What's your take on doing a resistance workout early in the morning on a near-empty stomach? Depending on my schedule, I occasionally do a workout on Sunday morning shortly after the gym opens at 8 AM. I only have a double dose of foul-tasting green tea for a bit of caffeine and a banana to raise my blood sugar about an hour before the workout. I replenish carbs and protein very soon after the ~65-minute workout.
If you can workout w/o carbs it's ideal. The cAMP will shuttle FAs, etc. to the working groups. BCAAs (Xtend or similar) during the workout.
So you're saying not to even have a piece of fruit to raise the blood sugar an hour or so beforehand? I read somewhere that not elevating blood sugar after "fasting" since the evening before can compromise the intensity of a workout. I don't know this to be true, it's just something I read.
Blood sugar doesn't move around wildly like the price of Knight Capital Group stock. Rather, it is fairly stable. If I can workout fasted, I will (taking BCAA's beforehand makes sense). Problem is, I don't train early morning unless it is on the weekend. Fasting until a 4 or 5 PM workout doesn't work for me. I worked out at 1 PM yesterday fasted. It makes more sense to eat AFTER the workout, not before. That way, the nutrients will more actively work towards building/rebuilding muscle.
Yeah, the effort is to facilitate cAMP to shuttle to the working groups, specifically for fat mobilization; not allowing the fat to get re-esterified. If you're operating at maintenance it's not an issue.
Well, I don't really work out often on the weekend (mornings), although I'll be doing so a bit more frequently in the future. And it will not be my full-out workout, but rather one of the "leave a rep in the tank" kind of workouts. So I can do it on an empty stomach with a little caffeine. You and atticus seem to be big on BCAAs and I have no doubt that you guys know more about this stuff than I do. But is there really a difference whether I have BCAAs just before or during a workout, as compared to shortly after? Is the finessing really meaningful? Also, what is the additional benefit of buying premium or whatever BCAAs rather than just getting them from whey isolate, which is supposed to be very fast absorbing? Is the extra rapidity going to make that much of a difference, if any, to a middle-aged weekend warrior?
You could do BCAAs before AND after. 5-10 grams each time. Esp after. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8563679 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20044472
Whey consists of around 1/4 BCAAs. To get enough of the BCAAs to maximize muscle protein synthesis, one would have to consume 4 servings of whey. 1 serving of the whey protein in my pantry (Champion) is 130 calories (I use it on non-training days to keep appetite low). 130 cal X 4 = 520 cal. 520 cal would help in packing on the muscle, but too many calories will only end up adding fat. Which would go against the topic here--gaining muscle/losing fat.