Why Intermittent Fasting Isn’t Ideal for Building Muscle

00:00Real 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 for you to do is if you could 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. So meaning after your workout, your body needs fuel.

00:32It 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 like crucial post-workout nutrition window. Like 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?

01:03Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikki Stott, co-founder of Warrior Babe. And 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, Nikki 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.

01:35We 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.

02:06But 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 specifically 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 and working in the gym and doing all the things that you think are right to try and put on muscle,

02:36but you're not seeing the results that you want, then what I'm going to do inside this podcast today is break down the science behind it and give you guys better alternatives to making 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, that you're doing that and you're doing the right things to do that. Because there's nothing more that I want for you guys, obviously, to succeed at the goals that you want to get after, but there's so many things that are out there that are kind of conflicting or counterproductive to the ultimate goal of building muscle.

03:12Everyone kind of – these tactics more so are focusing on weight loss, which is awesome. For those of you that are needing to do that goal, but what I look at it as is like, okay, go after fat loss, which I have shared with you guys in episodes of the podcast on 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 to your body. And then be able to fuel your body in the way that you need to.

03:44That's going to help to decrease the body fat that you want to see. So all that being said, I just want to talk about intermittent fasting before I even dive into it too. It's like it's 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. And that is why IF is good for a vast amount of people. But if your ultimate goal, why I want to talk about it on the podcast today is to build muscle.

04:18If that is your ultimate goal, then I don't believe personally that intermittent fasting is the best protocol to get you to that goal. So let's get into it. If you guys don't know what intermittent fasting is, if you're unfamiliar with it, it's an eating pattern that cycles between periods of eating and fasting. And I think the most popular one that's out there includes the protocol of 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of protocol or 8 hours of an 8-hour window where you eat.

04:50So for 16 hours, you fast and then you eat within an 8-hour window. I think that's like the most common one. There's tons of other ones. There's like, you know, you can even go a couple days without eating that I've seen. You can, it just, it vastly varies. There's like where people eat one meal a day and then they fast for the rest of it. Like IF is, there's different windows of which you could do a fast and different windows you could do of eating. And like I mentioned a little bit ago, it's definitely been praised for its benefits of weight loss.

05:22And like also people that have insulin sensitivity, it improves that. And it has factors of adding longevity to, like I said, like those pockets of people that this would specifically benefit them if they have things like health complications. They really do need to lose tons of weight, like 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 kind of like muscle building 101,

05:56there's several reasons why this isn't the most effective approach if that's your goal, like I said. So in order to build muscle, what your body needs is, think about it in like three buckets. There's having enough adequate protein intake. There's giving your body consistent energy, meaning like the calories that you consume in a day. And then the next bucket is proper timing for nutrient delivery. So I'm going to say that one more time.

06:27So think about your body in the way, in the goal of you building muscle, it needs three buckets on a daily basis in order for you to optimize muscle growth and get to that goal that you want to. The bucket number one is adequate protein intake on a daily basis. The bucket number two is you are giving your body consistent energy, meaning that you are eating a consistent number of calories in a day. And the last bucket is delivering the protein and the calories in a proper timing for the nutrient delivery to do its job.

07:00So as I mentioned in tons and tons of episodes of this podcast is when you lift weights, you create these small tears in your muscles. So I always say like 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 the bucket number one of protein, the bucket number two of the calories to repair and to rebuild those muscles in the following 24, 48, 72 hours after that exercise, after that workout session,

07:37which is how you grow stronger and how you get more toned, aka building more muscle mass. And this is where my brain also goes and like, you know, 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 because we don't have like a bulky is like if you're lifting heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy weight and eating in a surplus, that's the only way that you're going to get bulky.

08:08And plus like comes down to the types of hormones that we have in our body that like when people think of bulky, they think of men because men get big and they get big fast. You know, we don't have the same hormonal profile that men do. So I just want to kind of like debunk that myth really quick. And I also have an entire episode on that too as well. But another thing that happens too is muscle protein synthesis, which is the process of what of how muscle gets built in our body. And it's the most effective when your body has enough amino acids from protein throughout the day.

08:40And studies too have specifically shown that spacing out your protein intake evenly in multiple meals, like people call it protein dosing. I've heard that. But when you do space out your protein throughout the day and like even multiple, even grams in the multiple meals, like the way that I break it down, have broken down a couple episodes. And the way that I coach women and our coaches coach women is like, obviously, we see first and foremost how much protein they're eating in a day.

