Q&A: How Intermittent Fasting Effects Building Muscle, And More!

TRANSCRIPT

What’s up, you guys? Nikkiey here with WarriorBabe and welcome to another viewer weekly Q and A. I’m stoked to be here. I’m loving these weekly Q and As and I know that you guys are too as well with the feedback that I’m receiving from the videos in the comment section. Before we do dive into it, you guys know the drill. We’re taken four questions I’ve received from an earlier live Q and A that I do every single Tuesday at six PM eastern standard time over on Facebook at facebook.com/warriorbabenikkiey and I’m gonna tell you those questions and I’m gonna answer them here right now with you guys today. Before we dive into it, I just ask that you guys smash that Like button, hit the Subscribe channel because every single week we’re dropping these weekly Q and As and they are filled with new questions every single time and who knows, one of these questions could help you gain some clarity that you need for your journey achieving the results that you want with building muscle, changing your body composition, decreasing some body fat, just looking overall amazing. So let’s dive into it. Question number one. “Is intermittent fasting good for you in building muscle?” First of all, if I had a penny for every single time I got asked this question, I’d have a lot of money but seriously, you guys, I get asked this question a lot so I wanna be able to provide some very important clarity for you all if you are looking to build muscle because intermittent fasting is not a good strategy. It is a tool that has deemed a lot of traction in the fitness space but it’s not a tool that’s gonna help you with overall composition changes. Majority of people eat within that window if they’re doing intermittent fasting. Within that window falls at like 11 o’clock to like seven PM so 11 in the morning until like seven PM and a lot of people work out in the morning time and those people who work out in the morning time are doing themselves a disservice by not fueling their body before they go and work out. Your muscle’s active tissue. If you’re not giving this active tissue energy where energy comes from nutrition then it’s not gonna do the whole process that it needs to do, break it down, build it, yada, yada, yada. Your body needs energy to perform this workout. Your body’s gonna go inward. It’s gonna look for that energy and the first spot that it’s gonna go and look for it is in your muscle stores. So it’s gonna tap into it, take the energy from the muscle, give you that energy to perform your workout and if you just understood the entire process, it is completely counterproductive to the whole building up of the muscle that you want to have which is ultimately going to change your body composition and the same time that is ultimately gonna get you toned. Okay, so intermittent fasting is not good for building muscle. If you wanna just lose weight, if you don’t care about having and preserving the muscle in your body and you just wanna lose it, fine, have at intermittent fasting, have at keto, have at all of those fad diets that are out there because their ultimate goal is just for you to lose weight. What I love to talk about is losing fat which is preserving your lean muscle the same time as decreasing the body fat around it and at that point, you gotta make sure you’re fueling your body, you gotta make sure you’re fueling your muscles, you gotta make sure that you are doing everything that is in alignment with the process of building them and that my friends, intermittent fasting is not one of them. Question number two. “I need clarity on how long to stay in a build because a year seems like a long time.” Well, my friends, building muscle takes a long time. It’s not this overnight process, this pop your body into a microwave and out 30 seconds later comes a toned body. The second that you guys accept the fact that building muscle takes time and that your journey could be a journey of 12 months, 18 months, two years. Once you accept that and rope your mentality around the reality of what building muscle takes, your journey is going to become so much more enjoyable, so much more fun and you’re not constantly relying on this expectation of I need to see results in this X amount of time or I need to see results in three months. My results didn’t come overnight. My results didn’t come in six months. My results didn’t come in a year. My results came at five years of constantly working at changing my body composition, going through multiple different phases, cutting, to maintenance, to building and back on through and at five years, I can say that’s the year that I finally was super happy and proud of where my body was at. I’m now on year seven. I’m still actively working on it. It’s a never ending process. It’s a lifestyle. Get rid of the timelines that you guys have and get obsessed with the long-term game of what actually is required of you to build muscle. Question number three. “In your programs, what is the typical timeline spent for a build and then leaning” or what other people deem it as like cutting or fat loss or whatever? So a build phase and a leaning phase. Inside of WarriorBabe which if