Is Intermittent Fasting Bad for Building Muscle?

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

When you're doing intermittent fasting, it can reduce your recovery time. Meaning after your workout, your body needs fuel. It needs protein. It needs carbohydrates to recover, to repair and to build the muscle. If you've just finished an intense weightlifting session, but your fasting window is still in effect, you're missing that crucial post-workout nutrition window. Let's say you're working out at 6 a.m., but you can't start eating until 11 a.m. That's four hours where you are delaying recovery and you are hindering muscle growth.

Yo, yo, yo. What is going on, you guys? Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong and feel insanely confident. I'm your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to today's episode, episode number 190, 10 away from 200. And guys, we just saw this morning that we've hit over 600,000 downloads. We are 400,000 downloads away from a million, and that is just in a little over a year and a half since the birth of The WarriorBabe Show. So again, thank you guys so freaking much for being listeners of this, for spreading the word of this podcast and sharing it with your friends, family, cousins, sisters, brothers, all of the people. I appreciate you guys so much.

So with that being said, let's get into today's episode. I think this one's going to be a good one, but I'll let you guys be the judge of that. We're going to talk about something that's gaining, and has always gained, tons of attention within the fitness space. I think it's been going on for years now, and that is intermittent fasting. Specifically, what I want to talk about today is why intermittent fasting may not be the best protocol if your goal is to build muscle.

So if you've been fasting and working out hard in the gym and doing all the things that you think are right to try and put on muscle, but you're not seeing the results that you want, what I'm going to do in this podcast today is break down the science behind it and give you better alternatives, to make sure that all your hard work is paying off and that you are optimizing the goal of what you want to do, which is gaining more muscle, and that you're doing the right things to do that. Because there's nothing more that I want than for you guys to succeed at the goals that you want to get after, but there are so many things out there that are conflicting or counterproductive to the ultimate goal of building muscle.

These tactics are more so focusing on weight loss, which is awesome for those of you that need to do that goal. But the way I look at it is, okay, go after fat loss. I've shared with you guys in episodes of the podcast what the difference between weight loss and fat loss is. Go after fat loss. Focus on building the muscle and decreasing the body fat around the muscle so that you can look more toned. I think that's what everybody wants, right? But in order to look more toned, you have to have more muscle mass on your body, and then be able to fuel your body in the way that you need to. That's going to help to decrease the body fat that you want to see.

All that being said, before I even dive into it, I just want to say intermittent fasting is a protocol. It's a tool. It's an approach. It works. And it's proven that it's worked for people that have health issues or flare-ups or things like that that they need to control. That is why IF is good for a vast amount of people. But why I want to talk about it on the podcast today is if your ultimate goal is to build muscle, then I don't personally believe that intermittent fasting is the best protocol to get you to that goal.

So let's get into it. If you're unfamiliar with what intermittent fasting is, it's an eating pattern that cycles between periods of eating and fasting. I think the most popular one out there is 16 hours of fasting and an 8-hour window where you eat. So for 16 hours, you fast, and then you eat within an 8-hour window. I think that's the most common one. There are tons of other ones. I've seen people go a couple of days without eating. It vastly varies. There are people who eat one meal a day and then fast for the rest of it. There are different windows in which you could fast and different windows in which you could eat.

And like I mentioned a little bit ago, it's definitely been praised for its weight loss benefits. For people with insulin sensitivity issues, it improves that. And it has factors of adding longevity for, like I said, those pockets of people it would specifically benefit, if they have things like health complications or they really do need to lose tons of weight, X, Y and Z, right?

But when it comes to building muscle, which we're going to dive into in a couple of seconds with muscle building 101, there are several reasons why this isn't the most effective approach if that's your goal. In order to build muscle, think about what your body needs in three buckets. There's enough adequate protein intake. There's giving your body consistent energy, meaning the calories that you consume in a day. And the next bucket is proper timing for nutrient delivery.

