Why do not you practice on an empty stomach?

People who come to the gym with the desire to get rid of excess weight, often make one common mistake. They think that training on an empty stomach will help them burn more fat. If you are also sure that such a method has a rational grain, we hasten to disappoint you. In fact, abstinence from eating before exercise has many more drawbacks than advantages. Let's talk about this in more detail.

Hungry athletes burn more fat

You dream of finding the perfect body, calculating calories daily and developing an ideal training program. It's time to go to the gym. It seems that you have all foreseen. Stop! Did you remember to eat two hours before classes? Or do you decide to skip meals? Supporters of sports on an empty stomach suggest that they can accelerate weight loss by giving up eating. A scientific study published in the British Journal of Nutrition confirms these findings.

During the experiment, participants who attended the gym shared in two groups. As you might guess, one group of amateur athletes performed training on an empty stomach, and the other did not ignore the food before training. As a result, it was revealed that participants from the hunger group managed to burn 20 percent more fat than their well-fed opponents. Similar results were obtained in another study. From what follows such conclusions: aerobic training in a state of hunger reduces the percentage of fat in the body.

Why does excess fat go away?

It seems everything is fine. You will be able to deprive yourself of one meal, exercise and then fill up the lack of calories. Specialist in sports nutrition Kelly Pritchett tells how the body switches fuel sources. Intensive physical action (running for long distances or lifting weights) causes the body to burn glycogen and carbohydrate stores. With prolonged training or when you miss a meal, these resources can be completely consumed. And then the body switches to another mode. To maintain movement, it begins to use the stored fat. Ideally, your plan to skip meals before training should work, and the excess weight quickly melts.

There are several nuances

However, in reality you will have to face the unprecedented resistance of the body. You will be surprised when in practice you come across several features, which, in fact, are protective. Firstly, the human body is not a fan of starvation, so it seeks to save fat in reserve. When you quickly burn fat, the body switches to energy saving mode. Remember yourself at a time when you insure yourself against unforeseen financial waste. When the amount of the remaining money reaches a certain mark, you understand that you do not need to spend any more, and turn on the saving mode. The same happens with fat reserves. The body understands that it risks to remain without a "stash," and begins to regulate metabolism to compensate for this loss. Thus, for the first few workouts, you really will make some progress. However, after some time, the indicators on the scale of the scales will remain unchanged.

Protective mechanism

Do not blame your body for disobedience. This protective mechanism is really needed for survival in extreme conditions. If domestic resources were immediately spent, no one lost in the forest would live for weeks in the wild. But in fact, we know examples when people return home after 30 days of ordeal.

In the survival mode, the body burns far fewer calories than usual. You think you can outsmart the body, but in fact you yourself are deceived. Dinner, which you eat after training, completely compensates for what you just spent in the gym. These findings confirm the scientific study, the results of which were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. As scientists have found, long periods of fasting can lead to a slowing of metabolism. Are you still ready to give up eating before training?

Skipping meals encourages you to eat more after exercise

With the next underwater stone of fasting, all lovers of express diets, who bring the body into shape for a month, collide, and then overgrown with excess weight. Everything is the same with you, only in an even shorter time frame. If you miss meals during the day, then be ready to face an unquenchable bout of hunger in the evening. The study, published in the magazine Appetite, showed that participants who did not go hungry before training, felt less willing to attack food later. In general, volunteers from both groups spent the same amount of calories in one session. Considering the fact that weight loss is much more reduced to the quality of nutrition, and not to the amount of calories consumed in the gym, this can be an important factor for those involved in sports to lose weight.

Is it easy to be healthy?

It seems that many of us know the golden formula of health: eat less, move more. It's easy to write on paper, but it's hard to transfer to real life. Another secret is that we need strong muscles to burn fat. They are your allies in the struggle to accelerate metabolism. To form strong and elastic muscles requires protein. If you are starving, then you risk burning not only excess fat. Intensive training will take with them not only a part of the loose fatty layer, but also muscle proteins. At first glance, the method of fasting before training can be effective, but as long as the process of recovery does not enter into the matter. Here you can not do without good strong muscles.

Satiety promotes progress

The success of the morning run does not depend on whether it was performed on an empty stomach, or before going out to the street you used breakfast. According to the results of scientific research, in the morning the body has a sufficient amount of glycogen, left over from the evening meal. However, there is one important nuance: a body that is not fueled can not give its maximum. And this means that the effectiveness of training suffers. The progress of your physical form is possible only if you have improved results and updated personal records. This, in turn, becomes possible only with a fuel tank filled (full stomach).

Perfect balance of nutrition

Some people train on an empty stomach, because they do not like to feel heaviness. However, there are a lot of shortcomings in this method. Ideal option will be eating complex carbohydrates about an hour before classes. Protein food for recovery use after exercise. Agree that it is better to finish the session on a positive note than to feel exhausted.