The Intermittent Fasting of Classic Bodybuilders

The Truth About the Dietary Regimens of a Couple of Bodybuilding Legends!

     When you think of intermittent fasting, you don’t usually associate it with the classic bodybuilders of the past.  For the longest time, I certainly didn’t.  Turns out, however, that I was more than just a little bit wrong.

     I have written elsewhere that I think I can safely say, without much in the way of trepidation, that I was one of the first lifters I know of who tried intermittent fasting more than 25 years ago.  In fact, I first read about it in the late ‘90s, when Ori Hofmekler—who was actually, at the time, editor of Penthouse magazine of all things—published articles on his “Warrior Diet” in the online magazine T-Nation.  I didn’t refer to it as intermittent fasting—I don’t think that term had caught on yet—but simply told other lifters that I was going to try this (insanely sounding) Warrior Diet in order to lose enough weight to compete in the 165-pound class in powerlifting.  And the reason I write “insanely sounding” is because that’s just what my training partners told me it was: flat-out insane.  “Do that and you’ll lose every bit of damn muscle you got,” one of my partners, Bubba, told me.  Bubba was an overall-wearing, black Mississippian, wannabe World’s Strongest Man competitor, who stood about 6’5”, weighed more than 350 pounds, and worked part-time as a chef when he wasn’t hanging out at my house picking up heavy things.  The man liked to eat, no doubt, and he told me that even he would get scrawny on something such as that.  “You gon’ shrivel up,” is distinctly how he put it, I believe.

     I didn’t shrivel up.  In fact, I had abs—my first wife, who I was married to at the time, told me it was the only time I ever had an “eight-pack”—and I was still pretty damn strong, seeing as how I squatted 510 pounds, raw, at the meet I prepared for using the diet.  I weighed 163 pounds that day.  It kind of shocked me, to be honest, because of the kool-aid all of us had been drinking during the ‘80s and ‘90s.  And by “all of us,” I mean almost any man or woman who had ever taken up any bodybuilding or powerlifting training during those two decades.  Bubba, when he told me that I was going to lose all of the muscle and strength that I had worked so hard for from years of training, was simply saying the very thing that every single other bodybuilder or lifter would have told me.

     All during the ‘80s and ‘90s, in every single bodybuilding magazine that anyone ever picked up, you were told that you must eat 5 to 6 meals-per-day in order to build any sort of appreciable muscle mass.  You were also told that these meals should be spaced apart evenly throughout the day in order to constantly stay in an anabolic state—though, perhaps, anti-catabolic would have been the more scientifically correct term.  After all, or so we were told, that is exactly what every pro bodybuilder does, and that’s exactly what all the successful ones have ever done.

     But I should have known better.  There were successful bodybuilders who fasted all day, then ate one or two meals in the evening.

     Take Sergio Oliva, for instance.  During the height of his bodybuilding success, he would often fast all day long (while doing hard manual labor in a steel foundry), then go workout once his work day was completed.  Once the workout was over, he’d eat a large meal.  His favorite meal during this time was, believe it or not, Coca-Cola and crab legs.  He’d drink a lot of Coke, and eat pounds of crab legs to his heart’s delight.  Oh, and by the way, after dinner, he’d often take his wife out dancing for several hours.

     In the mid ‘80s, when Oliva returned to Mr. Olympia competition, he blamed his less-than-stellar look on the fact that he followed a nutritional coach who had him eating 5 to 6 meals-per-day on what had become the “standard” professional bodybuilding diet, a diet consisting of 60% carbs, 30% protein, and only 10% fat.  He said he should have eaten the way he always did previously, by fasting all day, then eating plenty of simple sugars and protein.  (For more on why this might not be the craziest idea after all, check out this “It Came from the ‘90s” post I did on the bodybuilder Roger Stewart, and his “wild and crazy” dietary regimen.)

     Then there’s Serge Nubret, most well-known to the average American bodybuilder for his part in the half-true, but mostly fictional, “documentary” Pumping Iron.  Nubret didn’t eat multiple meals per day, either.  He would, on most days, simply eat between 1 to 3 times over a few hours in the evening.  This was, of course, after doing one of his long, arduous, now-legendary workouts that would often last for 4 to 5 hours.  It was once reported that he ate 14 pounds of meat in one sitting.  His favorite meat, however, was apparently horse meat, and he would often eat up to 6 pounds of it per day.  (As a Texan, I must disapprove.  We love our horses, and only use them to herd together our favorite meat: beef!)

     Okay, what if you want to try intermittent fasting for building muscle?  Is this something I would recommend?  Well, honestly, that depends.  Here are some pointers that may help you decide:

• Don’t try intermittent fasting if you’re a “hardgainer.”  This is NOT the ultimate diet for mass-building.  Never will be.

• It’s probably also not a good diet for beginners.  Although there may not be the need for beginning bodybuilders (or lifters) to consume 6 meals evenly spaced apart throughout the day, I’d eat at least 3 large, substantial meals.  You need quite a bit of calories to pack on the muscle mass, and that’s hard to do so when you’re following an intermittent fasting approach.

• Which brings us to this point.  This approach can be good if you’re capable of eating a lot of calories, not to mention calories in the form of lean protein, over a few-hour window.  Often, when I fast, for instance, I simply can’t consume enough protein in one or two sittings to meet my protein requirement.  That was fine when I was powerlifting and trying to actually lose weight—and it’s fine now, when I’m doing it for longevity and general health.  But it’s not necessarily good if hypertrophy is your primary goal.  If you are capable of eating a lot of protein in one sitting after fasting all day, however, then you’re probably the best candidate for this approach.

• This kind of eating is really good if you’re after health in addition to just aesthetics.

• This approach is also great if you’re trying to get as lean as possible and are not worried about gaining any muscle.  I doubt that either Oliva or Nubret used this approach at the start of their careers, for instance, when they were trying to gain mass as fast as possible.

• I believe diet is, overall, fairly individual.  Despite internet influencers screaming at each other from their respective silos, there’s not a “one size fits all” approach.  Never has been.  Never will be.  Some bodybuilders will do well eating vegan.  Some keto.  Some will do best with the 6-meals-per-day method.  And, yes, others will do perfectly well emulating Nubret or Oliva.

     I hope you have found this short essay intriguing, especially if you hadn’t heard any of this information about our two physique legends before.  If anyone can think of some other old-time bodybuilders who used fasting as part of their aesthetic enhancement, please let us know in the comments section below.

SOURCES:

The information about our favorite horse-eating Frenchman comes from the article “Serge Nubret: How to Train Like the Bodybuilding Maverick” by James Edwards at bodybuilding.com.

The picture of Nubret in the title header comes from Wikimedia commons.