I'm going to say that one more time. In the goal of building muscle, your body needs three buckets on a daily basis in order for you to optimize muscle growth and get to the goal that you want. Bucket number one is adequate protein intake on a daily basis. Bucket number two is giving your body consistent energy, meaning you are eating a consistent number of calories in a day. And the last bucket is delivering the protein and the calories with proper timing so the nutrient delivery can do its job.

As I've mentioned in tons and tons of episodes of this podcast, when you lift weights, you create small tears in your muscles. I always say when you work out in the gym, you're not building muscle, you're breaking it down, because you're creating these small micro tears in the muscle fibers. And your body needs bucket number one, the protein, and bucket number two, the calories, to repair and rebuild those muscles in the 24, 48, 72 hours following that workout session, which is how you grow stronger and how you get more toned, aka building more muscle mass.

This is where my brain also goes: some of you guys don't want to get bulky, and I've heard that's a common concern. It's not going to happen. Getting bulky is if you're lifting heavy, heavy, heavy weight and eating in a surplus. That's the only way you're going to get bulky. Plus, it comes down to the types of hormones that we have in our body. When people think of bulky, they think of men, because men get big and they get big fast. We don't have the same hormonal profile that men do. So I just want to debunk that myth really quick, and I also have an entire episode on that as well.

Another thing that happens is muscle protein synthesis, which is the process of how muscle gets built in our body. It's the most effective when your body has enough amino acids from protein throughout the day. And studies have specifically shown the benefit of spacing out your protein intake evenly across multiple meals. People call it protein dosing; I've heard that.

The way that I break it down, and I've broken it down in a couple of episodes, and the way that I coach women and our coaches coach women, is first and foremost we see how much protein they're eating in a day. And we know that's the thing they're lacking on the most. So we'll have a goal of getting to 100 grams of protein, because a large amount of women are eating maybe 60 or 70 grams, and maybe even less, once we actually bring awareness to how much they're eating in a day, which we do by tracking for seven days.

So if they're eating 60, our goal would eventually be to get them to their body weight in protein. But that's very overwhelming for somebody that's only eating 60 grams of protein, and it can also cause a little bit of digestive disruption. So the goal is meeting it halfway: all right, we're going to hit 100 grams of protein for the next two or three weeks to allow your body to adapt and adjust.

Then, on a daily basis, you space it out evenly in multiple meals. Let's say there are four or five meals you have in a day, just for easy math. That's 20 or 25 grams in each meal, right? And it sounds overwhelming, and I can only say this from personal experience, because you don't yet know where to get the protein from, or you haven't yet meal prepped your meals, or you haven't yet weighed things out to see that a chicken breast with 20 or 25 grams is about three ounces of chicken, which is the palm of your hand. Once you do those things, you bring more awareness and you go, ah, it's not actually this overwhelming. This is actually a small amount of protein.

But having that four or five times, evenly throughout the day in multiple meals, helps. Studies have shown that spacing out your protein intake, rather than cramming it into one or two large meals, which is what intermittent fasting does, leads to better muscle growth. And that's where I believe, in my personal opinion, intermittent fasting can become problematic, because by limiting your daily eating window, you might struggle to get enough protein or enough calories throughout the day to support optimum muscle repair and growth.

Knowing what I know about having multiple meals in a day and spacing them out, and I've talked about this in previous podcasts, it doesn't necessarily have to be multiple meals. It can be three meals a day. But you have to ensure that you're getting the right amount of calories and the right amount of protein for yourself in those three meals. And from what I know, that's going to be a little bit harder if you're eating 2,000 calories in a day and you have 150 grams of protein to hit. That's going to be harder than having four meals a day, right? Because you can space it out a little bit more.

