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Yesterday, I explained the potential benefits and drawbacks of intermittent fasting for athletes. Maybe yesterday’s post intrigued you. Maybe you’re curious about this whole intermittent fasting thing but don’t want to sacrifice your performance in the gym or on the field.

What are my specific recommendations for athletes who wish to explore intermittent fasting? I’ve got twelve…plus some details about my own fasting and workout routine.

1) Use Restricted Eating Windows Over All-day Fasts

Athletes who want to lean out or maintain strength and performance while lowering body weight might have more success with shortened eating windows than with all day fasts or “one meal a day.” Fast for 12-16 hours, train, and break the fast. Then have 8-12 hours to eat. This will give you a nice block of almost pure fat-burning with enough of an eating window to get the calories you need to grow and maintain muscle and to recover from your training.

2) Small Amount Of Protein Pre-workout May Help

Having a small bit of protein (20 grams whey or maybe 10 grams BCAAs) can help if truly fasted workouts are too hard.

3) Fasted Walks In the Mornings

Whether you skip breakfast or dinner, you’ll have a block of time in the mornings before eating anything. That’s when fat-burning will be upregulated, and brisk fasted walking is a nice way to enhance it.

4) Light Cardio After a Fasted Lifting Session

A heavy lifting session will get free fatty acids liberated from your adipose tissue, particularly if you’re fasted. Doing some very light cardio after your weights should in theory help you utilize all that mobilized adipose tissue. Go for a 20-minute walk, do ten minutes on the bike, or something similar.

5) “Train Fasted, Race Fed”

This is a more intense version of “train low-carb, race high-carb,” a popular and well-researched method of enhancing fat adaptation and increasing fuel efficiency in endurance athletes. Training in a fasted state “forces” the athlete to burn stored fat because, well, there isn’t a whole lot of carbohydrate available. Plus, fasting necessarily increases the circulation of free fatty acids, which can be burned for fuel. This applies to everyone, not just people “racing.” The trick is to train in a fasted state (if you find it helps) and compete (whether it’s CrossFit games, a basketball game, a lifting competition, etc.) in a fed state—as long as it seems to improve your performance.

6) Most Of the Time, Break the Fast Shortly After the Workout

If you’re skipping dinner and eating breakfast, try morning workouts. If you’re skipping breakfast and eating lunch, try afternoon workouts.

7) Every So Often, Continue the Fast After a Workout

This enhances secretion of growth hormone, which fasting already elevates. Don’t make this an every-workout habit, though. Diminishing returns and all.

8) Every Athlete Can Probably Benefit From the Occasional Longer Fast (24 hours+)

This will normalize inflammation, boost growth hormone, and upregulate autophagy, giving you all the necessary co-factors for rest and recovery. Tissues will heal, joints will recover. Do nothing more on these days than easy movement (walks, hikes, bike rides, swims). Time this fast away from competition because your performance may suffer. Do these once a week or every other week.

9) If You Have Joint Problems (or Want To Avoid Them), Take Collagen or Drink Bone Broth Before a Fasted Workout

Fifteen grams of pre-workout collagen or gelatin with a few hundred milligrams of vitamin C has been shown to improve collagen synthesis in connective tissue, and collagen shouldn’t disrupt the fast too much.

10) More Isn’t Better

I see this a lot, especially with endurance athletes who get into intermittent fasting. They start eating breakfast later and see their times drop and their body fat disappear. They feel lighter on their feet, faster, just better all around. So they push breakfast even later and maintain the benefits, even building on them. Pretty soon they’re skipping lunch, and their performance drops off a cliff. When trying to use fasting to improve athletic performance, less is more generally speaking.

11) Realize That Exercise and Fasting Are Additive

For the average couch potato to get the benefits of fasting, he or she might need to go 16 hours without food. The couch potato isn’t liberating body fat through training. The couch potato isn’t getting into ketosis through physical activity. The couch potato isn’t increasing mitochondrial density—the power plants of the cells which actually process fuel—with exercise. The athlete is doing all those things. For the athlete, many of the benefits of fasting will appear with smaller fasting windows.

12) Consider Sleeping Low

“Sleeping low” is an alternative to full-on fasting that actually seems to work well. This is how you do it:

• Afternoon workout. This should be something intense that depletes glycogen—sprinting, metabolic conditioning, high volume strength training, high intensity endurance workouts.
• Eat protein and fat at dinner, no carbs. You’re not refilling your glycogen. You’re reveling in your lack of glycogen.
• Sleep.
• Wake up and do low-intensity cardio (walking, cycling, hiking, swimming) before breakfast. Eat carbs at breakfast.
• Repeat.

