Is it a good idea to work out while fasting? People think that to have enough energy, it is critical to eat before you exercise.
The purpose of the exercise is to make you more fit, to increase the health of the system, to build more capacity, to have less stress, etc.
During a workout, you’re stressing your body, your body adapts to that stress, and then it improves various things. But, make sure you don’t overtrain because overtraining will inhibit your sleep, keep your inflammation up, and reduce your gains.
The four variables of exercise:
1. Type of exercise
2. Intensity of exercise
3. Duration of exercise
4. Recovery after exercise
Various things happen during recovery mode:
• Glycogen reserve replenishment
• New capillaries are grown
• New mitochondria
• Cell structure repair
• Restored enzymes
• Cleared lactic acid
• Increased growth hormone
• Increased glucagon
There are a few disadvantages of eating before you workout or doing carbo-loading:
• You can decrease the amount of growth hormone you produce
• You can increase lactic acid
• You greatly diminish the ability to burn fat
• You can create insulin resistance
A few benefits of exercise while fasting:
• A massive additional increase in growth hormone
• Amazing reparative actions
• You can enhance fat burning by 20-30%
• You can improve insulin resistance
So what to do? What type of exercise you should do depends on your recovery. If your recovery is poor, you could do low-intensity workouts like aerobic exercise or walk. You can build up to high-intensity interval training and compound resistance exercise.
In my personal experience, I had been experimenting with the whole idea of workout while fasting. The best time for me was the morning before eating anything. I used to hit the gym early morning to feel and understand the benefits.
Although it was not a controlled experiment (all other variables were not constant like duration of workout, no. of sets etc.), it gave me an idea of how my performance improved while fasting. I felt that on days when I used to hit the gym after eating, I could not recover as quickly as on other days. The energy used to lag on those days while doing strength training.
Lately, I started experimenting with fasted cardio as I got back one of my favourite hobbies of cycling. I tried to do some experimentation, but it was not a controlled experiment (even though I tried this time).
I observed the same things again - improved performance and better recovery. Within a similar time range, I could cover a bit longer distance.
Let me show you my partially controlled experiment. The first Strava snap is when I was doing fasted cardio and the second one is not in a fasted state for comparison.
I know it's not a great comparison (due to different routes) but it gives a bit of an idea of overall performance with more distance covered during the fasted state.
In the fasted state:
In the non-fasted state within the same time:
I want to mention that it should not be tried by anyone who just started to do workouts. Consistency plays a key role in reaping the rewards of the fasted state. You may not be able to sustain the workout if you have never fasted before. So first, it makes sense to get used to the idea of intermittent fasting, build stamina and then adjust your workouts in a way that you can maintain consistency.
In summary, yes, it may be very beneficial to exercise while fasting, especially for reparative actions.
Let me know your thoughts or if you have ever tried to do fasted workouts.
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