I don't have the quick math on 2,000 calories and 150 grams of protein, but you're trying to cram a decent amount of protein and calories into those three meals. It becomes overwhelming. You're going to feel full. It's going to take longer to digest. All the things. And if you think about just one meal where you have to eat 2,000 calories, the only way you'd be able to get a decent amount of protein is having ribeyes all the time, because they have like 100 grams of protein in just one ribeye steak. And I'm like, well, if you don't eat meat, you can just spiral, and you can see how hard it could be to try and do that.

Again, that's when your ultimate goal is muscle growth. If it's not muscle growth, try this protocol. But I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast want to build more muscle and want to be more toned. They want to have the figure that they're proud of and confident in, and you have to put in the work to get that. So that's why I think, and I'm going to dive into a couple more reasons, intermittent fasting falls short when it comes to building more muscle, and exactly why it does. I'm going to break it down with more of a science-y approach in a few minutes.

But broadly speaking, muscle 101: your body needs those three buckets. It needs protein intake. It needs consistent energy from calories. And it needs proper timing for nutrient delivery to help repair and rebuild those muscles. It needs muscle protein synthesis in order to build the muscle. And when you're giving your body protein spaced out evenly throughout the day, rather than cramming it into one or two meals, that leads to more of the muscle growth you want to see, more of the recovery you want to have and more of the results you want to accomplish. So that's a little bit about muscle 101.

So, ladies, are you feeling frustrated with body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, WarriorBabe is here for you. At WarriorBabe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results, and results that last. Look, don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply.

All right, let's get back to the show. Let's dive even deeper into exactly why intermittent fasting falls short when it comes to building muscle.

One, we talked a little about how it limits the time to eat enough calories. Building muscle requires you to eat calories, and specifically to eat in a little bit of a surplus when you're trying to build more muscle. You can build muscle at maintenance. You can also build it while you're losing fat. But you won't build as much as you can when you're eating in a little bit of a surplus. It does require a calorie surplus, and that's where you eat more calories than you burn.

With intermittent fasting protocols, especially that 16:8 ratio, you're squeezing all of your meals into a smaller window. And if you're trying to get more toned or see the results that you want to see, this can make it extremely difficult to consume the amount of calories that you need in just eight hours. I just want to drill that home. When you're building muscle, calories are the most important thing to be giving your body, not fewer calories.

I know that a lot of women listening to this have been told for so long that you need to exercise more and eat less. Or when it comes to food, you've been told that you have to eat less in order to see the results that you want. And that's not the case when you're trying to become more toned, when you're trying to build more muscle. I say it like that because in order to be toned, you have to build more muscle, but you also have to decrease the body fat around that muscle so you can see the results you want with your body composition.

In order to do that, you have to give yourself the calories necessary. And that's calories like 1,500, 1,800, depending on you as an individual and specifically what your body requires. It's so individual; nobody eats the same thing from human to human. But you need to give your body those calories in order to build the muscle, to become toned, and for all of the things to happen internally for you to decrease the body fat as well.

And you can eat more and lose body fat. I just want you to know you can do that. I know some of you are like, yeah, yeah, I know that. But there are also some of you listening to this who are really struggling with that concept. You can trust me. We've coached over 19,000 women inside of our program, and I know that's one of the thought processes you're having. But trust me now, believe me later: you can eat more and you can decrease body fat when you're doing strength training protocols and focusing on building muscle. Muscle is an active tissue, so it's going to help you burn more calories as well, even when you're not working out. I'm sitting here recording this podcast and I'm burning calories, because I have a decent amount of muscle mass on my body.

Anyway, that was number one. It limits the time to eat enough calories.

The second thing is that protein distribution is suboptimal. As I mentioned earlier, muscle protein synthesis is maximized when protein intake is spread across multiple meals. With a fasting window, you're forced to condense your meals, which can result in large protein intakes at once but long periods without any. That isn't ideal for keeping your body in an anabolic state, where it can continuously focus on building muscle, repairing, growing and getting more toned.

