Training on an empty stomach/ Intermittent Fasting

Hi Guys,

today I found an really interesting article about the beneftis of training on an empty stomach.

http://greatist.com/fitness/why-you-should-exercise-on-an-empty-stomach

I think this method looks really cool and I kinda want to give it a try, but first of all I got some questions:

Is there a difference between fasting for 1 day every week for 24hours or to fast more days but only 12 -18 hours?

And if I want to train on a fasting day would it be okay to get a pre and post workout shake( creatine, bcaa, beta alanin)?

I am allowed to drink tea or coffee? Is it okay to take vitamins at a fasting day?

Well as you can see I got a lot of questions, but I still hope someone will answer!=)

Maybe you guys can also give your opinions on the article and if you agree with the benefits.=)

Ooh, ooh, I was waiting for this topic to come up!

PhilTaylor said:

 

1. Is there a difference between fasting for 1 day every week for 24hours or to fast more days but only 12 -18 hours?

 

 

2. And if I want to train on a fasting day would it be okay to get a pre and post workout shake( creatine, bcaa, beta alanin)?

 

3. I am allowed to drink tea or coffee? Is it okay to take vitamins at a fasting day?

1. I'd say the biggest difference is preference. They both tout the same kinds of benefits. I think the argument for Fasting 16 hours/day (as popularized by leangains.com, recommend reading) is that beyond 16 hours, you start to see diminishing returns on time investment. In addition, 16 hours also happens to be easy to follow daily, since it pretty much just entails cutting out either breakfast or dinner (as well as snacking in those time-frames, obviously). For these reasons, I feel the 16hr/day fast provides the best bang for your... empty stomach?

2. It's fine to get a pre/post workout shake, but it would no longer count as fasting, since you are injesting calories. Thus, if you were trying to fast for 24hrs, having a shake would break the fast. Martin Berkhan (of leangains) is adamant about pre-workout bcaa's. I personally always train on an totally empty stomach first thing in the morning and have my first meal of the day about 3 hours after the workout. It obviously takes getting used to, but I have been having good results thus far.

3. As long as there are no calories, I believe coffee, tea, vitamins, etc are fine. That means no milk, cream, sugar, fish oil, protein, etc though. However, I've heard many proponents of fasting recommend tea or coffee to help get through the morning. I personally have nothing but water while I am fasting.

For more information about 24-hr fasts and the benefits of fasting in general, I'd highly recommend Brad Pilon's "Eat Stop Eat". Leangains.com is another good source. Anthony Mychal has also done a good amount of personal testing with fasting.

Personally, I've tried many 24-hr fasts, a 48-hour fast, daily 20-hr fasting, and have settled on daily 16-hr fasting. Like I said, I train on an empty stomach every morning ~8, have my first meal at noon, and usually stop eating by 8. I only drink water when fasting.

Edit: Great article, by the way!

Definitely go for the 16 hour fast. It's just so convenient and will feel like nothing once you get used to it. You may however note slower progress. I know I am progressing faster now that I have breakfast before my workouts, but that may be different for you and there are other benefits to intermittent fasting. 

Okay while we're waiting for Naterman to chime in with how you should never workout on an empty stomach, let me just say that I find the 1 day a week fast the simplest, but that's because I do shift work and I'm never sure what time I'm going to be eating....

I remember him saying that intermittent fasting Leangains style was okay. He did underline Leangains and did say it still wasn't optimal. 

Thanks for the input ! =)

I am looking for optimal productivity and got really good results with the pre/post workout shake recommended by Naterman, but I my eating habits for the rest of the day are not the best sometimes... I am already lean enough for my preference and want to gain some muscles/weight.

So I think fasting for a day wont be that hard. Sometimes I just eat dinner and the rest of the day nothing, besides the shake for training, because I´m not hungry.

I will try the fast for 1 day for a week style and maybe after that try the 16hour for a few days a week style.

I was thinking about fasting at a day, where I didnt train Foundation and just do some HIIT or cardio training, because its seems like this would benfit the most from fasting.

Not trying to be a badger, but I would argue that "optimal productivity" is not something that athletes of our level should be worrying about... Unless I am off the mark and you are or are aspiring to soon be an olympic athlete, micro-managing nutrient intake and workout timing and such is not worth the sweat.

If you want to optimize productivity, get quality sleep, eat more real food and less garbage, push yourself harder in your workouts, and follow what ever workout/eating schedule suits your own personal taste!

If gaining muscle is your goal, intermittment fasting is probably not the best approach.

/2c

@Jon, there are plenty of studies to suggest that for gaining muscle, IF is a great approach (edit: and yes, perhaps the best approach). There are many people who claim that protein every 2 hours is necessary. 

