Training & Fueling Tips for the Athlete

Carb Timing, Exercise, Fasting for Athletes

1. Men 12-16 hours IF
2. Women 12 hours max
3. Premenopausal women- 2 x 24 hour cell autophagy OMAD dinner to dinner as example
4. Women morning fasted EASY workout unless aminos and ketones – trigger any endocrine suppression/regulation; save hard workout for later in day or eat something before workouts as aminos and ketones.
5. long bike rides- 1/4 normal amount as 100 calories per hour carbs as Virago plus each hour 10 grams – 20 grams aminos and ketones, plus scoop of electrolytes; slow bleed of carbs
6. long fasted bike ride- as above without carbs; ketones, aminos, electrolytes; semi depleted state

Fasted Exercise or Fed Exercise?

6 Steps To Fasting Properly

You already learned about the many benefits of using fasting as a recovery strategy in Chapter 8.

The fact is that from an ancestral standpoint, food always had to be hunted and gathered, and was never as readily available as it is in our modern area. Our body is actually programmed to allow our  digestive organs to take a much-needed rest – whether on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Unfortunately, in an age of affluence where food is ubiquitous, our digestive systems rarely get that break, and are instead being constantly worked with high intake of food.

No matter how healthy or nutrient dense the food, it can still be stressful on the digestive system to be constantly tapping into your body’s precious energy stores to break down, digest, absorb and assimilate a never-ending onslaught of food. In the same way that continuous living with no sleep is stressful to the human machine, continuous eating with no breaks is stressful to your metabolic and digestive engines.

In nature, fasting is often observed. A snake will refrain from eating for several weeks after gulping and swallowing a mouse. A dog will often laze around the house for an entire day without eating. But we humans are often not so smart or controlled.  Just think about what happens when you get sick, such as coming down with a fever.  Your own body often forces you to take a break from eating. This allows your body’s energy to be directed towards cleaning house, producing mucous  and increase immune system activity, rather than squandering energy on digestive work.  The benefits of caloric restriction are often missed by the hard charging athlete who rarely takes an easy recovery day and is constantly fueling their body.

After all – when you’re training heavily, you have a fine line to walk. On the one side, you need to give your body enough  nutrients to allow for adequate hormone formation and cellular repair and recovery, but on the other side, you need to give your digestive system an occasional break to allow for the many health and life-extending benefits of calorie restriction (31).

So as an athlete, how should you implement fasting without engaging in so much calorie restriction that it becomes unhealthy?

While the goal of this chapter is not to give you a thorough treatise on the matter of calorie restriction and fasting, I’m going to give you my top six steps to successfully implementing calorie restriction without damaging your body. If you want more, then I would recommend you read the most useful book on fasting for athletes that currently exists, which is written by the brilliant Dr. John Berardi and can be downloaded as a 100% free online manual at Precision Nutrition by clicking here.

Step #1 – 12-16 hour daily fast: The most practical and effective fasting strategy used by myself and the athletes I coach is a 12-16 hour fasting window for every 24 hour cycle. For example, you can eat dinner at 8pm, then eat nothing until breakfast or an early lunch sometime between 8am and 12pm the next day. 

Step #2 – skip the fast on high volume days: On high volume days, such as an Ironman triathlon training weekend that might involve several hours of exercise on both Saturday and Sunday, don’t fast. Just eat when you’re hungry. The risks outweigh the benefits of calorie restriction combined with high volume exercise. This goes hand-in-hand with the concept of also allowing yourself slightly higher carbohydrate intake on big training days or big blocks of training days.

Step #3 – don’t do hard or long workouts fasted: An easy morning swim, run, bike ride or body weight workout session that follows an overnight fast is fine. So is a short 10-60 minute hard interval training session, assuming you listen to your body and you’re able to maintain your goal intensity, recover well and eat a big breakfast afterwards. However, any workout that is A) hard and longer than 60 minutes or B) easy-to-moderate and longer than 2 hours should not be done in an overnight fasted state. This is a quick path to overtraining and unhealthy levels of self-cannibalization.

