Fasting and Muscle Gain - Is Muscle-Building Possible on a Fasting Diet?

The advantages of fasting diets are well-documented for fat loss and I have dealt with this in several other articles. But can it be used to build muscle? The answer is yes. Let's see how this can be done.

Firstly, it is important to remember how muscle is built. Whatever you might read on the internet, muscle gain is a matter of progressive overload, nutrition and recovery.

Progressive overload means hitting the weights hard, regularly and trying to add iron to the bar as often as possible. Any reasonable hypertrophy plan will work as long as you are putting the effort in.

Likewise recovery is not overly complicated. Get enough sleep, decrease stress as much as possible and keep your energy for training.

Which leaves us with nutrition. At first glance fasting goes against the simple notion of excess in order to build muscle. However, the most crucial element with food is the concept of nutrient timing. The aim here is to have our feeding window to coincide with training.

The real beauty of this plan is that we can do what was previously considered impossible-build muscle and burn fat at the same time. Of course, both processes are not actually happening simultaneously. However, we can burn fat and cleanse out system during the fast and then get all our calories in around the workout. this makes your body much more likely to use this food to build muscle rather than be stocked as fat. This is particularly interesting for those who are prone to excess fat gain when trying to gain muscle.