Maybe you’ve heard of anabolic fasting, and maybe you haven’t.
If you have heard about it, but haven't tried it yet, you’ve probably heard some of the claims and been a little skeptical.
“Anabolic fasting can change your entire life in a single day!”
“You can amplify your hormones without doing anything!”
“Anabolic fasting can boost your growth hormones by 2000%!”
Well, you’re not wrong to be skeptical. Some of those claims are outlandish, but the more outlandish part is that they’re more-or-less true.
Let’s give you a little introduction to the world of anabolic fasting.
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What is Anabolic Fasting?
It’s a relatively new concept to be popularized, but anabolic fasting is backed by some solid science and studies.
The primary scientific branch dealing with anabolic fasting research is the Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Virginia.
Their research focuses on human growth hormone. This hormone is responsible for a number of crucial and non-crucial bodily functions.
- Improving your cognitive function and sharpening your mind
- Balancing your mood
- Keeping your libido healthy
- Making sure your bones are strong
- And, most importantly (for this article,) improving your muscle mass.
As men age, the amount of human growth hormone flowing through their system decreases. It’s not hard to see why you’d want to increase the amount of HGH. The University of Virginia has proved that you can do that with anabolic fasting.
“Won’t fasting just throw my body into a natural starvation mode and start consuming all my muscle mass?”
Good question. That does happen eventually, but the key to anabolic fasting is to do it intermittently, not for extended periods.
So how does it work?
Let’s look at one of the first studies done on anabolic fasting, referred to as time-restricted feeding (TRF.)
- The study took two groups of men and had them train under the same regimen (alternating between upper and lower-body splits, three times a week for eight weeks.)
- The first group would eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, which was considered a normal diet, henceforth known as ND.
- The second group was fed using the study’s TRF guidelines, which allowed them to eat the same as the other group on workout days. On non-workout days, their food intake was limited to a short period of time between 4 PM and midnight.
- It’s important to note that the study didn’t specify what food the participants ate. They logged the food they ate, though, and found that most of them followed a standard American diet.
So, what happened? Well, the results were positive enough to turn anabolic fasting into a bit of a fad.
- The TRF group ate around 600 calories less than the other group on their TRF days, coming in at around 1600 calories. This means that on these days they were logged as being deficient in calories.
- The TRF group didn’t overcompensate for ‘lost’ calories on their workout days and would eat around 2300 calories on these days. These days were logged as slightly calorie-deficient.
- The other group consistently ate more calories, their daily average over the course of a week maxing out at 2700 and minimizing at 2100 in the last week.
- The study concluded a lot of things. It’s difficult to draw direct conclusions due to inaccuracy in the study logs, but a couple things were significant.
The group doing anabolic fasting showed a greater increase in both upper and lower body endurance, as well as lower body strength.
The group doing anabolic fasting was found to have a less prominent increase in muscle mass, largely due to the lack of protein consumed on TRF days.
We can conclude from this research that anabolic fasting does work. The research also shows that you need to eat a heck of a lot more protein on the days before and after.
If that’s not enough to convince you, another, more recent study was done with more conclusive results.
- This study drew a positive conclusion between increased muscle mass and anabolic fasting. That’s right - the TRF group gained more muscle than the other group. The study says that the muscle gains were ‘scientifically insignificant’ at 1.4kg over the 8-week period, but that’s actually pretty impressive.
- Especially since this study was done on intermediate strength trainers. They were already years into their exercise program before trying anabolic fasting and it provided benefits even during their training regimen.
- The TRF group also lost significantly more fat than the other study group during the course of the study.
So, Should We All Start Anabolic Fasting?
That depends on what you want to get. There are a few reasons that a lot of people don't want to try anabolic fasting, but these are largely myths.
- Anabolic fasting does not lower testosterone. Extended fasting over a period of three or more days can lower testosterone, but after the fasting period is finished, testosterone rebounds and shoots it up to levels higher than baseline.
- Anabolic fasting doesn't slow down your metabolism. It doesn't speed it up, either. Again, long-term fasting will start to mess with your metabolism, but short-term fasting doesn’t.
- Anabolic fasting doesn’t increase muscle breakdown. This is, and rightly so, one of the biggest worries for men considering an anabolic training regimen. However, as proven by the studies we talked about earlier, this isn’t true at all.
Oh, and here’s a link to the study that backs up the not so ridiculous quote about anabolic fasting boosting HGH production by 2000%. So, in summary, anabolic fasting has been scientifically proven to give you a number of benefits.
- You’ll see a huge improvement in HGH Levels
- Your ability to burn fat will increase
- The speed at which you build muscle improves
- You’ll save money on your grocery bill
With all this new knowledge under your belt, it seems like anabolic fasting is a good thing to try - at least once or twice.
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