Depletion Workouts Before Fasting
What are Depletion Workouts?
When it comes to fitness, we hear about glycogen depletion workouts and how they boost your body’s fat-burning potential. Depletion after workouts, your body uses carbohydrates as energy, which are stored as muscle glycogen. Glycogen depletion is a method which involves training hard to exhaust your body’s supply of muscle glycogen; which will in turn increase your sensitivity to insulin.
A depletion workout is the kind of workout that depletes the glycogen stores in your body. Glycogen is the storage form of glucose, and your body can tap into glycogen anytime it needs energy.
Depletion Workouts To Do Before Fasting
Are you working out for hours every week but don’t have any serious results that reflect your efforts?
It might be time to workout smarter instead of harder.
One of the most powerful ways to accomplish this in a scientifically approved manner is to implement depletion workouts in your regime.
What’s A Depletion Workout?
When we break our body down, it reacts by building itself back stronger than before. As long as you provide it with the necessary nutrients and time to recover, that is.
A depletion workout is designed to exhaust every single ounce of glycogen in your muscle cells. After depleting your glycogen, your body reacts by storing even more glycogen in your muscles than before. This makes it stronger, bigger, and usually more efficient at generating power.
This is super-compensation in action. The purpose of a depletion workout is to take advantage of this super-compensation. As long as you empty out your muscle cells, then replenish your body with clean, healthy new sources of fuel, it will rebuild itself stronger than before.
What’s The Science Behind Depletion Workouts?
Your body has a hormone called insulin that tells it where to store the energy you get from eating food. Insulin finds cells that are empty of energy and directs new fuel towards them.
A person that regularly uses up their fuel stores will be more insulin sensitive because your body needs to replenish your energy stores to keep you alive. Energy is what makes you capable of moving your hands up and down. Without it, you can’t lift a finger.
If you’re overweight and never exercise, you become insulin resistant, which comes with a host of problems that will eventually make you unhealthy.
If you regularly exhaust your muscles of fuel, your muscle cells then become sensitive to glycogen and use it more efficiently for energy.
Insulin sensitivity is linked with having more muscle mass, lower body fat levels, and overall better markers of health. Insulin resistance is linked with the opposite, and is usually the harbinger of a condition known as metabolic syndrome. This syndrome is a cluster of conditions that puts you at greater risk of dying from heart problems, diabetes, and stroke.
How Can I Implement Depletion Workouts In My Routine?
You want to exhaust your muscles cells through big, compound movements then continue with isolation exercises to eliminate every little bit of energy left in your muscles.
Work from the big muscles to the smaller muscles.
A sample depletion workout would be the following:
Upper body:
Incline Bench Press – 5×15
Shoulder Press – 5×15
Triceps Dips – 5×15
Rack-Pulls – 5×15
Seated Cable Row – 5×15
Lat Pull-Downs – 5×15
Biceps Curls & Triceps Push-downs – 5×20
Rear-Delt Flyes – 5×20
Cable Flyes – 5×20
Lower body:
Squats – 5×15
Rear Leg Deadlifts – 5×15
Hack Squats – 5×15
SS: Hamstring Curls & Leg Raises – 5x-20
Walking Lunges – 5×20
Calve Raises – 5×20
Leg Press – 5×20
After you finish your workout, make sure to eat healthy, clean food. A good rule of thumb is to eat 15 grams of carbs for every single kilo of body-weight.