There are lots of studies and even more interpretations of each study, and they will pretty much all lead you in different directions.

My vote is that no one actually knows anything for sure. But it seems that the human body is amazingly adaptable, and it can thrive under most circumstances as long as you are treating it well.

I don't usually post in nutrition threads because I don't know or worry a whole lot about it But in practical terms I question whether eating in an 8 hour window permits one to eat enough good quality food for the purposes of muscle gain without encouraging starving/binging issues or stress-inducing micromanaging which I regard as way over the top for the non-professional athlete, as well as potentially very expensive (you may of course disagree with my opinions).

Muscle gain is not a goal of mine as long as I am performing (and I am) so it's not something I research a lot I have family members who have dealt with nasty eating disorders, so I may just be oversensitive about these things too.

Edit;

I am used to cutting for competition and am quite experienced in manipulating my weight; now that I do this less often I simply do not think food is one of the many things in the world that needs to be stressed over, training a little more is more fun than not having a cupcake I realise I am in a tiny minority on the Internet for this view...

Jon Douglas said:

......I simply do not think food is one of the many things in the world that needs to be stressed over.....

Well, it's a little scary when you think that without the haber process, billions of people would starve to death.  Or that as a consequence of the haber process, we have dead zones in the oceans adding up to the size of a small country.....

How about GM food and the concept of intellectual property rights vis a vi for example soybeans?  I don't know about you but I think the fact that farmers aren't allowed to store their own seeds and have to buy them every year for a new crop is a disgusting business practice.

What about the industrialisation of the meat industry?  Ever met someone who was working in a meat packing plant on a work visa, cut his finger off and instead of getting compensated for the injury, simply got deported?  Sure it's amoral, but the people working in these places wouldn't be able to afford the very product they produce otherwise. 

Personally I think cleaning up the food supply without increasing it's price beyond what the people making minimum wage can afford is something the world could spend a little more time worrying about.

Oh by the way sorry Jon.  I know I'm taking your words out of context.

From naterman

If you are going to work out fasted, keep it low intensity OR keep the high intensity work VERY short. Like a tabata interval program, which takes 4-5 minutes.

I do not support this approach at all, but if you're going to do something suboptimal, at least try not to wreck yourself

Joshua Naterman

09 Aug 2012

Everything on the nutritiming page is fairly good as a source for the legitimacy of continuous energy balance, as well as forthcoming research coming from Dr. Benardot this year. It very clearly predicts who has high body fat and who has low body fat in athletes, with no fails. It also predicts performance. Everyone on this website should consider themselves an athlete. This should matter to everyone.

This is a screenshot of references from a PDF file. I am tired to death of talking about this stuff right now. I don't want to retype things.

This concept also bridges the gap between the "anabolic window" and body composition changes seen over long periods, but to bridge that gap I would need 1-2 hours of your time.

'More importantly, when you put it into practice you see superior results every time. I've literally watched a girl in my class change over the course of 2 months while she was one of Benardot's subjects for an upcoming study, which I did not know at the time. All I knew was that she was changing more rapidly than I have seen almost anyone change, and she started winning race after race in steeplechase after 2 years of never even standing on the podium. She went to states, don't know how she did but that's a ridiculous improvement. She dropped 11 seconds off of her race time in less than 2 weeks. If an experienced college athlete seeing these types of results doesn't make you think twice about what you believe currently, then you haven't had enough experience with higher level athletes to know how ridiculously fast that kind of improvement is. In addition to performance improvements, she changed from being a pretty in shape girl to looking like a machine. I watched her VO2max test at the end of the semester and dude... I have rarely seen a woman that lean. The change took 2 months.

If you want a giant pile of science on this, you're going to have to wait 10 years. If you want to take advantage of everything your body is willing to give you with the right stimuli combinations then I will highly suggest that you try it yourself and see. It should go without saying that if you have a fitness enthusiast's activity level then food quality is going to make a much bigger difference on the carb side than if you are a competitive athlete in a physically demanding sport simply due to the level of full-body glycogen depletion and the effect this has on glycogenesis speed.

There is also a pile of evidence showing that intermittent fasting is associated with increased insulin resistance. All you have to do is a pubmed search for the two terms. There are honestly too many.

You should know that our bodies are capable of producing chemicals that make us feel good and sometimes keep us from noticing the sub-optimal nature of our current status. Just because you feel satisfied does not mean your body has gotten what it needs.

Short version:

Your body is made to require a certain amount of sugar, both at rest and when working at varying intensities. As the level of stored sugar decreases, our bodies adjust by making sugar out of other things. Unfortunately those other things are intact proteins. Yes, lactate can be used, but I had a long PM discussion with FiN about why that doesn't make a practical difference under normal circumstances. After HIIT, it certainly can offset up to 60% of the reliance on protein for GNG, but that is short-lived. Meaning for less than 4 hours.