Step #4 – some foods are OK to eat when fasting. There are several foods that will allow your body to maintain low levels of blood sugar and low levels of insulin, but allow for adequate energy levels and even enhanced fatty acid utilization during a fast. By consuming these foods, you can also lower the amount of hormonal or metabolic stress you may experience when combining fasting with high levels of physical activity. These foods include: MCT or coconut oil, essential amino acids or branched chain amino acids, coffee or green tea (including Bulletproof® coffee), and spirulina, chlorella, greens powders or greens supplements.

 

Step #5 – every once in a while, do a 24 hour fast. Every one to two months minimum, choose one day on which you’re not going to exercise at all and you’re simply going to clean out your body and allow for enhanced cellular autophagy (basically, clean-up of your body’s junk). This is especially important for athletes who are eating thousands and thousands of calories per day. This occasional complete day of rest for your muscles, your adrenals and your digestive system can be incredibly therapeutic.

 

Step #6 – be careful if you’re female. Many women find that fasting causes sleeplessness, anxiety, and irregular periods, among a myriad of other hormonal dysregulation symptoms. Once again, this may seem sexist or unfair, but it seems that men simply do better heading off into the hills to hunt, gather or fight in a state of calorie restriction – while the same scenario sends many women into a complete metabolic downspin. There is a very good article about this called Shattering the Myth of Fasting for Women: A Review of Female-Specific Responses to Fasting in the Literature (Ruper). 

I highly recommend you give it a read if you’re a female and you want to try fasting. I’ve personally found that when it comes to maintaining health and hormonal status for the female clients I train, the complete 24 hour fast described in step #5 is far more effective than daily intermittent fasting. And if you are female and simply cannot resist the idea of daily intermittent fasting, at least implement the extra nutrient steps I outline in step #4.

Ben Greenfield…

I’m often asked if I personally implement intermittent fasting, and the answer is yes. Since I finish my workouts around 6:30pm, I personally eat dinner around 7pm, have a snack such as coconut milk with protein powder around 8pm, then generally don’t eat breakfast until around 10am the next morning, at which point I’ll usually make a high fat kale shake or have some Bulletproof® coffee. This is my standard practice 5 days per week, and then I generally just eat when I’m hungry on the heavier training volume weekends.  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/article/nutrition-articles/how-to-customize-your-diet/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3200169/?tool=pubmed

Dr. Mindy Pelz on Four steps for women when fasting to not tank sex hormones

1. Start with intermittent fasting 13-15 hours – get comfortable with building IF lifestyle
2. Are you getting into ketosis?  IF not, trouble shoot on WHY you are not getting into ketosis.  Foundational start-
   1. Test and not Guess with Keto Mojo
   2. Nutritional Ketosis 0.5 to 1.0:  light ketosis, great starting point
   3. Optimal Ketosis 1.0-3.0; sweet spot, clarity, energy, weight loss
   4. Therapeutic Ketosis 3.0-5.0; healing a condition, accelerated healing
   5. Fasting Ketosis 5.0-8.0; achieved through 3-day water fasting, prevention, and intense healing; do not go over 8.0 mmol/l

Dr. Mindy Pelz Fasting rules:

Women under 40 years old

1. 1. day 1-21 of your cycle you can do any type of fasting
   2. day 21-28 when body needs to make progesterone, make sure not in ketosis; body is trying to make progesterone or else throws cycle off, hair loss, infertile

Women 40-55 years of age

1. starting at age 40, our P & E are starting to slow down; ovaries slow down in making sex hormones and start to hand over job to adrenal glands
2. if under a lot of stress- make sure supporting adrenals and HPA Axis
3. strengthen adrenals-HPA
4. Track your cycle as Clue App
5. Day 21- Pair fasting down to IF lifestyle and lean into hormone building foods as beans, rice, squash, potatoes, grass fed beef, tropical fruits, citrus fruits- not foods that are keeping you in ketosis as not want to be in ketosis at this time of cycle until cycle begins again
6. DUTCH test to track cycle – hormones over 24 hours
7. Spotting in cycle, anxious, not sleeping = signs of low progesterone – signs of stepping out of long fast with these symptoms
8. When to do block fasts?  Day 1-21 is okay

