If you are starting out on the ketogenic diet, you certainly anticipate reaping the numerous health advantages it proclaims to offer. The keto diet works by changing the body’s metabolism and inducing ketosis in the body. When your body is in ketosis, it
utilizes fat for its energy source rather than carbohydrates. Keto is hailed for its capacities like weight loss, increased energy, and blood sugar regulations.
However, whether the diet benefits your activity or not is a matter of debate. Among athletes, the ketogenic diet has gained popularity in recent years. There are certain things you need to keep in mind before starting exercising on keto:
Tough to Enhance Performance in the beginning
The majority of high-intensity exercises are fueled by the carbohydrates you consume. Usually, the body stores carbs as glycogen in the cells of the muscles. When you engage in any type of exercise that occasionally needs significant movement, such as strength training and even sports like soccer, your body immediately converts that muscle glycogen into fuel.
When you start doing keto, your body will burn fats for energy in the absence of carbohydrates. The keto diet tends to hinder performance during high-intensity workouts since that fat isn’t as quickly burned, making the process overall less efficient. Lower-intensity workouts will be less affected.
Keto will burn fats faster
While the keto diet may not be the ideal choice for activities that require abundant energy like weightlifting or spinning, it does appear to help people who prefer aerobic exercise, such as marathon running or cycling and burns more fat. At first, that approach could make you feel less motivated to exercise than usual. Many research findings imply that athletes have been successful in improving their capacity to utilize fat as a fuel source.
Keto Is Better for Maintaining Muscle Mass
The loss of bone density with age can be reduced and slowed down by preserving and building up muscle mass. Even when you aren’t exercising, having more muscle mass helps you burn more calories each day. A ketogenic diet is beneficial for you if you work out regularly to maintain your muscle mass. However, the decreased calorie and protein intake might make it harder for you to gain muscle mass.
You might not be Losing Fat
Although the ketogenic diet can be an efficient way to teach your body to use fat as fuel, it doesn’t guarantee that the body will burn all that fat when you exercise. Burning fat doesn’t always mean fat loss. When you follow the keto diet, you burn more fat but you also store more fat since more of your calories come from fats than they normally would. A calorie deficit is still required to experience weight loss, after all. To truly shed fat (and decrease weight), you still need to be burning more calories overall than what you consume.
Best exercises while doing keto:
For high-intensity activities like sprinting, boxing, lap swimming, carbs are the primary source of fuel. As a result of engaging in these, it may not be ideal for everyone when on a low-carb ketogenic diet. Instead, to maximize the benefits of the ketogenic diet, you can try combining a range of low intensity, steady state exercises into your training regimen. Yoga, riding, and just jogging are a few examples of low-intensity physical activities that are particularly advantageous on the ketogenic diet.
However, it is not that simple.
While you are free to incorporate any additional pastimes into your exercise regimen, the ketogenic diet makes some high-intensity exercises more challenging if your body is not keto-adapted, due to the lack of carb and protein intake. Entering ketosis significantly reduces glucose in the body, and that often triggers a series of changes in the body’s systems. You will most definitely need to alter your exercise routine or take into account a modified Keto diet, depending on your health and fitness objectives.
The most effective exercise regimen for weight loss usually incorporates a whole lot of low-moderate-high intensity levels. They are called the LISS and HIIT. Weight lifting builds dense, lean muscle mass, which gets reduced when calorie intake is restricted. Having more muscle mass makes it easier for you to exert more effort and move more quickly during aerobic exercise, which increases the amount of fat and calories you burn.
LISS is a particular type of aerobics that maximizes calories burned by pushing you just hard enough to boost your metabolism while keeping the intensity low enough to allow you to work out for at least 60 minutes.
On the other hand, you are required to do highly intensive cardio sessions when you decide to do HIIT, which is a form of anaerobics that works by raising the body’s metabolism rate. This allows you to burn more fat even when you’re not exercising thanks to regular HIIT workouts. You have to remember that due to the increase in muscle mass caused by weight training, there will be an increase in “scale weight” for a brief period. When this happens, it’s preferable to gauge your body’s progress in terms of inches and how well your clothes fit.