There are other threads where I have detailed this quite clearly, and explained how using labile protein stores actually means tearing down excess liver mass and after a certain point the body switches over to skeletal muscle. In either case you end up spending energy and protein rebuilding the torn down tissues, leaving less protein available to be used for new skeletal muscle synthesis.

When you combine this with a lower carb diet you are now redirecting protein to GNG as well as the reconstruction of the labile stores.

There is a good reason why the typical math you describe does not work: It does not take into account the cyclical nature of:

carb restriction -> protein in GNG -> Less protein available for tissue synthesis -> unintended calorie deficits due to energy required for GNG and unaccounted-for thermic effect of protein metabolism -> lowering of free IGF-1, T3, and virtually everything associated with lower body fat levels -> impaired maintenance of lean mass -> slower metabolism due to loss of lean mass -> same calories cause more fat gain.

Another screen capture.

By itself, when combined with exercise and sufficient calories, this limits performance and sets a cycle of new proteins being built from the exercise stimulus then being broken down for energy (carbs). This is exactly why, on the leangains site, Martin clearly tells everyone that leangains produces very slow gains in lean mass and that you need to eat exactly how he tells you to.

If you do it juuuuust right, and it is certainly possible to do without using complicated maths, you will just barely stay in positive protein synthesis balance, which is why you see very slow gains. This does not take into account the high nitrogen load on the kidneys that comes from using extra protein in GNG. Combined with a diet that is recommended to already be high in protein, at 2+ grams per kg BW this extra load can put you into a danger zone where you WILL see long-term kidney damage.

There are a ton of people who don't get the results they see in his testimonials, and Martin tells them very clearly that the testimonial results are due to his direct, and strict, supervision. That's because the positive protein synthesis balance is so small.

As for Aragon, he's a smart guy and he is right as well as wrong. Aside from Dr. Benardot, I'm the only person out there talking about dynamically meeting energy demand in real time, and I go further. I base meal composition on the breakdown of fuel substrate you have been burning based on activity. No one, period, is doing this besides me. That is part of why I get better results... I prefer to look at exactly what is happening based on known factors, and adjust the diet accordingly. This means that your macronutrient breakdown for a 24 hour period will not match hardly any of your meals when looked at individually. If that concept doesn't immediately make at least a little bit of sense, you may be beyond my ability to help.

If you compare my way with what Aragon is talking about, they are completely different. He is talking about standard nutritional practice, meaning that you do the standard "I need this much protein, carbs and fat" and break them apart into balanced meals. That's retarded to do, because you don't always burn the same breakdown of energy substrates. However, when you compare 3 meals per day with 6 meals per day the main difference will be a somewhat higher body fat level when trying to gain weight. For that purpose, and because team sport athletes only do this for a few months per year, there really IS no practical difference between 3 meals and 6 aside from some body fat that they will later lose by the time the season starts.

If you want to have the combination of truly awesome looks and truly awesome performance, in objective terms related to what you are getting versus what your body is chemically capable of achieving with the correct inputs (which is different from whatever any of us think subjectively), my way is better. I literally follow what the body does and replace what is used by percentage according to the best experimental data we have, and it works stupefyingly well.

Jon Douglas said:

I don't usually post in nutrition threads because I don't know or worry a whole lot about it But in practical terms I question whether eating in an 8 hour window permits one to eat enough good quality food for the purposes of muscle gain without encouraging starving/binging issues or stress-inducing micromanaging which I regard as way over the top for the non-professional athlete, as well as potentially very expensive (you may of course disagree with my opinions).

 

Muscle gain is not a goal of mine as long as I am performing (and I am) so it's not something I research a lot I have family members who have dealt with nasty eating disorders, so I may just be oversensitive about these things too.

 

Edit;

I am used to cutting for competition and am quite experienced in manipulating my weight; now that I do this less often I simply do not think food is one of the many things in the world that needs to be stressed over, training a little more is more fun than not having a cupcake I realise I am in a tiny minority on the Internet for this view...

In total agreement!! I wasted a lot of time worrying over ample protein intake, supplements, and the correct timing of workouts and feedings, and eventually decided (or realized) it was really quite unnecessary. Life is better when simple, in my opinion.

I have not had food-related stress problems with fasting, though this may just be my own experience. I can say that it has not caused binging or starving issues, and it is perfectly possible to eat enough food in a healthy manner (this is coming from 6'5" former rower, so my daily food intake has always been high).

