Keto Diet + Strength Training For Women = Quick Fat Loss

Keto Diet + Strength Training For Women = