Fasting and combat sport

Three different practices get called fasting, and they restrict three different things. One restricts when you eat, one restricts what you eat, and one restricts how much. A training plan that survives the first will not necessarily survive the second, and the third is a choice rather than an obligation.

Whether an athlete keeps a religious fast is a matter for that athlete and for whoever advises them on their faith. Nothing on this site touches that question.

What is written here is about training, weight and competition once the decision is made.

Ramadan: a scheduling problem

A month in which nothing, including water, is taken between first light and sunset. Everything has to fit into suhoor and iftar, and the training day has to be rebuilt around them.

The part that gets least attention and causes most damage is sleep, which is broken in two by the pre-dawn meal and pushed later by the evening. Hunger gets far more attention and does less harm.

Performance follows sleep down about a week afterwards, and by then people blame the fast.

• Training through Ramadan: the two windows, where the session goes, and what to expect from body weight.
• Making weight during Ramadan: a daytime weigh-in closes the recovery window before it opens.
• Competing while fasting: the day itself, including a tournament in daylight.
• Running a squad through Ramadan: for a coach or a federation, where it is a logistics problem first.

Great Lent: a composition problem

Seven weeks including Holy Week, restricting meat, dairy, eggs and, on most days, fish, along with oil on weekdays.

You may eat whenever you like, which removes every problem Ramadan creates and introduces a different one.

Protein is the casualty, and behind it energy, because oil leaving takes out a dense source at the same time.

Shellfish is permitted and is the single most useful thing available to an athlete keeping this fast.

• Training through Great Lent: what the fast removes, what replaces it, and the four things to watch across 7 weeks.

Intermittent fasting: the one that is optional

This one is different in kind, because nobody is asking it of you. It arrives as a fat loss method, usually as an eating window of 8 hours or so, and fighters try it because it sounds like discipline.

The honest assessment for a combat athlete in camp is that it rarely earns its place. Training twice a day requires fuel before and recovery after, and a narrow window forces one or both of those to happen at the wrong time. Whatever the method does for a sedentary person managing body weight, a fighter already has a tool for that: a gradual reduction through food across weeks, at roughly 0.5 to 1 percent of body mass a week, which is set out in how much you can actually lose in a week.

Out of camp, in a genuinely quiet block, it is a personal preference and does little harm. Inside a camp it competes with the sessions, and the sessions should win.

Where it lands differently

Two groups carry more risk from the same fast, and both are usually left out of the general advice.

Female athletes. The consequences of low energy availability appear sooner, the cycle is the earliest readout, and iron is often marginal before the period even starts. That has its own page.

Athletes under 18. Nothing on this site about restricting intake applies to a growing athlete, and combining a fasting period with a weight category is a conversation for a doctor rather than a coach.

The reasoning is in weight cutting under 18.

What decides how the period goes

In 10 years I have not seen a fast damage an athlete who planned it. I have seen plenty of athletes damaged by treating it as something to survive and start properly afterwards.

The month or the 7 weeks are a block in the year like any other, they are on the calendar long in advance, and everything that makes them work is decided before they begin.