09:13And we know that that's the thing that they're lacking on the most. So we'll have a goal of getting to like 100 grams of protein because vastly a large amount of women are eating maybe 60, 70 grams once they actually, and maybe even less once we actually bring awareness to how much they are eating in a day, which we do that by tracking for like seven days. But anyway, so like if they're eating 60, okay, we're not going to, our goal would 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 also can cause a little bit of digestive disruption.

09:47So the goal of meeting it halfway is like, all right, we're going to hit 100 grams of protein for the next like two, three weeks. So allow your body to adapt, to adjust. And then with that on a daily basis, with spacing it out evenly in multiple meals is you have, let's say that there's four meals that you have in a day just for easy math or five. I mean, 20 grams or 25 grams, right? In each meal. And it sounds overwhelming more so because, and I can only say this from personal experience, you don't yet know how, you don't know yet how to, or you don't know yet where to get the protein from.

10:30Um, and, or you haven't yet like meal prepped your meals. And then yet you haven't yet like weighed out to see like a chicken breast with 20 grams, 25 grams is like three ounces of chicken, which is like the palm of your hand. And then once you have and do those things, you bring more awareness to be like, ah, it's not this overwhelming actually. And actually this is a small amount of protein, but having that five, four or five times multiple, uh, you know, evenly throughout the day, multiple meals helps like science, like it's been proven studies have shown that spacing out your protein intake rather than cramming it, which is what intermittent fasting does.

11:11Rather than cramming it into one or two large meals, spacing it out leads to better muscle growth. And that's where I believe that my personal opinion, intermittent fasting can become problematic because by you limiting your daily eating window, you might struggle to get enough of that protein or enough of those calories throughout the day to support optimum muscle repair and growth. I can't think like, if I knowing what I know with like having multiple meals in a day and spacing them out, or even like I've talked about this in previous podcasts, like it doesn't have to necessarily be the multiple meals, like it can be the three meals a day.

11:53But like you have to ensure that you're getting the right amount of calories for yourself 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 like 2000 calories in a day and you have 150 grams of protein that you need to hit. That's going to be a little bit harder than having four meals a day, right? Because you can space it out a little bit more. Like you're trying to cram, I don't know quick math of 2000 calories and 150 grams of protein, but you're trying to cram a decent amount of protein and calories into those three meals.

12:24It's become overwhelming. You're going to feel full. You're going to take longer to digest. All the things. So when like even just like you're thinking about one meal, we have to eat 2000 calories. And like the only way that you'd be able to get an indecent amount of protein is like having ribeyes all of the time because they have like 100 to 100 grams of protein in just one ribeye in a steak. And I'm like, well, if you don't eat meat, you know, that you can just spiral and you can see how hard it could be to try and do that.

12:54Again, when your ultimate goal is for muscle growth. Because if it's not muscle growth and have that trying this protocol, you know, but I think a lot of people listen to this podcast want to build more muscle and they want to be more toned. They want to have like the figure that they want, you know, that they feel that they're proud of and they're confident in and like, you know, that puts in the, you have to put in the work to get that. So, yeah, this is where I, that's why I think, and I'm going to dive into a couple more where I believe intermittent fasting like falls short when it comes to building more muscle.

13:27Like, like why exactly it does. And I'm going to break it down to a little bit more of like a science-y approach in a few minutes. But bold, like broadly speaking, like 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 to repair and to rebuild those muscles. And it needs to do the protein muscle synthesis in order to build the muscle. And when you're giving your body the protein space out evenly throughout the day, rather than cramming it into one or two meals, that leads to more of the muscle growth that you want to see and the more of the recovery that you want to have and more of the results that you want to accomplish.

14:14So, yeah, that's a little bit about muscles 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, Warrior Babe is here for you. At Warrior Babe, 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.

14:47Imagine 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 forward slash apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com forward slash apply. All right, let's get back to the show. Let's dive into exactly why intermittent fasting kind of falls short even deeper when it comes to building muscle.

15:18One, we talked about a little how it like limits time to eat enough calories. When you're building muscle, building muscle requires you to eat calories and eating specifically in a little bit more of a surplus when you're trying to build more muscle. You can build more muscle maintenance. You can also build it while you're losing fat, but you won't build it as much as you can build it when you're eating in a little bit more of a surplus. It does require calorie surplus. And that's where you eat more calories than you burn.

15:51With intermittent fasting, with protocols, especially like that 16 to 8, you know, ratio, you're squeezing all of your meals into a smaller window. And for people who are trying, you trying to get more toned or trying to 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. And like, I just want to drill that home. Like the calories, when you're building muscle, calories are the most important thing to be giving your body, not less calories.