 

Post Menopausal: over 55 years of age

1. You can fast anytime
2. You don’t have a lot of progesterone which can make estrogen high leading to estrogen dominance and increase risk for cancers
3. Weekly or monthly basis
4. one day a week a “feast day” with hormone building carbs as listed above
5. Five days period of building up fasting with hormone building
6. Once a month
7. Once a quarter
8. Step out of ketosis, not in extreme fasting at any time; not in extreme fasting any long time; excessive long fasts and OMAD over and over again will be a way to imbalance your hormones.

 

Learn much more with Dr. Mindy Pelz on her YouTube Channel and podcast

https://youtu.be/Btys5cEswrw

https://b.online.csp.edu/resources/article/intermittent-fasting-for-athletes/

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Before adequate attention can be given to how intermittent fasting influences the performance of athletes, it’s helpful to understand the diet plan’s origins and functions.

The dietary sensation began in 2012 when the BBC’s Michael Mosely explored popular research being conducted about the health benefits of fasting. As he created his documentary, which required him to try the diet, he discovered that his overall cholesterol levels improved and that his “risk of contracting age-related diseases like cancer and diabetes” decreased dramatically. As a result, Britain and eventually the world would pick up the trend.

The specifics about intermittent fasting require a little more attention, though. A. Pawlowski of Today has unpacked the essentials for how intermittent fasting typically goes outside of the athletic world. She said the three most common intermittent fasting plans are the 16:8 diet, the alternate day fasting, and the 5:2 plan.

• The 16:8 Diet: This form of intermittent fasting requires 16 solid hours of fasting every day. In the other eight hours, those looking to lose weight can eat practically whatever they want. Because they will finish their meals early in their waking hours, there will be more time for sugars and fats to metabolize throughout the day.
• Alternate Day Fasting: Here, people fast every other day of the week. As they limit their calorie intake to 500 calories on their fasting day, they will be able to eat anything on the days they don’t fast.
• The 5:2 Diet: In this model, dieters need to limit their consumption to 500 calories per day for two days in a row. In the other five days of the week, all other food is fair game.

While intermittent fasting requires stringent limitations on caloric intake, athletes can still exercise during their diets.

According to K. Aleisha, M.S., CSCS, people can still exercise while fasting, but they need to be smart about it. Specifically, dieters need to follow four basic guidelines when exercising while fasting:

• Commit to low-intensity cardio exercises during fasting times
• Perform higher-intensity workouts after meals (or snacks during fasting days)
• Consume protein-rich foods
• Eat snacks to stabilize blood sugar

While this is a good starting point for understanding the relationship between intermittent fasting and exercise, most of this research has been completed on everyday dieters.

As athletes are required to train for multiple hours practically each day, it’s important to zoom in on how the diet plan both benefits and potentially serves as a detriment for competitors.

Strategies for Athletes Considering Intermittent Fasting

Before the benefits of intermittent fasting for athletes can be given proper attention, it’s necessary to understand why they might choose this diet plan.

Before intermittent fasting reached its peak popularity, some athletes were already having to navigate the balance between fasting and training/competing. In the article “Optimizing training and competition during the month of Ramadan,” researchers looked into the challenges that Muslim athletes have to negotiate as they compete during the month-long fasting period.

The researchers recommended ways that trainers and managers can help athletes prepare and perform during the period, maintaining that they apply a “holistic approach, rather than focusing on the single alterations/perturbations.”

To this end, the writers of the study cited the need for “variability among athletes and their specific needs (biological, psychological, cognitive-behavioral), and their social and living environment.” Trainers should work with athletes’ different body compositions in a one-on-one capacity.

