Fasted cardio is a widely used tool in the fitness industry today, mainly used by people aiming to lose fat/weight. For the unaware, fasted cardio is exactly what it sounds like, you wake up on a morning and before putting anything in your body that could be used as fuel, you go and do some cardio. Now the theory is that by not putting any fuel into your body, your body will be FORCED to liberate it’s fat stores and use this as fuel, which makes perfect sense, in theory. Most of the evidence to back this up comes from anecdotal evidence, when people go from no cardio whatsoever to including fasted cardio they lost weight so it MUST have been the fact that the cardio was done fasted, and if it was done in a fed state it would have made no difference to their weight right? This is also fuelled by bodybuilders who do fasted cardio and it must work because they do it and they’re shredded, it’s logic.

The million dollar question is does fasted cardio ‘enhance’ fat loss and is it superior to doing cardio in a fed state with regards to fat loss or weight loss? There is limited research in the area to be honest but there is one very good study by Schoenfeld et al (2014) which took 20 healthy females split them into 2 groups of 10 and had one group do fasted cardio and one group do fed cardio for 4 weeks and measured the results. It’s worth mentioning BOTH groups were on the SAME amount of calories and they were all in a calorie deficit. What this study showed was both groups lost weight and lost fat and there was no significant difference between the 2 groups at all.

So why is the belief that fasted cardio is so superior? Why is it people still do it and make out like if you cant do it fasted then theres no point doing it at all? Well when we stand back and apply some common sense, we can see that if a person wakes up at 6am, goes to the gym does 1 hour of cardio, showers, comes home and then eats at perhaps 7:30 or 8am they have effectively shortened their window of eating for the day instead of eating when they first woke up. This could potentially lead to lower total calories taken in over the day which of course would be better for losing fat/weight. But, and I know this from experience, training in the fasted state for some people can be very difficult as your energy levels are low, so the output of the session would be much lower than if you’d actually eaten before you did it, so why doesn’t a fed cardio session deliver better results if you can train harder?

So we have established that training in a fasted state has NO benefits above training in a fed state when calories are the same in both groups, so as always it boils down to personal preference. I am not saying fasted cardio doesn’t work at all absolutely not, Ido it (because I need to due to use of yohimbine but thats a topic for another article) and I also recommend some clients to still do it because everybody is different. Some people have no appetite whatsoever on a morning and would prefer to train fasted, they would actually train better because they wouldn’t feel sick from eating immediately before, so it wouldn’t be wise for that person to eat pre cardio would it! I will hold my hands up now and admit I have actually advised clients to train fasted touting the superior benefits of it as apposed to regular cardio, this was obviously before I had read the most up to date research and for anyone I had told that to I apologise.

So…..the choice is yours!