When a group of triathletes followed this protocol, both their submaximal efficiency and supramaximal capacity. High submaximal efficiency means you get more power out of each stroke/pedal/step with less energy required. Your “easy pace” becomes faster and more powerful. High supramaximal capacity means you can last longer at your maximum power output.

It’s likely that full-on fasting could be integrated into this protocol. Maybe with a compressed eating window leading up to the afternoon workout.

A Few Words About My Routine:

A few people have asked, so I’ll give an overview of how I approach this topic for myself:

Every day, I do time-restricted feeding. This isn’t a formal declaration I make with myself every day. It’s not really a schedule. It just happens naturally. I wake up and most days I’m not very hungry for anything but a cup of coffee, so I “skip” breakfast and eat my first meal around one in the afternoon following a workout.

Most of my workouts are performed in a fasted state, and I usually keep fasting after the workout for a few hours. I’ll extend that fast after the workout to really take advantage of the increased secretion of growth hormone. I’m not really trying to “get big” or anything, I’m more interested in maintaining body comp and function and increasing longevity. Natural pulses in growth hormone help with that.

Before most workouts, I’ll do some Collagen Fuel. This doesn’t seem to impair my fast and it helps me keep my joints working well—an important part of aging.

Half an hour before my weekly Ultimate Frisbee game, I’ll also include a little Primal Fuel (my whey isolate powder). This just helps me perform better. I’m not going to lose. (By the way, I’ll talk more about protein types for different functions in an upcoming post.)

That’s it for today, folks. Have you tried any of these fasting workout tips? Have they worked? Do you have any more to add? Let us know down below!

References:

Marquet LA, Brisswalter J, Louis J, et al. Enhanced Endurance Performance by Periodization of Carbohydrate Intake: “Sleep Low” Strategy. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2016;48(4):663-72.

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Let’s face it, we’re all human, and no matter how committed you are to a healthy diet or lifestyle, there will always be those few foods that keep drawing you in with their seductive siren song. French fries, sugary ice cream, chips suddenly seem so appealing when you can’t have them anymore. Turning back to […]

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To the average person, the idea of elite athletes skipping meals sounds like pure madness. Athletes are fine-tuned, well-oiled machines. Machines need fuel. You don’t see race car drivers running on empty to “promote training adaptations” in their vehicles. No, high performance requires high energy reserves.

Athletes need to eat, and eat well. Right?

But humans aren’t machines. We’re biological. The car doesn’t respond to training stress, but we do. We adapt, grow, recover, and build new capabilities in response to the stress we endure. You expose yourself to a ton of stress, recover from that stress, and end up stronger/fitter/faster on net. That’s training. And sometimes, high stress is exactly what we need to progress—a few heavy sets of squats, some rounds on the Airdyne, a killer CrossFit workout—as long as you can recover from it. A major modulator of our stress is the amount of food we have coming in. At least in theory, exercising in a fasted state could provoke a powerful adaptive response that athletes would find helpful.

So, does it stack up? What exactly can intermittent fasting offer athletes?

Benefits Of Fasting For Athletes

Increases In Growth Hormone

Growth hormone helps spur, well, growth. It improves immune function. It builds muscle, bone, and cartilage. Kids are swimming in the stuff, and they heal like Wolverine. Older adults who inject it enjoy improved wound healing and workout recovery. That’s why it’s a banned substance in professional athletics, and it’s why natural ways to augment growth hormone secretion can be very helpful to athletes of all stripes.

Fasting increases growth hormone, most likely as a way to limit harmful tissue degeneration and preserve muscle; so does exercise. Once or twice a week, I like to fast after workouts to extend and expand the GH release. That’s a slightly more extreme version of post-workout carb abstention, but it’s the same idea: withholding food and forcing your body to adapt. This increases growth hormone (important for fat burning and cellular repair) and speeds up fat adaptation.

Improvement Of Metabolic Flexibility

In experienced male lifters (5-year history of 3-5 days/week training upper and lower body, drawn from advertisements placed in bodybuilding gyms), fasting for 16 hours a day and eating for 8 increased metabolic flexibility.

Metabolic flexibility is the ease with which a person is able to switch between sources of energy—from carbs to fat and back again. For the average person interested in health and longevity, maintaining metabolic flexibility is an important way to live a healthy life. For an athlete interested in performance, health, and longevity, metabolic flexibility is absolutely essential.

If you’re metabolically flexible, you can burn fat for longer before switching over to carbs. You can burn carbs when you actually need them, right away. And afterwards, you can switch back into passive fat-burning mode to keep unnecessary carb cravings and insulin low and improve recovery.

