Breakfast is the first meal of the day and the meal that breaks a 7 or 8-hour fast. Hopefully, you’re getting that much sleep! However, there’s controversy about whether you should eat breakfast before exercise. One argument: If you’re trying to lose body fat, exercising in a fasted state boosts fat burning. However, this mainly applies to aerobic training. What about strength training? You might wonder how eating breakfast or skipping the morning meal affects your ability to build strength and muscle size.
According to one study, your best bet, if you’re trying to get stronger or build muscle, is to eat breakfast. For the study, researchers asked sixteen healthy men who trained regularly to dine on either a breakfast high in carbohydrates or no breakfast. Both groups got adequate water for hydration. Two hours afterward, they asked the men to do a brief strength training workout by doing four sets of two exercises to failure: bench press and barbell squats. The men used weights that corresponded to 90% of their 10-rep maximum.
The results? The men who hit the weights without eating breakfast were unable to complete as many repetitions of either exercise. Based on this, you might anticipate that if the men skipped breakfast consistently, they couldn’t perform as many repetitions before fatiguing. In turn, that could limit strength gains and muscle growth. Of course, making the last statement is theoretical since they didn’t follow the men over time to see how the two groups fared in terms of muscle and strength gains. However, based on this study, it does appear that not eating breakfast limits weight training performance, at least for these two exercises.
This isn’t the first study to show not eating breakfast impacts athletic performance. One small study of ten men found that those who skipped breakfast performed worse than those who enjoyed a first-morning meal even when they ate a larger lunch to compensate. In the study, the guys worked out between lunch and dinner after eating breakfast or not. The guys were allowed to eat a larger lunch to make up for the lack of breakfast. The type of exercise they did was cycling at 60% of their aerobic capacity for 30 minutes followed by a test where they cycled with near maximal effort, as a performance test.
The findings? The guys who didn’t eat breakfast performed worse on the performance test than those who ate breakfast, even when they ate a large lunch. The extra calories and carbohydrates they consumed at lunch didn’t make up for skipping breakfast.
Breakfast and Grip Strength
Grip strength is a good measure of general strength and some studies even link a stronger grip with a lower risk of dying early. When Japanese researchers measured grip strength, they found those who ate breakfast had a stronger grip. It’s hard to draw a solid conclusion from this study since another factor common to breakfast eaters may explain the greater grip strength of breakfast eaters but it’s an interesting observation.
Another study looked at handgrip strength among patients fasting before surgery. The study showed that patients who fasted overnight also experienced a drop in grip strength relative to those who got a liquid diet before surgery. The results were more pronounced in the elderly. This suggests that even consuming a smoothie or shake in the morning is better than not eating breakfast.
Why Is Breakfast Importance for Strength-Training Performance?
After an overnight fast is when your glycogen stores are the lowest. Without adequate muscle glycogen reserves, your strength-training performance may suffer, especially if you lift heavy weights. You might think that only carbohydrates are important, but make sure you’re getting a protein source too. One study found consuming more protein over the course of a day was linked with greater handgrip strength in women but not men. However, the quantity of protein was more important than consuming it in the morning or at a certain time of day. Some research also shows greater scores on muscle strength when people consume protein evenly across the day.
Studies also show that eating a breakfast high in protein reduces ghrelin, an appetite hormone that increases the munchies, more than a breakfast high in carbohydrates. So, choose the egg and steel-cut oat breakfast over a bagel and coffee. Even better, whip up an omelet with vegetables to get a headstart on your vegetable quota. If you’re pressed for time, a protein shake is a quick go-to breakfast that will prime your muscles for work and help them repair afterward.
The Bottom Line
The issue of whether not eating breakfast reduces strength and muscle hypertrophy gains is still unsettled. However, there is some evidence that you may not perform as well when you strength train if you skip the morning meal. There are other reasons to eat breakfast too. After an overnight fast, your brain will function best when you’re not forcing it to run on ketone bodies produced as an alternative fuel source during fasting. If your brain cells aren’t accustomed to running on ketones, you could experience fatigue, lightheadedness, dizziness, nausea, or irritability if you don’t eat soon after waking up. Some people adapt to using ketones as fuel but it takes a few weeks for this to happen. Why not give your muscle and brain cells the fuel they need in the morning? For that, a healthy breakfast works best. So, don’t skip the morning meal, but keep it healthy!
References:
- Bin Naharudin, MN, Yusof, A, Shaw, H, Stockton, M, Clayton, DJ, and James, LJ. Breakfast omission reduces subsequent resistance exercise performance. J Strength Cond Res 33(7): 1766–1772, 2019.
- com. “Skipping breakfast may harm athletic performance later in the day”
- “Breakfast consumption frequency is associated with grip strength in a population of healthy Japanese adults.”June 2014Nutrition Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases 24(6):648-655. DOI: 10.1016/j.numecd.2013.12.013.
- Einstein (Sao Paulo). 2019; 17(1): eAO4418. Published online 2018 Dec 28. doi: 10.31744/einstein_journal/2019AO4418. PMCID: PMC6333214.
- Am J Clin Nutr February 2006 Vol. 83 no. 2 211-220.
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