One of the healthiest ways to fire up your metabolism, burn fat, and enhance your health is to combine a ketogenic diet with regular exercise. Keto and exercise have a significant synergistic effect. When correctly combined, many people find that their health journey takes a dramatic turn for the better. These findings are now supported by scientific studies.
Can You Exercise On A Ketogenic Diet?
Research suggests that regular exercise brings added benefits to a ketogenic diet performed for weight loss. A combination of resistance exercise and low-to-moderate intensity aerobic exercises, such as jogging or cycling, is probably the best exercise regimen for weight loss on the keto diet. Aerobic exercise should be performed with caution until the body gets accustomed to ketosis; ‘overdoing’ aerobic exercise when on a ketogenic diet, may cause you to feel faint from low blood sugar – so get started gradually. Should you feel tired or dizzy at any time, stop exercising, drink a glass of water, and continue when you’ve recovered.
Best Exercise With Keto
When losing weight, you want to lose fat, not muscle. A keto diet is ideal for this, as it helps to mobilise fat and when correctly designed, will include sufficient protein to protect muscle. But muscle must be stimulated, otherwise, it can still be lost. The best exercise to stimulate muscle is resistance exercise, which has been shown to be very effective for maintaining muscle mass. And muscle burns calories 24 hours a day, even when you’re not exercising, keeping up your basal metabolic rate. Aerobic exercise also helps to mobilise fat – getting the fat out of the fat cells and burning it for energy.
So, you should aim to perform moderate-intensity resistance exercise 3-5 times per week to make sure you preserve muscle and keep up your basal metabolic rate. And then, to help to burn fat, you should gradually bring in low-to-moderate intensity cardio exercise, such as jogging, cycling, or swimming, which keeps your heart rate at about 70% of your maximum heart rate.
It is important to avoid pre-workout and recovery sports drinks whilst on a ketogenic diet, as these are typically high in carbs, which could knock you out of ketosis.
How The Ketogenic Diet Could Affect Your Workout
Sugar is stored in all the cells of the body and is immediately available to burn for energy. Fat, on the other hand, is stored in the fat cells and has to be carried through the bloodstream to the cells where it is going to be used. So, aerobic exercise, with its sudden bursts of energetic movement, needs sugar for immediate action.
On a keto diet, your body’s store of sugars is almost empty. This means that when you do aerobic exercise, which relies on sugar, you are going to find that you run out of energy rather quickly. As you get used to ketosis, the body’s fat-burning systems start to function better, and you will find you can comfortably start doing low-to-moderate intensity aerobic exercise. This can take several weeks, so go gently at first.
Resistance exercise, in contrast, doesn’t need such an immediate supply of energy. These slower—though not necessarily less strenuous—exercises can use fat as their source of energy, so you should be using these exercises from Day 1.
PronoKal creates a detailed, personalised keto diet exercise plan for you, with guidance from a personal trainer along the way. Your trainer will be aware of your unique objectives and will assist you in achieving them through customised sessions. Get in touch today to find out more.
