Should You Strength Train While Fasting?
During a recent conversation with podcaster and author Tim Ferriss, Dr. Peter Attia shared his thoughts on intermittent fasting—or as he calls it, time-restricted eating—and one pitfall in particular. Namely, that fasting can lead to the loss of lean muscle, as well as fat, if you’re not putting in an appropriate amount of strength training at the same time.
“You’re going to lose muscle mass when you fast, you have to accept that,” he said. “So the question is, how do you minimize that damage, how do you lose as little muscle mass as possible?”
Attia was speaking from personal experience, having found that his body fat went from 10 percent to around 16 percent when he was fasting. “I always exercise in the morning and don’t eat,” he says. “To exercise, then not provide yourself with any amino acids, every single day, to undergo muscle protein synthesis, is a bit risky. So I’ve been looking at other strategies.”
Excerpted from Men’s Health
