If you practice intermittent fasting it means that you take care of your health. It is more likely that sports also take place in your life. Let’s discover what is the best way to mix these tools of achieving better health and shape.
There are many controversies about when it is better to do exercises when fasting- during fasting or eating window.
For many decades we were taught not to exercise on an empty stomach because you won’t have the power to accomplish your workout, you will feel weak and nauseous and that before any sports activity you need to replenish your glycogen storage for better performance. But is this true?
The majority of us prefer to skip breakfast when doing intermittent fasting because we need to get ready for work or university, we need to take kids to school, we need to take shower, put makeup on, make our hairstyle or just simply want to sleep a bit longer.
But morning is also the best time to exercise, not only because it will provide you with a lot of energy for the rest of your day, but it has special physiological reasons which will convince you to have your workout in the first part of the day.
We all know that including exercises in your life is good, but we don't really know why it's better to do it in the morning.
Exercising on an empty stomach (read fasted state) has been shown to have several benefits:
We all know, if you want to lose weight, you need to do cardio. But to achieve this, you need to do cardio for at least forty minutes to start to dig in fat storage, because before you need to use up all the glycogen in your body. It takes on average about 8-12 hours for your body to metabolize and use up all its blood sugar and glycogen stores after a meal is consumed. (3).
Doing cardio in a fasted state helps you start using fat much faster, it also increases lipolysis and fat oxidation (fat cells break down to make energy and burn off this energy) (4).
Intermittent fasting and working out, especially if it is high intensity exercise, are the best ways to skyrocket the production of human growth hormone (HGH) also known as fitness hormone (5).
Under normal conditions, more HGH is produced at night than during the day because of the indirect relationship it has with insulin. HGH is only released when there is no insulin in the bloodstream. Lactic acid buildup as a response to weight training is also a good trigger for HGH secretion. There is no better time to make use of the fitness hormone to achieve desirable results than exercising in the morning. (6).
The combination of fasting and exercising in the morning will help you to achieve better results in losing weight and building muscle together with increasing the level of energy and providing you with a good mood for the day. The benefits go way beyond fat and weight loss as you will see. It provides you with good metabolic health, immune system, gut microbiome, and lifespan.
Read our article “Intermittent Fasting and Exercise: What You Need to Know” to have more understanding about the advantages of exercising and intermittent fasting.