you guys don’t know anything about WarriorBabe or the programs that we offer, check out the link in the description below. So inside of our program, we talk about all of these different phases. We talk about fat loss, we talk about maintenance, we talk about building, we talk about how to adjust it throughout all of those courses and all those phases. It totally depends on where you’re coming into a build at. If you are somebody who needs to build that lean muscle that’s gonna change your body composition, you need to spend a little bit more time in a build. If you do need to do that, six months minimal is where I would recommend you to start out at and so much so as to a year and so much more than that. Maybe two years depending on where you’re coming in at. If you’re someone like me and you’ve got some decent muscle mass to you then you don’t need to spend that much time up in a build. Preferably, I spent majority of my time in a maintenance. I don’t really go into build anymore. I don’t need to build any more lean muscle but if you do need to build lean muscle then you need to spend time up in the build phase and you need to spend a decent amount of time up in the build phase. As you get older too as well, 40, 50, 60 years old, your builds are going to look a little bit longer because it takes a little bit more time for you to build muscle. Going into a cutting or fat loss phase, it entirely matters on how consistent you are throughout your fat loss or cutting phase. If you are somebody who lacks consistency and is inconsistent majority of time, well guess what? The results that you’re seeking are gonna take longer to accomplish but if you’re relatively consistent and you’re showing up majority of the time then you could look at a fat loss phase or a cutting phase being 12 weeks, three months, anywhere to five months but it all depends on your level of consistency throughout. And then the last question we got, question number four, “what should you eat before a workout, specifically a five AM workout?” So I love this question because first of all, I wanna speak to the women who are afraid to eat or don’t eat before a workout like I spoke to in the intermittent fasting side of things. If you are afraid or you don’t like to eat before you work out, again, you’re doing your goals a disservice. It’s completely counterproductive to the results that you want to accomplish and you may be that individual that’s like, “well, if I eat before a workout, I feel so sluggish and I feel so tired.” Yes, that is probably what you are going to feel like when you first do incorporate a meal in before your workout because you’ve never done that before and your body’s like, holy cow, what’s going on, you’re feeding me this, I’m not used to it, I feel all types of weird but if you consistently keep eating before your workout for two weeks, your body’s going to adapt to that meal and you’re gonna notice a huge difference in your energy and your strength and your overall performance in your workouts. So if you’re just starting out with eating before your workout, keep going, see it through because in a two week adaption period, your body is gonna totally love it. Okay, so what should you eat before you work out? For any of you guys that are the morning workout goers, you need something fast. You need something that’s gonna immediately hit your system and you’re gonna have that immediate energy to go on and crush your workout. For you guys, I recommend always a protein. No matter what, you want a protein source. whether that’s a protein shake or some egg whites is always a good go-to and then you also want a fast acting carbohydrate and what I mean by fast acting carbohydrate is more of those simple carbs. They have more sugar in them. They immediately give you that burst of energy to spike your insulin stores, give you the burst of energy and you’re able to go and perform your workout and within a 30 minute window because they’re immediately shuttling into your body and into your muscles and giving you the energy that you need to perform that lift. For a carb source that is a fast acting carbohydrate, fruit is great, rice cakes are great, white rice is great. Anything again that is more of a simple makeup in the carbohydrate family. All right, you guys, well, that answers all four of my questions that I wanted to bring it to our viewer Q and A this week. I hope you guys got tons of value and tons of insight and hey, maybe this was a question that you needed to hear today that’s gonna help change your mindset and puts you on the right path to the goals that you want to accomplish of building that muscle and changing your body composition. If you guys wanna learn more about nutrition and workouts that’s specific for your individual needs, head over to wp.warriorbabe.com, check out our Resources page. There’s tons of valuable information there on that Resource page and you can learn tons of information about macros and workouts. So before you guys head out, please make sure you guys subscribe to this channel. Every single week, we’re dropping this viewer Q and A and who knows? Maybe it’s gonna be a question that you need to hear. All right, guys, I’ll see you guys next time.