Diet is king but exercise is not to be underestimated in its contribution.
I have found major success with fasted cardio. That is to say, timing when the exercise occurs relative to your most recent meal seems to dramatically modulate the effects.
If I do an hour of cardio within 12 hours of eating, it feels "normal". Nothing to write home about. If I do the same routine but I've been fasting for longer than 12 hours, I can feel my mitochondria light on fire after about 40 minutes in. The first few times I did this I stopped because I thought I was going to die. It felt super weird to me. Like a very strong parasympathetic response. You do get used to it though. I think this is one thing that can actually affect certain fixed points in your metabolism. If you go from zero to 80% VO2 max and keep it there for an hour on an empty stomach, that energy has to come from somewhere. And it has to happen pretty damn quickly. I think the time pressure for energy delivery under adverse conditions is what makes this so impactful.
> I can feel my mitochondria light on fire
What is this supposed to mean?
BroScience.
What point are you even trying to make? The energy comes from your glycogen reserves and then from fat, both in a fasted vs non-fasted state. And if calories are equated at the end of the day, you just made your workout way harder because you didn't fuel properly.
> you just made your workout way harder because you didn't fuel properly.
Not necessarily. I feel way better when I work out in the morning without any food first. I think it's because my body doesn't have to spend any energy digesting food while exercising. This is true whether I'm doing a weightlifting session or a few hour trail run
It is because this subject is the closest to modern voodoo of all modern activities.
I rolled the bones myself and it seemed like it worked, therefor X.
No, I rolled the bones myself and it seemed like it worked, therefor Y.
We would first have to define what we are even talking about by "energy" and "workout" to have any kind of real conversation.
The popular mind on this subject is also not even up to the point we sequenced the genome. What people think of as truth is mostly repeating things from the 1990s.I rolled the bones myself and it seemed like it worked.
Well I think it largely depends on how well trained you are because metabolic flexibility is something that gets trained. Without it your body has a hard time burning fats for fuel and so you'll feel terrible if you don't have an immediate glycogen store. When you are well trained you can do things like literally run several marathons while fasted which is documented. So whether it "works" or not will just depend largely on if your body has adapted to it