Athletes who don’t observe Ramadan are beginning to consider fasting techniques for a variety of reasons. A 2017 scholarly article from the academic publication called The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition focused on potential motivations and benefits of intermittent fasting for athletes.

The researchers found that intermittent fasting would be immensely helpful for competitors aiming to lose fat, especially endurance athletes competing in sports like track and field, swimming, or cycling.

Low-carbohydrate and intermittent fasting diets “can be similarly effective for improving body composition.”  In order to achieve this goal while maintaining peak performance, though, athletes should consume more protein in their diets.

Additional research out of the journal Sports has highlighted the weight-loss and fat-burning qualities of intermittent fasting but warned that other behavioral changes should be considered.

The researchers recommended that athletes looking to lose weight using an intermittent fasting diet should be careful about when and how they exercise, train, and compete, and they noted more research into their conclusion was needed.

What are the Side Effects of Intermittent Fasting?

Even though there’s still work still to be done on the research side, it’s helpful to consider the perspectives of athletes currently training.

Craig Pickering is a former Olympic sprinter and bobsledder who now writes about nutrition in athletics. He wrote that, while there are marked benefits of intermittent fasting for athletes, competitors should be careful as they pursue the diet.

Specifically, he wrote that “not eating before a high-intensity exercise, such as sprints and resistance training, also will likely reduce training performance and, in turn, hamper competition performance.”

Pickering also noted that an intermittent fasting plan for athletes may hinder or limit their overall protein intake. In the events that athletes compete while nutrient-deficient, there performances will suffer.

As a result, he has recommended that athletes carefully plan when they eat to maximize performance.  Pickering’s sentiment is backed up by some recent research. An article in the academic journal Nutrition highlighted the importance of carbohydrate consumption for athletes training for competition.

In most intermittent fasting plans, dieters cut out carb-rich foods to lower their calorie consumption on fast days. Carbs are important in an athlete’s diet, though, since they break down as energy to burn during training and competitive performances.  The study examined how a lot of existing research warns against athletes adopting a carb-restricted diet because they need enough energy to compete at the highest level. 

However, the study also made note of how little research is available at this time.  In other words, intermittent fasting may still be appropriate for endurance athletes looking to drop weight, but more conclusive evidence is required.  As some researchers have gestured toward its benefits and others have rightly recommended caution, there’s still a considerable amount of work to be done to fully understand if the diet plan is suitable for athletic training.

Professionals in the athletic and health industries will want to learn more about its nuances before recommending to clients. The ideal way to do so is through an online B.A. in Exercise Science. Concordia University, St. Paul’s flexible and fully online program prepares students looking to become athletic trainers, fitness trainers, and coaches to confront diet plans like intermittent fasting directly and soundly. At the same time, CSP prepares students to enter the research side of exercise science by equipping them with the tools to go on to conduct graduate-level study.

Intuitive Fueling, Training and Performing

Should female athletes fast before their workout?

It depends.

Fueling, training, and performing as a low carb athlete involves many factors including how you train, and which is your main fuel tank (carbs or fat).

1. Is your workout a low heart rate morning movement exercise as walking, hiking, swimming, or easy bike?
2. What is your heart rate in your workout?
3. Are you fat adapted?
4. What are your goals?
5. What is the purpose of the workout?

Women are obviously different than men.

I am discovering that SO many female athletes are doing too much of everything. 

1. Too much fasting
2. Too low of carbohydrates
3. Too much hard exercise
4. Too many stressful activities

All while we have too little of hormones including low thyroid, progesterone, and cortisol.

Why are we pushing past the body’s signals or red flags that are being sent to us in order to follow what ‘everyone’ else is doing?

Why do we stop listening to our own red flags sent by our own body?

Instead of adjusting our fueling, training, and performing plans… we push past the “right” dose of “stressor” for our bio-individual needs and ultimately lead us to “METABOLIC CHAOS”.

My suggestion is to start listening to our own intuitive signals and adapt to what our mind, body and spirt needs to be our optimal self.