@howens, thanks for posting Naterman's opinion, but it is just one of many. I know he has done his work, but so have a lot of other people. There are many different paths to the same result. It is damn near impossible to make the claim that one is the best, and it doesn't really matter anyways. I think most of the people on this forum should will see better gains from focusing more of their energy into holding ABH for a few more seconds instead of thinking about what's going to be in their post-workout shake.

When it comes to diet, what matters is that you find something that you can stick with. Something that speaks to you and suits your lifestyle, and something that you can follow with ongoing enthusiasm (whether it is a challenge or not). I personally like doing things simple: not stressing about this nutrient or that anabolic window, eating whatever I am served, eating more vegetables when I can, and taking occasional breaks from filling my stomach. 

Some good resources for learning more about IF:

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting (Some experiences with different approaches)

http://doubleyourgains.com/musclebuildingmastermind/The_Leangains_Approach_Final.pdf (IMO Berkhans most easily accessible text on the subject, so you don't have to sift through the entire website to find the concrete stuff you need to start)

 

I tried the warrior diet for 3 months last summer, was great when I was doing high interval stuff for awhile, but when I went back to strength training (plus doing stonework in the hot sun ) I felt light headed after a workout and a couple times got migraines that lasted for days. This kind of diet is unsustainable for anyone who expends calories throughout the day doing things other than training for 1 hour and resting for 23. Like work, or even studying. my 2cents.

Well, I kind of disagree - I think you just have to try out diets for yourself, everyone is a little different - both biologically and lifestyle-wise. Not much, but just enough that you'll hate or enjoy a way of eating.

For me, leangains was pretty alright. It took a few weeks to get used to, but when I got there it felt great. I had a lot of energy for my training (mostly strength, mind you - not extreme metabolic demands) and early in the day while I was fasted, my concentration was laser. I never felt so mentally sharp before, I was breezing through pages until I ate, when my mind got really sluggish.
On the flipside, it can be tough shoving down enough food in your 8-hour window and I kind of prefer to just eat when I'm hungry instead of having a set of "rules" to follow. But I think it's a good way to recomp.

Thanks for all the replies!   

I will try how fasting for 1 day will work for me and maybe change it later.

I would just add that working out in the fasting state is an immune suppressor.  In endurance sports we sometimes do this to "train" the body to utilize fat for fuel and to make it more efficient during late stages of a long race when the glycogen is long gone.  However, it's always very carefully undertaken because of the high risks of immune suppression and getting sick.  Obviously we evolved with intermittent fasting (imposed on us, not by us) and our bodies can handle it, and it may even be good for our bodies on a larger time scale.  However, for those of us who are working out to stay in shape and get stronger, I don't think there's any good reason to make your process even more complicated than it already is by adding fasting.  You will be at higher risk of getting sick, and at higher risk of overtraining.  

How is working out fasted noticeably any more immune-suppressing than working out while fed?
I'm just asking because I am curious, I never heard about this before.

If you refer to the role of cortisol in boosting glucose release:
-Is that so much higher in training fasted than training fed?
-If you refeed after training (as with leangains) or for that matter, the next day - will the amount of cortisol released by the fasted training actually have time to suppress the immune system long enough for you to get an infection?

If you have any articles or textbooks you have read, I would be interested in reading more about that.

Kage, will get you some links later in the day when I have a little more time.

Appreciate it! Thanks Nordic

I don't care to debate the science (of which we only know little), but I will provide some anecdotal evidence to fasted workouts. I notice that I can handle a fasted workout if the time is kept short (under 1 hour) but anything over and performance suffers. Also I absolutely know that my recovery suffers when I try IF. But to be fair I was working out over 2 hours.

Yeah, I think you can notice dips in performance depending on what kind of workouts you do - obviously the kind of stuff where you need a lot of glycogen can be tougher to handle and poorer recovery will get more evident the closer you are to your current plateau.

But IF is for recomping, mostly, after all - and any calorie-restriction nutritional style will cut into your near-maximal efforts. That's just the way it is, you can't have your cake and eat it too. At some point it becomes a compromise between cutting weight/body fat and your physical performance.

Kage said:

Yeah, I think you can notice dips in performance depending on what kind of workouts you do - obviously the kind of stuff where you need a lot of glycogen can be tougher to handle and poorer recovery will get more evident the closer you are to your current plateau.

But IF is for recomping, mostly, after all - and any calorie-restriction nutritional style will cut into your near-maximal efforts. That's just the way it is, you can't have your cake and eat it too. At some point it becomes a compromise between cutting weight/body fat and your physical performance.

I disagree that there is a tradeoff.  Coach's guys perform at a much higher level than us and look the part.  This is the same for all other competitive gymnasts I know.