Concept2 Forum

Hey, anybody here know the pros and cons of rowing fasted? or does anyone here row fasted? by fasted I mean in the morning before any food is eaten.

I'm asking because for some of my rows its easier to row first thing in the morning (after a glass of water and maybe some coffee) and get it out the way first thing than to eat food and have to wait a while before I can exercise. I find if I'm doing a steady state row I need to leave about an hour and hard intervals or going for a PB at a distance I need to leave 2-3 hours or it impacts my rowing.

Cant see any noticeable difference in times between when I row like this and when I've eaten, but some times I do feel starving hungry by the end of the session and wonder if I could push a bit harder if I'd eaten......I've heard its good for losing weight to exercise fasted but I'm more about gaining fitness than losing weight right now.

I do it fairly often with low-moderate intensity rows- personally for me the pros outweigh the cons

Athletes don't fast before exercise. But then there are all manner of gradations of fasting. Usually at a minimum some sort energy bar or the like would be eaten before exercise.

zacclowes wrote:Hey, anybody here know the pros and cons of rowing fasted? or does anyone here row fasted? by fasted I mean in the morning before any food is eaten.

I'm asking because for some of my rows its easier to row first thing in the morning (after a glass of water and maybe some coffee) and get it out the way first thing than to eat food and have to wait a while before I can exercise. I find if I'm doing a steady state row I need to leave about an hour and hard intervals or going for a PB at a distance I need to leave 2-3 hours or it impacts my rowing.

Cant see any noticeable difference in times between when I row like this and when I've eaten, but some times I do feel starving hungry by the end of the session and wonder if I could push a bit harder if I'd eaten......I've heard its good for losing weight to exercise fasted but I'm more about gaining fitness than losing weight right now.

No problem, I have raced even fasted with a 2 hour drive before, you need to eaten enough the day before.

All my rows with the exception of TTs are fasted in the morning. I do intermittent fasting so most days don't touch a drop of food until the afternoon. Some days (once every 2 weeks or so) I don't eat at all! Even time trials I generally eat a big lunch around 1 or 2pm and don't do my race piece until 6 or 7.

Like Shawn, I find the benefits outweigh any negatives.

Every training I've done in the past 10 years has been 'fasted'. That includes around 2 million meters on the erg in the past two years.
I stop eating around 17-18h and exercise around 7-8h the next morning. I didn't even know it was a thing.
I don't like doing anything with food in my belly.

Three mornings a week I row at a YMCA gym. My wife and I wake at 6AM, feed the dogs, grab water bottles, USB sticks and chest belts and out the door by 6:45. She doesn't eat or make coffee. Sometimes I make coffee but don't drink more than a half cup. At the gym and on a treadmill or rower by 7:00. We eat breakfast after gym but are we fasted?

I don't think we are. Most of the googled definitions of fasting agree that fasting involves a "voluntary" omission of meals. But we don't omit a normally-scheduled meal because the other 4 days of the week we don't eat before 7:30 at the earliest and more often than not some time after 8:00. We don't voluntarily omit to take food; rather we are habituated to the normal and necessary cessation of intake that accompanies 6 to 8 hrs. uninterrupted sleep for folks who don't stand watches at sea, work in hospitals, do split shifts, or take catnaps and prowl at nite.

if there are benefits that accrue on an empty stomach I'll take them but I'm not working all that hard at emptying it and leaving it empty for 1 or 2 hrs. after waking. An hour of work isn't that depleting. If I were going off to ride a 5-6hr. hilly century, I'd be stoking at dawn. That wouldn't be voluntary or optional either.

On the other hand, it isn't called break fast for nothing. Most people customarily enjoy (or rush thru and carb load) one meal per day after a period when they aren't doing much of anything at all--might as well call it breaksleep. Eating at 13:00 and starting a HIT session at 18:00 is called leaving time for digestion.

I do most of my training first thing in the morning before eating. This is around 7am. Reason being I don't like training with a meal in my stomach. The most I can take is a banana, a light type of bar or a sugared drink.

However I do tend to eat fairly late at night (9-10pm) and I make sure I eat enough carbs in general. If I go too low on the carbs the night before, my performance does suffer. For long endurance pieces (was doing some 90m stuff a while back) I would make sure to have something right before I trained, usually like a sports drink or banana, so that it would be digested a half hour in and replenishing glycogen for the 2nd half of the workout.

