Revisiting Fasted Training
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By: Mark Sisson
I'm a huge fan of fasted training. It feels right, it feels "Primal." And it jibes with my sense of how life was back in the hunting and gathering days: if you wanted to eat, you had to go hunt, and you had to hunt on an empty stomach (because you didn't have much food laying around, let alone a refrigerator full of it). This is the natural state of animal life in the wild-get hungry, perform physical tasks to obtain food, eat-and it always made intuitive sense that following that pattern when working out as a modern human would confer special benefits. Our big disconnect nowadays is that food is separate from physical labor. You no longer earn your meal on a visceral, physical level. There are social benefits to this new setup, but there are also metabolic, health, and fitness consequences. Fasted training could be a way to correct that disconnect and restore the ancient relationship between food and movement. It's plausible. But what does the research say?
Benefits of Fasted Training - There is actually a decent body of evidence suggesting multiple benefits to fasted training.
Improved insulin sensitivity
Better recovery
Stronger anabolic response to weight lifting
Improved capacity to perform without food
More fat burning
Improved Insulin Sensitivity
Intermittent fasting improves insulin sensitivity, as I've mentioned before. And exercise is perhaps the most reliable way to increase insulin sensitivity, even absent any changes to your diet. When you combine the two, the effect is even greater. By the end of one study, subjects who fasted while training had lower body weights (the only group not to gain weight), better body-wide glucose tolerance, and enhanced insulin sensitivity compared to the subjects who ate normally and exercised.