16:23And I know that a lot of women that are listening to this, it's for so long, you've been told that you need to like exercise more and eat less. Or when it does come 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. And I say that 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.

16:55In order to do that, you have to give yourself the calories necessary. And it's calories like 1800, 1500, 1800, depending on you as an individual and, you know, specifically what your body requires. And it's so individual, nobody eats the same thing on a daily, you know, human, human, human. But you need to give your body those calories in order to build that, to become toned. In order for all of the things to happen internally for you to decrease the body fat too as well. And you can eat more and lose body fat.

17:28Like I just want that to also know you can do that. I know there's some of you like, yeah, yeah, I know that. But then there's also some of you guys listening to this are like, oh, I'm so struggling with that concept. You can trust me. I've co we've coached over 19,000 women inside of our program. And I know that's one of your thought processes of what you're thinking. 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 when you're focusing on building muscle, building muscle is an active tissue. So it's going to help you burn more calories too as well.

17:58Even when you're not working out. I'm sitting here, I'm burning calories. I'm recording this podcast, I'm burning calories because I have a decent amount of muscle mass on my body. Anyway, that was number one. So it eliminates the time to eat enough calories. The second thing is the protein distribution is suboptimal. As I mentioned earlier, like muscle protein synthesis is maximized when protein intake is spread across multiple meals. In a fasting window, you're focused on your folk, you're forced to condensed to condense your meals, which can result in like large protein intakes at once, but long periods without any.

18:36And that's, that isn't ideal for keeping your body in an anabolic state where it can continuously focusing on building muscle and repairing and growing and getting more toned. The third thing is, is that fasted workouts may hurt your performance. And look, this is something in this space that five people are going to say to work out fasted. And then another 10 people are going to say don't work out fasted. Another 20 people are going to say you can do both.

19:08In my personal opinion, and I have tried this, I've done this. I've worked out fasted. I even reattempted to test this again earlier this year. Many people practicing intermittent fasting work out fasted. They're in a fasted state, especially if they train in the morning, especially if you train in the morning before that eating window starts. Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with body changes you're experiencing during menopause?

19:46It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, Warrior Babe is here for you. At Warrior Babe, 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.

20:17Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com forward slash apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com forward slash 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 the carbohydrates, to fuel you for your workouts.

20:51Training 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 to fuel the whole repair process for building the muscle. So when you're training in a fasted state, that means that you're likely running low on glycogen when you need the glycogen, because it's stored energy from the carbohydrates to fuel you for your workouts.

21:27And that will lead you to not performing as well as you could when you had more energy. And 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 in order for the muscle to break down so you can repair it afterwards with the meal and build it back up. So in my personal opinion, and trust me, I've done this. I've tested on myself. I've done my own experiment.

21:59I even had women do this, like the ones that I still coach to this day, testing it out. And it's always like I don't – it comes back, 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. I feel like the weight that I once was able to push last week feels like it's 100 pounds heavier. And I feel flat, meaning like when I look in the mirror, like I don't see like how full my body and my muscles can get from the pump, the blood flow flowing to my muscles because I don't – there's not internally the right amount – the right things helping to push that blood to my muscle.

22:41And I fatigue out really quick. Like within 30 minutes, I'm pretty much like gassed, maybe even less. Sometimes it could happen within the first couple of sets. It varies. It's different. So me personally, I – fasted workouts, in my opinion, hurt performance and ultimately are somewhat counterproductive to building muscle and getting the result that you want.

23:11The last thing to dive a little bit deeper on this topic is it – when you're doing intermittent fasting, it can reduce your recovery time. So meaning after a workout, your body needs fuel. We 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 like crucial post-workout nutrition window.

23:47Like let's say you're working out at 6 a.m. but you can't start eating until 11 a.m. That's three hours. Let's say your workout's an hour. That's – or seven, eight, nine, ten. That's four hours. That's four hours where you are delaying recovery and you are hindering muscle growth. Like cool. Like I even said in another podcast, I was like you can, you know, like you can maybe go max an hour, an hour and a half, but I won't even push it that far because there is a certain amount of time where you should fuel your body.

24:23Like within it – like it doesn't – it shouldn't go outside of – it shouldn't go four hours. So reducing recovery with intermittent fasting is another thing that I feel like is where if this concept and protocol falls short when it comes to building muscle. And then not to mention too, like there's another important factor to consider, which I touched on a little bit, which is insulin. And insulin often gets a bad rep because it actually plays a key role in muscle growth, but I don't think a lot of people talk about it and talk enough about it.

