In some cases, people who exercise just a few times a week but have been doing so for years are also considered athletes. Athletes typically lose less overall muscle strength during a break than nonathletes.
In general, you can take up to three or four weeks off without seeing a noticeable drop in your strength performance. A recent study looked at 21 runners who participated in the Boston Marathon and then cut back on their exercise. They each went from running about 32 miles a week, to 3 or 4 miles a week. The researchers noted that the runners would have seen larger declines had they stopped exercising completely.
Running three or four miles a week helped them maintain some level of cardio fitness. Like athletes, you can take about three weeks off without seeing a noticeable drop in your muscle strength, according to a study.
Nonathletes are more likely than athletes to lose their progress during periods of inactivity. The good news? A study found that both athletes and nonathletes can reach their peak fitness levels more quickly after a break, than when they first began training. Our bodies are good at maintaining overall strength. We know that skeletal muscular strength stays about the same during a month of not exercising. However, as mentioned above, athletes can start losing muscles after three weeks of inactivity.
You lose cardio, or aerobic, fitness more quickly than muscle strength, and this can start to happen in just a few days. According to a study in athletes, endurance decreases between 4 and 25 percent after a 3 to 4 week break in cardio.
Beginners may find their aerobic fitness is back to zero after a four-week break. As we age, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain muscle mass and strength. During a break, older people experience a bigger drop in fitness. One study from grouped participants by age to year-olds, and to year-olds and put them all through the same exercise routine and period of inactivity.
During the six-month break, the older participants lost strength almost twice as fast as the younger ones. The study found no significant differences in strength loss between men and women within the same age groups. In other cases, a person might eat normally on most days but then have two days a week when they have only one meal. It is important to differentiate intermittent fasting from other methods of fasting for weight loss, which Beaumont Health notes will often have attributes of a fad diet.
For example, a person might consume only fruit or cabbage soup, or they'll restrict themselves to fewer than calories a day, often with the hopes that this extremely limited diet will help them drop pounds quickly or will somehow cleanse the body of toxins. This kind of fasting is extremely bad for you and for your fitness or wellness efforts.
Beaumont Health emphasizes that eating too few calories can make you hungrier and set you up for gaining fat in the long term. More important, prolonged fasting with few nutrients can pose such risks as electrolyte imbalance, heart arrhythmia, dizziness, dehydration, constipation, cold intolerance, decreased metabolic rate and, yes, even muscle loss. As the American Academy of Family Physicians points out, fad diets — including very low-calorie diets — are so detrimental not only because they limit the nutrients you consume but also because they're not sustainable in the long term.
People follow them for a short time and then go back to their regular lifestyle. Intermittent fasting is different because it simply limits the times of the day that you're eating and encourages fasting for the other hours of the day — and this is a lifestyle that Johns Hopkins Medicine notes is much more in tune with the way humans have evolved to live, going for long periods of time between eating.
During this fasting stage, the body undergoes what's referred to as metabolic switching, where it runs out of carbohydrate stores to use for energy and instead starts burning fat. But with the average modern lifestyle, where most people eat throughout their waking hours, the body never has a chance to undergo this metabolic switch. The SCNM Medical Center adds that restricting the hours when you're eating often means you'll end up eating less overall, and, provided that the foods you are consuming during your eating period are sufficiently healthy, you will see fat loss and muscle gain.
Harvard Health Publishing encourages those who are trying intermittent fasting to restrict their eating to eight to 10 hours a day and to avoid eating too late in the evening before bed. This could mean breaking their fast at 7 a. If this makes them too hungry later in the day, they could hold off on breaking their fast until 10 a. This leaves a hour window of time for their body to enter a fasted state. Note that if 16 hours is too long for you to fast, you could shorten your fasting period to 12 hours or even 10 hours.
In short, intermittent fasting isn't about starving yourself. It's about getting sufficient calories and nutrients every day but still giving your body a period of time where it can fast and not take in food. But if you're trying to eat correctly during that window of eating while doing intermittent fasting, what does that entail? What does a healthy diet for building muscle include? One of the primary reasons good nutrition is vital to strength gains is that it's during those fed periods, as opposed to during those fasting periods, that the body has the insulin and amino acids it needs to build muscle, according to University of Utah Health.
But just because these feeding periods are when your body builds muscle, that doesn't mean short-term fasting and muscle loss are as cause-and-effect related as you might think.
According to both University of Utah Health and the SCNM Medical Center, you don't need to worry about losing muscle during fasting as long as you are getting proper nutrition during your periods of eating. And it's not all about protein. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics notes that while protein is important , it's not necessary to guzzle protein shakes the way some people think you must. Instead, protein should make up about 10 to 35 percent of your total calories.
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You need to feed your muscles protein to maintain and build them. So, while you should be in a calorie deficit to lose fat, you should be focusing on healthy whole foods, with a healthy amount of protein. Not using your muscles can cause them to waste away, so make sure that you strength train.
Not to mention, because muscles burn more calories than fat, you will be helping yourself if you strength train.
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