Reduction Of Inflammation

To attain the training effect, an athlete must incur a big blast of inflammation (from the exercise) and then recover from that inflammation. Blunting the initial inflammatory response with drugs and even mega-doses of vitamins will impair the training effect. You can also reduce the training effect by training too soon after a workout, thereby stacking inflammation.

You need the inflammation, but you also need the inflammation to subside. Both sides of the coin matter. What fasting does is improve your natural ability to dampen inflammation. You get the big inflammatory response of a tough workout.

This is where a fasted workout can really shine. When you’re fasted, you’re in a state of very low inflammation. And then you introduce the workout, and inflammation spikes. It’s a big response, a heightened response—and you must adapt to it. Oscillating between fasting, training, and feeding lets you hit those extremes, those margins where peak performance occurs.

Maintenance Of Energy Expenditure

There’s something revitalizing about going without food for a decent period of time and then feasting. You could spend the week restricting calories each day or use fasting to arrive at the same weekly caloric load and the effects will be different. Chronic calorie restriction enervates. Intermittent calorie restriction peppered with intermittent feasting energizes.

For an athlete, chronic calorie restriction spells doom. They need energy. They need to be able to expend energy when they need it. Luckily, studies show that intermittent fasting is one way to “reduce calories” without reducing energy expenditure. Perhaps the main reason is that IF doesn’t necessarily lower calories; it just changes when you get them. In the bodybuilder study, the athletes in both the fasting and the control groups ate about the same number of calories. But only the fasting group lost a lot of body fat, and they did this without suffering a drop in energy expenditure. Pretty cool stuff.

That said, you can overdo it. Too much fasting for too long will depress energy expenditure, as would happen with any kind of chronic calorie reduction. It’s just that fasting seems to stave off the drop in energy longer than other forms of “dieting,” especially if you maintain your calorie intake.

Concerns About Fasting For Athletes

May Reduce Testosterone

In the bodybuilder study, the group with the 8-hour eating window experienced a drop in testosterone. As T is essential for muscle protein synthesis, performance, strength, and general vitality, this could be problematic for athletes (particularly male ones). Despite the drop in testosterone, though, they still gained lean mass, lost fat, and got stronger—so it may not be practically relevant.

May Be Hard To Get Enough Calories To Gain Muscle or Recover

Athletes do need more fuel than the average person. A big draw of fasting for weight loss is that it makes it easier to reduce calories by erecting illusionary barriers that we nonetheless adhere to. If you only have an 8-hour eating window, you can’t eat outside of it. If you’re “fasting today,” you simply can’t eat. It makes things really simple for people who otherwise have trouble limiting food intake.

The flip-side is that it can make eating enough calories difficult, especially for athletes who do need more fuel than the average person. In a recent study, lifters who ate inside a 4-hour eating window had a 650 calorie daily deficit, lost a little bit of body fat but failed to gain any lean mass, while the control group—who ate more calories and protein—did gain lean mass. The fasting group simply wasn’t able to eat enough food or protein. Despite that, the 4-hour eating window group still gained upper and lower body strength, and they didn’t lose muscle mass. I suspect they could have gotten great results with a few hundred more calories of protein.

As is the case with every study that attempts to collate the individual experiences and results of hundreds of humans into “trends” and “averages,” there’s a wide variety of personal responses to fasting among athletes. The name of the game is experimentation—you have to see what works for you. This week I’ll give some specific recommendations for specific types of athletes, as well as my own experiences utilizing fasting in the pursuit of better physical performance.

For now, though, how has fasting worked for you and your athletic pursuits? Does it seem to help or hinder?

References:

Moro, T., Tinsley, G., Bianco, A., Marcolin, G., Pacelli, Q.F., Battaglia, G., … & Paoli, A. (2016). Effects of eight weeks of time-restricted feeding (16/8) on basal metabolism, maximal strength, body composition, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk factors in resistance-trained males.J ournal of translational medicine, 14(1), 290.

Tinsley, G.M., Forsse, J.S., Butler, N.K., Paoli, A., Bane, A.A., La Bounty, P.M., … & Grandjean, P.W. (2017). Time-restricted feeding in young men performing resistance training: A randomized controlled trial. European journal of sport science, 17(2), 200-7.

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Asparagus has always been one of my favorite vegetables. With great fiber content and a unique taste, it’s a go-to for my Primal and keto meals. Another plus: it’s simple to prepare. That said, however, it does take a bit of precision. The best way I’ve found to prepare asparagus is roasting, and nothing beats the tanginess of lemon to complement its taste. Serve it up with some flavorful chicken or salmon for a full Primal and keto-friendly dinner.

