Training Myths- part 1- Breakfast and training

Myths about training

There are many old wives tales and myths out there about training. Many are proven wrong but still exist out there today over the next few weeks we are going to look at the best/ worst of them. Starting today with

1. Dont eat breakfast before training.  The idea here is to burn your existing calories off - last nights dinner- before adding anymore calories on. Well lets look at it. 

If you dont eat before training your body would slow down your metabolic rate and go into survival mode because of so many hours without food added to the fact that your now burning calories at an alarming rate. We are survival machines and our bodies will do anything to keep us alive. So the body believing it is starving would slow done the use of fat as an energy source. The very thing we are trying to achieve by training. 

The other reason is the grazing factor. All day we say eat every two or three hours to keep your metabolism moving and so as to not let your body go into fat storing mode.  Then this advise is thrown out the window at breakfast. Yes graze all day except for breakfast. Crazy. 

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it is the longest time without food sometimes 10 hours. This is not ideal but you cant keep the eat every two hour rule up when your asleep so we have to let it slide at this time. Its not the end of the world because while your asleep everything slows down including your metabolic rate. So its an acceptable fast. Thats why its called Breakfast.  But you must eat as soon as awake to get back on the fat burning system and off the fat storage train asap. Any advise to the con-try is wrong. 

Now i understand many people cant stomach alot of food before training and im not suggesting a 3 course meal just a piece of fruit to get the system rolling for the day and to pacify the brain that we are not starving its OK dont do anything crazy we will have more food soon -relax brain relax. 

We are trying to teach ourselves that we are not cavemen anymore looking for food all the time we dont need fat reserves for times of famine anymore we can eat anytime we want to. But we are very slow at evolving and the message needs alot of reassuring. So the last thing we want is to scare our bodies into starvation mode every time we train in the morning.