Maintain Peak Output while doing Keto:
Due to the lack of carbs and thereby glucose in the body, some people who follow a ketogenic diet find that high-intensity anaerobic exercise causes them to perform less efficiently.
Examples include:
- Lifting weights
- Sprinting/swimming for longer than ten seconds
- Lacrosse, or soccer
- Circuit training/ CrossFit
Due to their unique physical characteristics and heredity as well, they could experience the same kind of diminished performance in other workouts.
Their influence on fat burning and body composition however, remains unaffected by this decline in performance. By switching to a customized Keto diet, dieters who notice a decline in performance can return to their baseline performance levels.
Tips for Exercising while doing Keto
Set a daily calorie goal
Your body weight requirements and your desired body composition will determine your recommended calorie intake while on the ketogenic diet. Using a keto calculator is the simplest approach to determine how many calories you need to consume for the best effects. You don’t need to monitor calories to lose weight, even though eating less calories is vital for weight loss. In fact, many people who transition to a ketogenic diet have noticeable fat loss outcomes without tracking any calories. However, other keto dieters have discovered that calorie and macro tracking is quite beneficial, especially when they aren’t seeing the results they want.
Always listen to what your body needs
Being on a Keto diet for the first couple of weeks might be challenging as your body adjusts to burning fat as its main fuel source. Feel free to take it easy (take a week off from work, if you can) during this period of transition. It’s advisable to listen to your body if it tells you to temporarily lower the intensity of your workouts. Even during routines that don’t heavily rely on glycogen resources, you could experience decreased performance. Usually, this impact lasts only briefly. Your physical performance will return to normal once you’ve become keto-adapted.
Invest in a fitness device if you can
Consider getting a FitBit, or an Apple watch to keep a better check on your calorie intake and the amount you are burning. Also it will monitor the physical activity you are doing on a daily basis.
Eat as much protein as your diet allows
According to research, consuming more protein than 1.6g/kg of body weight per day doesn’t provide any significant benefits. body weight overall.
Eat around 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight if you want to gain muscle. Don’t go overboard keeping track, though. Just make sure to keep protein at around 25% of total calories, or 0.8-1.0 grams per kilogram of your body weight, to provide your muscles the building blocks they need to get stronger.
Rest and sleep well
Deep rest is necessary for your body to recuperate efficiently in between workouts. In order for your body to recuperate and grow the ideal amount of muscular tissue, it is important to take days off from training and to relax and get enough rest on those off days.
Hydrate!
To avoid electrolyte imbalances and dehydration while your body is on ketosis, it’s crucial to drink more water. When exercise is included, this importance is increased twofold.
Maintaining your electrolyte levels is essential when on the Keto diet, but it becomes much more vital when you combine it with exercise. By eating enough green leafy vegetables and adding pink Himalayan sea salt to your food and water, you can replenish your electrolyte levels. Alternatively, you can also take a good electrolyte supplement to replenish your fluid levels.
Summary;
It’s not a good idea to try an unfamiliar exercise routine during the first few weeks of a keto diet. Continue doing what you usually do. This is primarily due to the first reason, which is that most individuals don’t first feel fantastic on keto. When severe, this initial unpleasant phase—which typically passes within a few days to a couple of weeks—can be referred to as the “keto flu” due to its flu-like grogginess and stomach disturbances.
High-intensity exercises may be best avoided when you start the diet. To slowly profit from your workouts, you actually need to eat adequate fat otherwise, you risk losing out on all the advantages and having your performance decrease.
The versatility of the ketogenic diet is one of its most potent features. Keto can be easily changed for exercise-based performance, just as it can be easily modified for all diet preferences like vegans, herbivores, and people who are Halal or Kosher. According to studies, the state of ketosis itself offers potent fat-burning and weight-loss benefits. When combined with your preferred workout, it creates a potent mix that could aid in your long-term fitness and health goals.
The ketogenic diet can therefore be readily modified to retain performance levels found with carb consumption while giving all of the benefits of ketosis, despite the fact that it may receive a “bad rep” in athletic circles when it comes to performance.