I’ve been getting a lot of questions about fasted state exercise lately. Specifically, people want to know if it’s OK to exercise while they are doing their Eat Stop Eat fasts.
I’m still of the school of thought that it doesn’t matter WHEN you train, as long as you’re training consistently, but for the sake of argument I’d like to explore this concept.
The general idea is that by performing exercise at the end of a fast, you are burning more fat (This is the main idea behind fasted state morning cardio).
From this the general premise we seem to get the following idea – Use your fasts to optimize the fat burning of your exercise.
Based on this I would suggest that we have the entire concept backwards.
As a conservative estimate an hour long cardio session may burn an additional 500 Calories..so fasting to optimize this calorie burn seems a little silly considering we COULD be using exercise to optimize our fasts.
In other words instead of optimizing the fat burning potential of 500 calories, we could be optimizing the fat burning potential of over 2,000 calories by starting our fasts with exercise.
The benefits would be two fold:
Firstly – for all the people who fret about their pre-workout BCAA‘s or Arginine, or Protein or whatever this is now a non issue…take what ever you want, your not fasting…You’d be omitting your post-workout meal, but I doubt this would be an issue for most people.
Secondly – by working out at the beginning of your fast you technically SHOULD enter the fasted state earlier, so you’d have higher levels of fat burning, higher Growth Hormone levels and lower Insulin levels.
In the end, I think we are talking about the ‘nickles and dimes’ of a thousand dollar deal, but nonetheless it is worth considering…if you are the type of person who frets over when to train, training at the beginning of your fasts may be a logical option.
But as always, the most important thing is not when you are fasting and exercising, but simply that you ARE fasting and exercising.
BP