The third thing is that fasted workouts may hurt your performance. And look, in this space, five people are going to say work out fasted, another 10 people are going to say don't work out fasted, and another 20 people are going to say you can do both. In my personal opinion, and I have tried this, I've worked out fasted. I even reattempted to test it again earlier this year. Many people practicing intermittent fasting work out in a fasted state, especially if they train in the morning before their eating window starts.

Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, WarriorBabe is here for you. At WarriorBabe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results, and results that last. Look, don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply.

All right, let's get back to the show. Fasted cardio is beneficial for fat loss. Fasted strength training isn't ideal for muscle building. Your body relies on glycogen, that stored energy from carbohydrates, to fuel you for your workouts. Training in a fasted state means that you're likely running low on glycogen. And people are like, oh, well, you're going to tap into your body fat to do this. Your body needs carbs. Your muscles need carbs. Your brain needs carbs to fuel every aspect of not only getting through your workouts, but also the whole repair process for building the muscle.

So when you're training in a fasted state, you're likely running low on glycogen right when you need it, because it's the stored energy from carbohydrates that fuels you for your workouts. That will lead to you not performing as well as you could if you had more energy. You're going to have less energy to push hard in your strength training workouts, where you need to push hard in order to create the metabolic stress on the muscle, so the muscle breaks down and you can repair it afterwards with a meal and build it back up.

So in my personal opinion, and trust me, I've done this, I've tested it on myself, I've done my own experiment. I've even had women I still coach to this day test it out. And I'll just speak personally from my experience: I don't feel good when I work out in a fasted state. I feel tired. I feel lethargic. The weight that I was able to push last week feels like it's 100 pounds heavier. And I feel flat, meaning when I look in the mirror, I don't see how full my body and my muscles can get from the pump, the blood flowing to my muscles, because internally there aren't the right things helping to push that blood to my muscles.

And I fatigue really quickly. Within 30 minutes I'm pretty much gassed, maybe even less. Sometimes it can happen within the first couple of sets. It varies. So for me personally, fasted workouts, in my opinion, hurt performance and ultimately are somewhat counterproductive to building muscle and getting the result that you want.

The last thing, to dive a little bit deeper on this topic, is that when you're doing intermittent fasting, it can reduce your recovery. Meaning after a workout, your body needs fuel. I think we've established that, right? It needs protein. It needs carbohydrates to recover, to repair and to build the muscle. So if you've just finished an intense weightlifting session but your fasting window is still in effect, you're missing that crucial post-workout nutrition window.

Let's say you're working out at 6 a.m. but you can't start eating until 11 a.m. Let's say your workout's an hour, so seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. That's four hours. That's four hours where you are delaying recovery and you are hindering muscle growth. I even said in another podcast that you can maybe go an hour, an hour and a half max, but I won't even push it that far, because there is a certain amount of time within which you should fuel your body. It shouldn't go four hours. So reduced recovery is another place where I feel this concept and protocol falls short when it comes to building muscle.

And not to mention, there's another important factor to consider, which I touched on a little bit, and that's insulin. Insulin often gets a bad rep, but it actually plays a key role in muscle growth, and I don't think people talk about it enough. When you eat carbs, your body releases insulin, which helps to shuttle nutrients like glucose and amino acids from protein into your muscle cells for repair and for growth. During intermittent fasting, insulin levels stay low for extended periods of time, which is great for fat burning, but not so great for muscle building.

To optimize muscle growth, to get you more toned, to get the results that you want, it's super important to have slightly elevated insulin levels throughout the day, especially after workouts, to ensure that your muscles are getting the nutrients they need. It shuttles everything into the muscle cell so that it can grow.

Essentially, if I'm trying to break it down so you're able to digest what I just said: you need the fuel, you need the carbs to release insulin. And when that happens, it helps shuttle nutrients like glucose and amino acids from protein throughout your body and into the muscle cells so that they can grow. That's the most important thing to take away from what I just said, because it's extremely important to optimize you getting the results that you want. It's also not talked about, and it probably should be talked about a little bit more. So I just want you to quickly know that role.