25:02When you eat carbs, your body releases insulin, which helps to shuttle nutrients like glucose and amino acids and 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 do the results that you want, it's so super important to have slightly elevated insulin levels throughout the day, especially after workouts, to ensure that your muscles are getting the nutrients that they need.

25:33It shuttles, it shuttles everything in to the muscle cell so that it can grow. Essentially, if I'm trying to break it down and like you guys are able to digest what I just said, you need the fuel, you need the carbs to release insulin. And then it, when that does, it helps to shuttle nutrients throughout your body and throughout your everywhere, like glucose and amino acids and protein into the muscle cells so that it can grow.

26:08And that's the most important thing to take away from what I just said there. Because that is extremely important to optimize you getting the results that you want. But it's also not talked about and probably should be talked about a little bit more. But I want you to just know quickly that role. But more importantly too, or more equally important are the things I talked about in terms of how intermittent fasting limits your time to eat enough calories. It's suboptimal for protein distribution throughout the day.

26:40A lot of people work out faster when they do IF. In my personal opinion, it hurts performance. It also hurts offering a reduced recovery period for you, 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 our body, things you can't see, to get to start building what you want to see on the outside. So a couple of takeaways for you guys to be able to walk away from this podcast and be like, okay, Nikki, everything makes sense.

27:14I'm going to start switching over and maybe you're doing IF, but you have a goal and you recognize it's kind of productive. So you're going to start eating the way you should be eating and you don't necessarily know how to do that yet. Number one, prioritize your protein timing. So like as I said, if you're doing 100 grams of protein in a day, working up to your body weight, aim to get like 20, 30 grams of protein every two in like four or five meals throughout the day. Because it keeps a steady stream of amino acids in your system and that supports muscle protein synthesis.

27:47And if you are serious about that goal of building more muscle, spreading out your protein intake is important. Eat, eat calories. You got to eat calories. You don't necessarily need to be as suppressed as I touched on, but you have to eat enough calories in order for you to get the goal of looking more toned. Um, so you need to focus on nutrient dense foods that, that provide like a balance of getting enough protein, fats, and carbs and eating and eating the right types of foods and getting enough of them.

28:19And so if you're not already tracking, like the best thing that I could offer you here is so you can bring awareness how much you are eating or how much you're not eating is just download my fitness pal, the free version, and just start barcodes, scanning all your food. It has a database of tons and tons and tons of food. So like, even if you don't have a barcode scanner, you kind of like have to just plug it in. Um, you can search in the search bar and you can find what you're eating and you can just plug it in for rough estimate. That's not the perfect. Um, post pre and post workout nutrition.

28:50This is important. You have to fill your body before and after. I've talked about this in a recent podcast. If you guys, it's definitely within the last 10 that I've recorded. So I would recommend listening to that because I will give you more than just me talking about for two minutes. So I'll give you a 30 minute episode on pre and post workout nutrition. And the last one is don't skip meals. Uh, instead of compressing your meals into a short eating window, just spread out your meals over the course of the day. And some of you guys are like, Oh, I'm busy. I have to work.

29:21Like I'm always on my feet or like, I don't have time to eat during the day. Dude, I worked in the emergency room for four years, five years, four years. And this was in my prime of bodybuilding where I had to eat every three hours. And the emergency room should say enough. It's chaotic. You're moving around. Sometimes I don't even know what's about to come through the door. Right. And I got to jump on it. I would run into the meal break room five minutes, five minutes to eat my food.

29:52That's it. Because the meals are so small. It's not like you're huffing down a piece of pizza or cheeseburger. And like you just feel like weighted afterwards. You just got to 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 an antibiotic state that I was touching on and allows for better digestion. It allows for nutrient absorption, for the nutrients to get delivered where it needs to, and for energy distribution too as well. Like you're going to feel better once you have a meal.

30:24So all that, guys, to say that's my like that's intermittent fasting is just it's a very popular topic in the fitness space. Don't get me wrong. Like I said, the beginning is serves a purpose in specific aspects for people. But if your ultimate goal is to build muscle, I don't believe it is the best protocol for you to be following. Because like I said, like if you've been fasting and you're putting hard work in the gym, trying to build muscle, but you're not seeing the results, that's, this is my personal opinion.

30:56Why? Why you're not seeing results. Because intermittent fasting isn't the best protocol to get you those types of results that you want to see when it comes to building muscle. So 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, lose body fat, build more muscle, feel more confident, do it alongside one of our 30 plus professional coaches. Work one-on-one with her to eliminate all of the guesswork that you may have.

31:29And all you need to do is just do the work that she tells you to do to get to those goals of yours. And to learn more, click the link below this podcast and apply to our VIP program right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.