People have many different goals with exercise. Some exercise for wellness and others for elite performance. Many for fun and others to lose weight. Most have not considered exercising in the fasted state. Fasted exercise can bring a number of benefits. It is also the hardest way to train if you are not used to it. Make sure you can handle a fasted interval without exercise before you consider any fasted exercise.
When you have no food energy coming in you are putting all of the load on your body stores to fuel you. It takes time for your body to adjust to this. Above all you have to ease into it and stay hydrated. Expect it to get easier over the course of a month. Just taking a walk is a fine place to start!
If you would like to hear more about weight loss and exercise check out this article: “Why Fasting is Better than Exercise for Weight Loss.” This present article will focus on having a more enjoyable and effective training experience.
After six weeks I had fully adjusted. I could exercise every bit as hard if not harder than before.
The difficulty with diet as it relates to exercise is that our society is always telling people that they need to have food constantly in order to function. Carb-load and keep the sports drinks flowing to ensure a ready stream of glucose to working muscle. And be sure to eat right away when you are done to stop the muscle breakdown.
Now there is definitely a time and a place for this advice and for electrolyte replacement, especially with endurance events and elite competition. But I believe most people would be shocked to experience how functional they could become, how much energy they could have, and what they could accomplish just from the power contained within them.
This is where fasted exercise can become truly empowering. Beyond energy for athletics. It’s about power for life.
The average-weight individual has around 130,000 stored body-fat calories. This is an immense resource that can keep us alive and active for many weeks if necessary.
We have incredible power inside us. We have failed to appreciate how marvelous it is. Fasted exercise is about training the body to tap into it. We are not nearly as dependent on constant food intake as we have thought.
I always wondered how indigenous peoples were able to migrate across great distances for their hunting practices. Well, they were lean and they were strong. Their bodies were highly efficient and trained to run off the stored energy. Now the whole point was about getting food. But it was a different world than we have today. They did it all without sports drinks or energy bars. We have this same type of physical potential.
Five Ways Fasted Training Can Improve Performance and Enjoyment
- When is the time in your life you feel least like going for a run or exerting yourself? Right after a big holiday dinner right? You don’t sit down to a feast and then go sprint around a track. You want to head to the couch. From an exertion and performance perspective it can make sense to avoid lugging an extra 5 pounds around with you. It can certainly be a more pleasant experience to lighten the load.
- Eating causes the body to redirect a significant amount of blood flow to our gut to help us process food. If we start exercising we can pull some of this back again but not all of it. If we are trying to perform our best we want all our blood flow available to power our muscles. We don’t want it focusing on processing a meal.
- We know that sports performance of all kinds requires great concentration. The fasted state (once you have adjusted to it) is definitely the most focused state. There is an interesting evolutionary underpinning to this. If you are a day out from food this is a critical time. Our bodies think we are hunter-gatherers living in prehistory. If the food is out we need razor focus on the task at hand. Get more food. After a meal the stress is gone. You want that naturally sharpened focus fasting can offer.
- The fourth benefit is that burning body-fat for fuel is a more stable energy source than being dependent on stored and exogenous sugar. Sugar can be fleeting and spikes of insulin can leave you in an energy whiplash. There also is a vastly larger supply of body-fat calories available at any given time. The issue is just whether your body is trained to use them.
If you spend all your days with a steady stream of carbohydrate coming in and you always train in this state, the muscles will never have to adapt to burning fat for fuel. And since the body is always doing the most efficient thing your body does not build out the cellular architecture for large scale fat metabolism. This can leave one in a relatively insulin resistant state with little ability to function if sugar stores run out. This can be a problem as the body only has the ability to store around 2,000 sugar calories at any point.
Contrast this with training in the fasted state. The glycogen stores are likely already fairly depleted at the time of exercise and insulin is low. The primary load falls to fat metabolism. With a large supply and a trained metabolism you become a duel fuel vehicle. You can burn carbs if needed. But you are not chained down. There is much less risk of facing a crash with intense performance.
We have seen the marathon runner that stalls out just a hundred yards from the finish and cant go on. This is a big issue for high level competition. But even for a friendly 18 holes. You can keep your energy and focus up without constant need for sugar by training fasted.
- The last reason on this list is probably the most interesting. Some very interesting physiology happens in the body when training in the fasted state. Think back to the evolutionary paradigm. You are a primordial human and it is day one without food. What is the top priority? Stay strong. Muscle is what is going to keep you alive.
You are going to have to hunt or travel or carry stuff. Whatever it is you are going to be working. But if you are working hard and not eating wont you burn muscle? Well your body knows this is the big risk and it does everything it can to help support your muscle and maximize fat burning instead.
It does this primarily through hormonal changes, chiefly an increase in growth hormone. Growth hormone maximizes fat burning and helps grow and maintain lean muscle. This is like amplifying all your hard work by putting it in the best possible hormonal environment. Don’t worry, the food is not really running out. This is a method to hack into these muscle building pathways in the body and support the best outcome of training for sports performance: Becoming Lean and Strong.
What’s the Easiest Way to Do This?
The easiest way to take advantage of these effects is to simply exercise in the morning before breakfast. Even if you are eating three times a day and not on a fasting regimen you will still hopefully be 12 hours out from your last meal. The most fasted time of the day.
Most public sports literature (actually supplement marketing) instructs people to get protein and carbs in right away after a training session. But you may find that you are actually less hungry after exercise. It can be quite pleasant after you get used to it.
It is fine to experiment with pushing out your post exercise meal. Just embrace the good feeling of the workout. You are in a fat burning zone. Growth hormone is being produced to help the muscles. You don’t have to put a stop to that right away. This can be a way to push out the first meal and get toward a two meal/day fasting regimen.