C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Question: I compete in powerlifting.  I am interested in dropping down a weight class and want to try intermittent fasting to do so.  Will it be possible for me to keep my strength, or even get stronger, while fasting?  I can see how intermittent fasting would be good for getting in shape or losing weight easily, but I am concerned that it might not be good for strength athletes.  Can you really build mass and power while practicing intermittent fasting? (Question comes via email from Stuart)   Answer:  I have personally used fasting myself in order to drop a weight class for a powerlifting meet.   Over 20 years ago, when I competed regularly in powerlifting, I always lifted in the 181-pound class, but I wanted to get down to the 165-pound class as sort of an experiment to see how strong I would be at the reduced bodyweight.   To do that, I opted for the “Warrior Diet.”   This was in 2000.   No one knew anything about intermi...

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 w...

      There is, at least in certain places online, a lot of “chatter” about whether or not you should practice intermittent fasting.  Many folks who used to previously tout intermittent fasting as some sort of miracle of modern dieting have backtracked, and now a lot of those “influencers” (or whoever-the-heck they might be) recommend a more standard, traditional approach to dieting for building muscle and burning fat.  Recently, there was even that god-awful “study” from the American Heart Association that showed a “91% increased likelihood of death” from heart complications by following intermittent fasting.  Now, this isn’t the place to discuss the real problems and politics around that so-called study, it will suffice for now to point out that its metrics were just plain wrong.   And, of course, on the flip side of all of that you also have the defenders, rightly so, of the benefits of various forms of fasting.     ...