Training through Ramadan: a fighter's month

A large share of professional combat sport is competed by Muslim athletes, and the month lands wherever it lands in the calendar. Most of what is written about it is about willpower. Almost none of it is about the two openings in the day and what has to fit inside them.

Before any of it: whether an athlete fasts, and whether an exemption applies to him, is a question for him and for whoever advises him on his faith. It is not a question for a nutritionist and I do not answer it here.

Everything below is written for those who are fasting and have already made that decision.

The two windows

The daily intake of a fighter in training stays the same when the day changes shape; it has to arrive in two sittings instead of five or six, and that is a mechanical problem more than a dietary one.

Suhoor is the meal people get wrong most often, because it is eaten half asleep and treated as a formality. It is doing the work of breakfast, lunch and everything between. Protein and fat slow the whole thing down, carbohydrate that releases gradually rather than a bowl of something sweet, and as much fluid as the athlete can comfortably take.

Iftar is the one people overload. Breaking a fast with a very large meal in one go usually produces an athlete who feels heavy, sleeps badly and is no better fed for it. Opening with something light, then training, then eating properly afterwards, works better for most people, and it also solves where the session goes.

Where the training goes

There are three slots and they are not equal.

• After iftar. The best slot for anything hard: conditioning, heavy sparring, strength work at real intensity. Fed and hydrated, with the night ahead to recover.
• Late in the fast, close to sunset. Workable for technical and skill sessions, because the fluid deficit is at its largest and you can drink almost immediately afterwards.
• Middle of the day. The worst of the three, and the one most gyms default to because that is when the gym is open. A hard session here is followed by 6 or 7 hours with no fluid.

The single largest improvement available to most fighters in this month comes from persuading the coach to move one session, and it has nothing to do with food.

Sleep breaks before performance does

The research on fasting and physical performance is more reassuring than most athletes expect: when testing is done at sensible times, most measures hold up across the month. The exception is worth knowing, because it lines up with the scheduling point above. High-intensity and sprint work suffers most, and suffers most of all in the morning.

What does not hold up on its own is sleep.

The night is interrupted by suhoor, and evening prayers and eating push the whole schedule later. An athlete who was getting 8 hours can end up with five, taken in two pieces.

Training quality follows sleep down a week later, and by then people blame the fasting rather than the timetable.

Plan the sleep first, before the meals and before the sessions. An afternoon nap is not a luxury during this month, it is part of the plan, and in most camps it is the single easiest thing to arrange.

What the evidence actually shows

The honest position is less alarming than the reputation, and the detail matters more than the headline.

A systematic review with meta-analysis of intermittent fasting and exercise performance separates two things that get confused.

Those two are often discussed as if they were the same intervention. They are not, and the difference between them is the thing that makes Ramadan hard.

Time-restricted eating narrows the window for food. Ramadan narrows the window for food and fluid, and it moves both into the hours that used to be for sleeping.

The fasting is not the variable doing the damage on its own.

Strength and anaerobic capacity came through mostly unchanged in that analysis, and body composition typically improved. Which fits what coaches observe: fighters often come out of the month leaner, and the sharp work is not what suffers first.

The more recent reviews add a detail that concerns you directly. The decrements are more pronounced in team sports with long continuous efforts, and less pronounced in martial arts and endurance disciplines.

That places the work where the rest of this page already puts it: on the schedule and the night, not on the fast itself.

What happens to body weight

Most athletes lose some. Part of it is fluid that comes back, part is a genuine reduction in intake, and the split is not visible on a scale.

Say something plainly here, because the temptation is obvious and it is a mistake. This month is not a fat loss window and it should not be used as one. An athlete deliberately eating less inside an already compressed intake is heading for low energy availability, and the consequences of that are physiological rather than motivational: hormones, bone, immunity, and a recovery capacity that does not return quickly. The threshold and the arithmetic are in how many calories does a fighter need in camp, and you can run your own figure on the energy availability calculator.

If weight has to come down for a competition, that is a different problem with a different answer, and it is covered separately in making weight during Ramadan. The competition day itself is in competing while fasting, and the version for a coach with a whole squad is in running a squad through Ramadan.

What the month is good for

Coaches who handle it well tend to use it the same way. Volume comes down, technique comes up, and the month becomes the one part of the year when there is time to fix something specific rather than add to everything.

Nobody has ever built a career in these 30 days. Plenty of fighters have damaged one by treating them as ordinary and wondering in April why the sparring got worse.

The other fast that lands in a competitive year restricts the plate rather than the clock, and breaks something else entirely. Both are compared in fasting and combat sport.