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Comment by mattlong | Hacker News Reader

Question for you and everyone else that recommends fasting: What sort of exercise regimen to you maintain? Mine is fairly active (~5 days per week) and consists of a mix of cardio and strength training (mostly running, climbing, and weights). I feel that any level of fasting would quite negatively impact my performance in all of these.

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I don't do the days-long fasts that others do, but usually try and eat something with a relatively low glycemic load about once every 24 hours. Generally that meal comes shortly after getting out of the gym, so my workout is usually after 22-23 hours of not eating.

Exercise regimen is 3-4 days a week of strength training. Usually a moderate pace, 1.0-1.5 hours. Start the day with high-weight/low rep major lifts (deadlift, squat, bench), fill the middle with other high weight/low rep lifts, and towards the end as my energy is tapering off move to about 50% of 1RM and high rep sets of the same major lift until exhausted.

Probably more than you wanted to know. :)

So that all said, I've got the benefit of having maintained a more-or-less consistent workout regimen since before I started fasting and having logged every set along the way. When I started I was waiting for my performance to fall off a cliff... but it never came. My performance has remained steady and continued rising at close enough to the same rate as it was before that I'll call it "unaffected within some margin of error".

Same here. No decrease in performance during fasts and I push myself pretty hard on both cardio and weights. If anything, I feel a little bit better since I tend to be a little more alert and focused during fasts.

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