The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast
well.blogs.nytimes.com
well.blogs.nytimes.com
I would love to get a hold of the full study for a better look at it.
Edit:
Reading this article a bit closer, and taking to look at the study, it is clear that the author has some serious bias against the idea that a high-fat diet with fasted training will be of benefit. The people who lost weight were eating 30% more than usual. If they modified there diet to 50% of fat, and not increased calories, you would have seen an even great weight drop.
How long were the fasts you took? I am curious because my lifts suffer when I have not eaten breakfast, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the exhausted feeling in my muscles, which I attribute to the lack of food.
I fast every day, 16-19 hrs at a time. I train completely for strength rather than endurance, so lift super heavy for 4-5. Max 2-3 sets. If you are going for muscle endurance (8reps+) then some food prior to training.
I have seen only improvement in my lifts since I started this regimen. Lost some serious bodyfat % whilst gained muscle.
Low level of testosterone found to be one of reasons of men's depression.
It has the additional benefit that it alters your mood, aerobic exercise makes you happy :)
Strength training may boost testosterone, but the effects of aerobic exercise is well established. Several comparisons have been done between aerobic and strength training and the conclusions have been that strength training have little effect on executive function.
My source for this is the book "Brain Rules" by John Medina [1]. Also check out his presentation on exercise [2] and his Authors@Google talk [3].
[1] http://www.brainrules.net [2] http://www.brainrules.net/exercise [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1nMQq67VI
(Thanks for the citations. That's awesome, and I wish more people would do it.)
That is one definition of fasting, I guess a lot of people are only exposed to the story of Jesus "fasting" for 40 days where he ate nothing at all (if I remember the story right, if I have that wrong please correct me, I don't know the Bible all that well).
Personally, I can't IF at all because of my activity levels. Missing 1-2 meals for a couple days means I start losing weight which is not something I'm looking to do.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArDlY2B14P1IdFA2NElD...
It's pretty easy to see the exercise has died down to just enough to keep metabalism up, but the weight loss has been very steady. There's been no difference for me between pre-breakfast and post-dinner exercise, but huge difference based on what I eat and when.
I would expect different results if I was trying to burn calories directly through exercise, but I spent a month planning how to lose weight without spending lots of time in the gym because I knew I wouldn't stick to that :-)
Exercise doesn't really help you with losing weight, but it helps you with losing fat and/or gaining muscle.
In the last few months I've exercised a lot and ate a lot. I've gained around 7kg of mostly muscles.
I don't know whether losing weight is a useful goal at all. Aiming to lose body fat while keeping lean body weight (=muscles, bones, everything that isn't fat) seems much more sane to me.
"In the morning (when waking up after a night's sleep), your <something> reserves are depleted so exercising before you eat will burn fat (no, you won't burn muscle)."
It seems to me that the commenter knew about this effect just fine.
I believe your "<something>" is glycogen. The basic idea being that if you have no glycogen to burn, you'll burn fat.
Also, it's probably true that it's not very good to exercise after waking, but nobody said you have to exercise after waking, just that you have to do it before eating breakfast :)
Also, the human body did not evolve to perform best when fasting. Certainly we have adrenaline for "kill" moments, but I would bet that eating before a long physical challenge would increase performance during that challenge. You might bur more fat if you don't eat, but I don't think we evolved to burn fat - rather the opposite seems more likely.
It's only very recently in human history with the advent of agriculture that large amounts of grains and legumes becme available for human consumption. 99.5% of our human existence was spent as hunter-gatherers surviving on mostly meat.
Imagine the shear number of people that would help.
(For the lazy: http://duckduckgo.com/High-intensity_interval_training)
Gaining more muscles does raise your base metabolic rate, though.
Where would we have been if that amount of money had instead been used for "exercise in a pill" research? Would we have it? Unlikely. Would we be able to get some of the benefits? Absolutely.
So I am going to try this and see if it improves my burn rate, or at least slows my girth rate. :-)
In the bike's defense: as a runner, spinning on the bike is an absolutely awesome to maintain cardio-fitness after a running injury.
Squats were used by Soviet marathon runners for training in winter, when it is too cold outside to run. They squatted for hours.
One my squat is approximately 2.5 second. 5 minutes amounts to 120 squats. 30 minutes - 720.
I think you'll appreciate the power of 720 squats. ;)
Squats are pretty variable. You can put your hands behind your back, fold them on the chest, actively wave them helping squats - all those variation will give you different feeling.
Running isn't too bad either. Go barefoot or with something like Vibram FiveFingers if you care about your joints at all.
Also---in addition---consider getting a pull-up bar. Pull-ups [1] are a nice functional exercise for your upper body.
[1] And press-ups, but they don't require any equipment.
I have seen this work wonders on countless people.
It's almost the last thing I want to do. The last thing I want to do is exercise after I've started my day. I simply never do it.
Good to hear about eating after exercising, too, since I have to go running first thing when I get up. If I first have coffee or eat breakfast I lose all my "go running!" magic power due to the mysterious hypnotic beams emanating from my laptop.
Could you please elaborate a little bit? It sounds a little vague to me.
When I run in the morning I usually rest for a few minutes to cool down, take a shower and then have breakfast. But you can eat immediately after you finished exercising if you feel like it.
Also, keep in mind that while depleting your glycogen stores may help your body focus on using fat instead of other sources of energy during exercise, it doesn't change the fact that the only way to lose weight is to eat less than you use. Too many people look at these studies (GI, insulin response, and HFCS immediately come to mind) as silver bullets. The only real silver bullet is eat less than you use. There was an article not long ago about a guy who only ate twinkies and lost weight by counting calories.
Physically, losing weight is pretty basic stuff, but it's so hard to do because it requires a tough combination of mental and emotional skills and often requires people to change their deep seated (often decades long) relationship with food.
add.: Someone sitting next to me as I wrote this asked me, "how long ago was 7th grade?", as a reference of how "re-inventive" this study was. 7th grade was 17 years ago.
How would our metabolism have to be different for you to come to a different conclusion?
(I just want to know, how strong your statement is.)
Today we have empirical evidence, through years of study of people living on rigorous LCHF diets, that the human body does not require a single gram of sugar a day to function; it can slowly adapt and switch entirely, both brain, core and limbs, into being solely a fat- and protein-consuming machine. We can from this perspective consider sugars as being available as an alternate form of energy that we can process by secondary function, at a cost - the cost of insulin in our blood stream, and all the problems that can come with the production of such (various cardiovascular diseases have been linked to this, as well as the cases of insulin resistance and lack of insulin production from the pancreas from being "burnt out" being the two major problems).