Lemony Asparagus

Servings: 2

Prep Time: 2 minutes

Cook Time: ~12 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch asparagus
• 1/3 cup Primal Kitchen® Lemon Turmeric Dressing and Marinade
• 1/4 cup Primal Kitchen Avocado Oil
• Zest of ½ lemon
• Juice of ½ lemon
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425 ºF.

Cut ends off of fresh asparagus and discard.

Place asparagus on a sheet pan. Toss with salt and pepper, avocado oil, and Lemon Turmeric Dressing and Marinade.

Roast in oven for 10-15 minutes, depending on thickness of the asparagus. Remove from oven and toss with fresh lemon juice and zest. Enjoy!

Nutritional Information (per serving):

• Calories: 534
• Carbs: 7.4 grams
• Net Carbs: 6.3 grams
• Fat: 57 grams
• Protein: 1.2 grams

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The ketogenic diet is successful for so many because it targets a number of underlying reasons for weight gain – including hormonal issues such as insulin resistance, with high blood sugar levels, and the vicious cycle of eating empty calories due to out of control hunger and cravings. If you are following a low carb […]

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Few diseases are more misunderstood than Lyme disease, resulting in thousands of undiagnosed and undertreated patients. Read on to learn five dangerous myths about chronic Lyme disease.

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It’s all patterns. Learning to squat is learning a pattern of movement. As a coach, you see patterns in people too in their behavior and their responses. Different people will give the same reasons as to why they haven’t been able to learn to squat. It repeats itself in entirely different types of people. They feel off-balance every time they try to squat. They feel like their hips, knees, and ankles lock up on them when they reach a certain depth, keeping them from going any lower.

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The light taste of fish is often overpowered by heavy sauces. We’ve found marinades to be a great alternative. Some healthy oil means they hold up better to the heat of baking or grilling as well. A quintessential summer flavor for said marinade? Cilantro lime of course! And we’ve got the marinade ready-made, to boot…. We’ve complemented this quick delicacy with fresh green beans, garnished with red pepper, red onion and some cilantro for an easy and tasty dinner pairing.

Servings: 3

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

• 12 oz. cod filet
• 1/4 cup Primal Kitchen® Cilantro Lime Dressing and Marinade
• 3 cloves minced garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. black pepper
• ¼ tsp. cumin
• ¼ tsp. onion powder
• pinch of red pepper
• optional equipment: cedar plank

Green Beans:

• 2 cups green beans, ends trimmed
• 1/4 cup chopped red pepper
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1 Tbsp. Primal Kitchen Avocado Oil
• 1 tsp. red wine vinegar
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
• 2 Tbsp. minced red onion
• Additional cilantro, minced red onion and avocado, to garnish

Directions:

Soak a cedar plank in water for 2 hours. While the plank is soaking, preheat the oven to 375 ºFahrenheit.

Toss the green beans, red pepper, garlic, avocado oil, red wine vinegar, and a pinch of salt and pepper together. Lay the mixture out on a parchment-covered sheet pan. Roast for 15 minutes, then flip the vegetables over with a spatula. Roast until the green beans and are well roasted and top with minced onion and cilantro.

In a bowl, combine the Primal Kitchen Cilantro Lime Dressing and Marinade, garlic, cilantro, salt, pepper, cumin, onion powder and red pepper. Cut the cod filet into 2-3 portions and gently toss them in the sauce. Allow them to rest for 5 minutes.

Fire up your grill. The fish will need to cook over indirect heat. Take the cedar plank out of the water and place on a paper towel. Place the plank on the grill for 2 minutes. Flip the plank over and place the fish portions on top of the plank and spoon and remaining marinade over the top. Cover the lid and cook for about 15 minutes, or until the fish is firm and opaque. The cooking time may vary slightly depending on the thickness and size of the portions of fish. Top with chopped cilantro, minced onion and avocado slices and serve alongside the green beans.

Nutrition Information (4 oz. cod and 1/3 of green beans):

• Calories: 240
• Total Carbs: 11 grams
• Net Carbs: 9 grams
• Fat: 12 grams
• Protein: 22 grams

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Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the biggest cause of mortality worldwide. According to the World Health Organization  (WHO), cardiovascular diseases were responsible for 15.2 million deaths around the world in 2016. Sadly, even if one does not die from a cardiovascular event, it places a tremendous burden on the body and can drastically reduce the quality […]

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“We are mere bundles of habits.”

William James

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