For a while I was trying to lose weight, so I was trying that whole "Intermittent Fasting" thing by not eating until lunch at 2pm. Combined with rowing, fasted, at 7am and then not eating anything after for several hours. I lost weight but found that just having lunch was not enough for my body to replenish enough glycogen for an effective evening workout.

These days I find I like rowing in the morning fasted or with just a light carb source beforehand and having a protein-rich breakfast right afterwards. It is still possible to lose weight (or not) without intentionally fasting every day, and it is in my opinion much better for recovery to eat soon after training.

I row and exercise mid-mornings every day, and I NEVER eat anything prior. I usually have a couple of cups of cafe Bustelo with honey and 1/2&1/2. I eat my heaviest meal early afternoon Spanish style and always a light supper and never later than 1900. Works for me...still wearing my Navy issue Pea coat from 1965.

As I tried to say, fasting is a relative concept. In general, fasting is not good for endurance sports. Food = calories = ability to generate energy. Of course, much food in stomach is counterproductive. Some sports are more tolerant of eating before. Cycling and rowing are fairly tolerant; running is not. Toast and coffee before a road race should do it. But maybe you check out what Tour de France riders consume before a day's stage. Without lots of calories before riding they would be face down on the pavement in about 3 hours. Since the reference point for rowing is elite OTW rowers, what are their eating habits?

Cyclingman1 wrote:As I tried to say, fasting is a relative concept. In general, fasting is not good for endurance sports. Food = calories = ability to generate energy. Of course, much food in stomach is counterproductive. Some sports are more tolerant of eating before. Cycling and rowing are fairly tolerant; running is not. Toast and coffee before a road race should do it. But maybe you check out what Tour de France riders consume before a day's stage. Without lots of calories before riding they would be face down on the pavement in about 3 hours. Since the reference point for rowing is elite OTW rowers, what are their eating habits?

The question was about training very early, not about eating not enough in general.
Toprowers train massive volumes and are relative big, so no doubt they eat a lot. Training 2/3 hours a day would proberly use 3/4000 cal alone, so that needs to be eaten op top of a basic needed amount.

For us, training maybe 30/60 min max per training day, its not very difficult to eat enough to fill this.

Tour the france takes 4,5,6 hours per stage, not much of a comparison. Most riders lose weight during the tour. Not seldom getting in trouble in the last week due to to much weightloss.

Have started rowing over the summer at 19:30 GMT so thats 8:30am local time.

I cannot eat 2 to 3 hours before anything intensive and even at the slow morning pace I maybe have a few sips of water first but no food, have always found that this works better for me as any food in my stomach feels like a real handicap. I thought this was pretty normal, no way you would try to go hard out on a full stomach.

sounds like its not much of a problem at all then
my rows atm are only short 30-40 minutes-ish but I'm working on build them up, i guess the answer is to continue as I'm doing and not worry till I'm rowing longer than an hour.

cyclingman1 i used to road cycle quite a bit and raced for a season (won a race, local TT and got some points in other races ), didn't ever do races that were long enough to need more than a bottle or a gel but 3-4 hour training rides and sometimes long sportives taught me about the importance of eating during long exercise. the tdf guys never seem to stop eating haha

Interesting thread, thanks for the various perspective. Very useful information for me.

I've noticed that if I row while I still have food in my stomach, especially low GI food like I tend to eat, my blood glucose levels seem less stable. Just now for example I rowed about 1.5 hours after eating some beans and chicken and I started to feel a bit 'shaky' around 5K. So, I just cut the distance work there, took 3 minute break and did a set of intervals. The intervals were no problem and I had a productive session, clearly they run on a different metabolic system.

My best 10K time are invariably in the morning after either a small amount of high GI food (like a single granola bar or banana) or 'fasted' i.e. having not eaten since the night before. At first it struck me as weird that I was so much more stable on the distance pieces in the morning, but it seems I'm not the only one who finds this helpful. Whew!!

I did a lot of time trials and a couple of races in the first 4 or 5 months of last year and most of them were fairly early in the morning and done without any any food, especially those I did as a light weight. On the few occasions when I did have something, it was only a banana or a glass of orange juice at least an hour before the event. The longest of these were the 2 60' minute TTs and those were not long enough to use up the energy stored from the previous night's dinner.