But equally important are the things I talked about: intermittent fasting limits your time to eat enough calories. It's suboptimal for protein distribution throughout the day. A lot of people work out fasted when they do IF, and in my personal opinion, that hurts performance. And it reduces your recovery, which is so important. You break down the muscle in the gym, you build the muscle afterwards. So you have to give your body what it needs in order to start all of the processes within your body, the things you can't see, to start building what you want to see on the outside.

So here are a couple of takeaways for you to walk away from this podcast with and be like, okay, Nikkiey, everything makes sense. Maybe you're doing IF, but you have a goal and you recognize it's kind of counterproductive, so you're going to start switching over and eating the way you should be eating, and you don't necessarily know how to do that yet.

Number one, prioritize your protein timing. As I said, if you're doing 100 grams of protein in a day, working up to your body weight, aim to get 20 to 30 grams of protein in four or five meals throughout the day. That keeps a steady stream of amino acids in your system, and that supports muscle protein synthesis. If you are serious about the goal of building more muscle, spreading out your protein intake is important.

Eat calories. You've got to eat calories. You don't necessarily need to be in a surplus, as I touched on, but you have to eat enough calories in order to reach the goal of looking more toned. You need to focus on nutrient-dense foods that provide a balance of enough protein, fats and carbs, eating the right types of foods and getting enough of them.

And if you're not already tracking, the best thing I could offer you here, so you can bring awareness to how much you are or aren't eating, is to download MyFitnessPal, the free version, and just start scanning the barcodes on all your food. It has a database of tons and tons of foods. Even if you don't have a barcode to scan, you can search in the search bar, find what you're eating and plug it in for a rough estimate. It's not perfect.

Pre- and post-workout nutrition. This is important. You have to fuel your body before and after. I've talked about this in a recent podcast, definitely within the last 10 that I've recorded, so I'd recommend listening to that, because it'll give you more than me talking about it for two minutes. It's a 30-minute episode on pre- and post-workout nutrition.

And the last one is don't skip meals. Instead of compressing your meals into a short eating window, spread your meals out over the course of the day. And some of you are like, oh, I'm busy, I have to work, I'm always on my feet, I don't have time to eat during the day. Dude, I worked in the emergency room for four years, and this was in my prime of bodybuilding, when I had to eat every three hours. The emergency room says enough. It's chaotic. You're moving around. Sometimes you don't even know what's about to come through the door, and you've got to jump on it. I would run into the break room for five minutes to eat my food. That's it. Because the meals are so small. It's not like you're downing a pizza or a cheeseburger and feeling weighted afterwards. You just give your body what it needs and you go back out to work.

And you can make that happen. If I can make that happen, you can make that happen. So don't skip your meals. That keeps your body in the anabolic state I was touching on, and it allows for better digestion, for nutrient absorption, for the nutrients to get delivered where they need to go, and for energy distribution as well. You're going to feel better once you have a meal.

So all that to say, intermittent fasting is a very popular topic in the fitness space. Don't get me wrong, like I said at the beginning, it serves a purpose in specific aspects for people. But if your ultimate goal is to build muscle, I don't believe it's the best protocol for you to be following. Because like I said, if you've been fasting and putting in hard work in the gym trying to build muscle, but you're not seeing the results, this is my personal opinion on why: intermittent fasting isn't the best protocol to get you the results that you want to see when it comes to building muscle.

All right, y'all. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. And I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

Hey, guys, real quick. If you're interested in taking your body to the next level, losing body fat, building more muscle and feeling more confident, do it alongside one of our 30-plus professional coaches. Work one-on-one with her to eliminate all of the guesswork you may have. All you need to do is the work she tells you to do to get to those goals of yours. To learn more, click the link below this podcast and apply to our VIP program right now. Thank you.