I am proposing a “new” type of training… INTUITIVE fueling, training, and performing for the athlete – especially the FEMALE ATHLETE.

• When should we eat before a workout?
• When should we eat after a workout?
• When should we have a higher carb meal?
• When should we adjust our workout plan?
• When should we fast or not fast?

What about the Kisspeptin hormone?

A large body of data has established the hypothalamic kisspeptin (KP) and its receptor, KISS1R, as major players in the activation of the neuroendocrine reproductive axis at the time of puberty and maintenance of reproductive capacity in the adult. Due to its strategic location, this ligand-receptor pair acts as an integrator of cues from gonadal steroids as well as of circadian and seasonal variation-related information on the reproductive axis.

“Besides these cues, the activity of the hypothalamic KP signaling is very sensitive to the current metabolic status of the body. In conditions of energy imbalance, either positive or negative, a number of alterations in the hypothalamic KP signaling pathway have been documented in different mammalian models including nonhuman primates and human. Deficiency of metabolic fuels during fasting causes a marked reduction of Kiss1 gene transcript levels in the hypothalamus and, hence, decreases the output of KP-containing neurons. Food intake or exogenous supply of metabolic cues, such as leptin, reverses metabolic insufficiency-related changes in the hypothalamic KP signaling. Likewise, alterations in Kiss1 expression have also been reported in other situations of energy imbalance like diabetes and obesity. Information related to the body’s current metabolic status reaches to KP neurons both directly as well as indirectly via a complex network of other neurons. In this review article, we have provided an updated summary of the available literature on the regulation of the hypothalamic KP-Kiss1r signaling by metabolic cues. In particular, the potential mechanisms of metabolic impact on the hypothalamic KP-Kiss1r signaling, in light of available evidence, are discussed.”

We strive to BURN FAT, optimize our health, and improve the aging process… or as I say, “Strive for THRIVE each day and live our best life our second half of our life!”

What to eat and when to eat is an N = 1 Experiment especially for the high performing individual, athlete and especially the female athlete.  There is not a one size fits all solution or specific answer!

What if you do a performance focused, higher heart rate, training in the morning before the first meal?

What are the risks of doing a fasted workout session upon waking?

 

1. Do we have lack of fuel on board to train in a fasted stated (12-15 hours)?
2. Do we risk losing muscle strength?
3. Do we increase the chance of creating hormone imbalance?

Hormone imbalance can have a negative effect on our body weight (weight gain), energy and vitality.

MORE IS NOT BETTER!

Instead, would exercising in mid-afternoon or early evening (before dinner) be the ideal time of day to do a more intense workout session or strength training session (HIIT)?

Ben Greenfield suggested starting your day with a morning EASY fasted movement session (move more than a hard workout) as walking, low heart rate run, easy bike, easy swim, or hike that keeps your heart rate in your fat burning range (as MAF formula).

How can you customize your nutrition and training plan?

1. Check out your DNAFit and ancestry background
2. Become fat adapted before you begin fasting and before you do fasted workouts.
3. Two meal a day may not be enough calories for you- so maybe you eat MORE in that meal or break your fast earlier with an easy to digest fuel as grass-fed bone broth (option to add sea salt and fat as MCT oil or grass-fed butter) or .
4. Women do best by adding some calories before a workout – then waiting to eat post workout.
5. Men do best with a morning fasted workout then eat afterwards- easy to digest.

How can you be an intuitive eating and fuel/train/perform as an intuitive athlete?

1. Ask yourself if skipping that meal is too much stress for your body
2. Learn if hungry or just need to hydrate.
3. Do intermittent fasting 12 plus hours – listen to your body to when to “break your fast” rather than going by time.

WHEN or What time of day should you eat?

For example if you had to work out at 530 am what would you take and when is so individual but also different for men vs. women.

