I’ve successfully fasted in the past (usually 24-48h rolling fasts) for a series of reasons - mostly to quickly and effortlessly lose the extra weight that I put on every year after I go visit my family and they feed me all kinds of food known to man. At the time my forms of exercise were walking and some strength training, so training fasted wasn’t a problem, and even if my performance wasn’t the best it wasn’t really a problem.
Now however, I do Judo, and the training is very cardio-intensive (I’d argue that certain parts of the class are basically HIIT). Even regularly eating low carbs isn’t feasible for me anymore and a significant drop in performance would be a problem - this isn’t a beginner class so I need to keep up with everyone else, since everything is synchronised. Besides I risk getting hurt if my head isn’t there during sparring.
Does anyone doing similar sports/training have any advice? My idea is to carb load on training days and fast on days off. I expect some drop in performance but not as much as regularly eating low calories maybe. Has anyone been successful while keeping up this kind of training schedule?
I do 2-3hr training blocks with the Muay Thai competition team fasted (~36hr) without a problem. Feeling very energetic. I prefer it to post meal training, for the focus and intensity benefits.
Sylvie von duuglas ittu from YouTube, a professional nak muay with hundreds of fights, prefers to compete fasted too for similar reasons.
However, doing a ~16 mile run at 48hr fasted, I hit a glycogen wall around 12-14 mile, bunking (no energy) pretty hard. I didn’t have gels on me, but I believe that would solve the problem (and break the fast). 18 miles with carb preloading and gels the week after went smoothly.