If you're not fueling your muscles properly after a workout, you could lose all the muscle-building benefits that you were achieving. “Your body is using energy constantly throughout the day, even when you aren't exercising," Jones says.
You will lose muscle first before anything else. Your recovery after training will require further calories which will burn more muscle so you lose 2x times the muscle. The retaining of muscle in a caloric deficit is tricky itself and to not eat anything is a complete downhill way to approach lifting.
Not eating after a workout can hinder recovery and muscle growth. It's essential to replenish your energy and provide your muscles with the nutrients they need. A light post-workout snack with protein and carbs will help you recover and support weight loss by boosting your metabolism.
Muscle Recovery: After strength training, your muscles need nutrients to repair and grow. Not eating can slow down this recovery process, potentially leading to increased soreness and longer recovery times.
Most adults do not need to eat back their exercise calories because they are doing moderate activities, like walking, biking, swimming, weight-lifting, etc. These activities do not burn enough calories to require a post-workout snack, particularly if weight-loss is the intended goal.
However, given that we all have to eat, it is better for men to eat after exercising if they want to burn fat. This is because, after exercise, men will use that carbohydrate to replace the carbohydrate in their muscles rather than burn it for fuel and will continue to burn fat instead.
The afterburn effect is based on this anaerobic muscle function. After training, your muscles restore all the reserves that it burned during the first minutes of training. The recovery of these energy stocks, of course, consumes energy. So, as you can see, you burn calories even during recovery time after your workout.
To make gains you have to have the right nutrients in your body to construct muscle. This means that what you eat, and how much, is essential in making muscle gains. Lifting and doing strength training without adequate nutrition, especially without enough protein, can actually lead to loss of muscle tissue.
Is Working Out On an Empty Stomach Bad for You? According to Roper, fasted exercise is generally safe for most people, but it may lead to side effects. “Because blood glucose gets depleted during fasting cardio, you can experience some side effects including lightheadedness and dizziness,” she said.
Recent research suggests that intermittent fasting (IF) does not negatively impact sports performance or lean muscle mass more than any other diet. “But still, the goal is to maintain your health and minimize muscle loss with the right blend of diet and exercise,” explains Kate.
Your body needs protein for muscle building and repair tissues, so if you aren't eating enough, your muscles won't have the material they need to grow. You could feel “punch drunk” after working out, your arms and other muscles might ache more than usual, and your body may even feel generally weaker.
You can get away with not eating before an exercise session if it is low-intensity or less than an hour. If you haven't eaten for a few hours beforehand, it's important to have a balanced meal soon after (within an hour) to recover and refuel.
Is it OK to not eat after working out? While it's not mandatory to eat after a workout, in general, it's a good idea even when you're not hungry.
Schlichter points to a review of 46 studies published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, which found that eating before exercise was beneficial for performance for aerobic workouts lasting more than an hour—though fasting before shorter workouts wasn't found to be detrimental.
There is no perfect length for naps after a workout. However, experts recommend keeping them short, between 20 and 90 minutes. A 20-minute sleep after a workout reduces the risk of feeling groggy, while a 90-minute sleep offers deep relaxation and gets you through a full sleep cycle.
If you don't eat, you might feel slow-moving or lightheaded when you exercise. If you plan to exercise within an hour after breakfast, eat a light meal. Or have a sports drink. Focus on carbohydrates for the most energy.
That plan is called the 30-30-30 rule. It's a simple but catchy idea that encourages you to eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up and then get 30 minutes of low-intensity exercise. The 30-30-30 rule now has millions of followers on TikTok.
Your body uses stored fat and carbohydrates from food to fuel exercise. But when you haven't eaten for hours, there are fewer carbs available. So your body may rely on fat stores as a primary energy source, allowing you to burn more fat. The hormone cortisol stimulates fat metabolism.
You're depriving your muscles of the amino acids they need to rebuild and recover. You're not replenishing the stored glucose (glycogen) in your muscles which can lead to further muscle breakdown.
There are other terms for this, such as build mode, but bulking is a common term for this caloric surplus. Dirty bulking is when an individual is in a caloric surplus to build muscle (build mode). However, the individual is eating foods that are carb dense, unhealthy, and ultra-processed out of convenience.
When experiencing physical burnout from overtraining, you might feel like it's a struggle to get through the workout—even if you're excited to train. You might also experience abnormal changes in appetite, difficulty sleeping, irritability, extreme soreness, or injury.
After we finish exercising, oxygen debt, also known as post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), occurs when our bodies continue to consume excess oxygen at an increased rate in order to make up for the oxygen deficit.
How Long Does it Last? There have been several studies to determine how many hours EPOC, or afterburn, can last, and the consensus is that the effect peaks in the first hour after exercise and continues for up to 72 hours. That means your body could keep burning extra calories for as long as three days after a workout!