#5 Increased testosterone

• In lean active women, who require testosterone quite significantly as do men of course, the issue is that when you overdo fasted exercise or you do extremely glycogen depleting exercise sessions in a completely fasted especially an overnight state, you can tend to see a drop in hormone production.
• Basically, it’s another one of those ancestral mechanisms where nature doesn’t want starved people who are hungry and running from lions to make babies – we down-regulate a lot of these hormones responsible for fertility.
• If you’re going to do harder workout sessions and you’re going to do those in a fasted state, then ideally, you would save them for the afternoon or the early evening- If you haven’t been fasting for 8 to 12 hours.
• If you do the harder workout session in the morning – do make sure to prioritize a post-workout meal. I see over and over again in the people who will do like a hard morning workout but then not eat a drop in those hormones, or in the people who just basically are working out too much and not eating enough.

One of many suggestions from my mentor Ben Greenfield:

• Ultimately, the scenario here is if you get up in the morning, and this is especially important to tell your female clients, if you get up in the morning and your only time to do a hard exercise session is in the morning and you’ve been fasting for 8 to 12 hours…
  • if you are male, you would actually be able to get through that pretty well but you’d want to prioritize your post-workout nutrition.
  • If you are a female, I’ll even have them do something like a smaller workout snack after they’ve been fasting, but this would be something that’s non-insulinogenic like you take 20 grams of amino acids or you take a little bit of MCT oil or something like that.
  • ONLY IF it’s going to be a really hard workout as an hour-long strength training workout, a CrossFit WOD, something like that, not the easy morning movement that I was talking about.
  • You do see an increase in testosterone when fasted workouts are done in moderation, and it’s not like a crazy soul-crushing workout in which you’re starved before and you’re starving yourself after.

We need to learn more about KISS1 Gene and Kisspeptin proteins…

What is KISS1 gene?

“Context: Kisspeptin, encoded by the KISS1 gene, is a key stimulatory factor of GnRH secretion and puberty onset. Inactivating mutations of its receptor (KISS1R) cause isolated hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (IHH). A unique KISS1R-activating mutation was described in central precocious puberty (CPP).”

Mutations of the KISS1 gene in disorders of puberty – PubMed

Is Kisspeptin a protein?

“Kisspeptins (including kisspeptin-54 (KP-54), formerly known as metastin) are proteins encoded by the KISS1 gene in humans. Kisspeptins are ligands of the G-protein coupled receptor, GPR54. … The Kiss1 gene is located on chromosome 1. It is transcribed in the brain, adrenal gland, and pancreas.”

Kisspeptin – Wikipedia

Functional Lab Testing & LIFESTYLE Habits: when is your fasting, low carb athletic lifestyle is TOO MUCH and becoming a source of CHRONIC STRESS – leading to “METABOLIC CHAOS”?

1. High performing driven individual
2. Dutch test- add optimal ranges
   1. Cortisol low
   2. DHEA low
   3. Testosterone
   4. Estrogens
   5. Melatonin
3. Hormones – serum
   1. Progesterone
   2. Insulin
   3. HA1C
   4. Leptin
4. Full thyroid panel lab ranges vs. optimal
5. 1. Free T3
   2. Free T4
   3. Reverse T3
   4. Antibodies
6. Athletic:

1. 1. Exercise 1x day or more
   2. HIIT training at least once a week
   3. Endurance athlete
2. Hormones- cycling

1. 1. Pre menopause
   2. Irregular cycle
   3. Post menopause
2. Nutrition

1. 1. Low carb – grams per day average
   2. Carb cycling
   3. Nutritional Ketosis
   4. Fasting 20 plus hours once a week OMAD
   5. Intermittent Fasting 15-plus hours 3x or more week

Debbie Potts

Health & Fitness Coach, Author, & Speaker

Host of ‘The Low Carb Athlete’ Intuitive Fueling & Training Podcast

Founder of ‘The WHOLESTIC Method’ Coaching Program

FNTP, FDNP, NASM CPT, CHEK HLC, Ben Greenfield Coach

BURN FAT. OPTIMIZE HEALTH. IMPROVE PERFORMANCE.

Learn more on https://linktr.ee/Debbiepotts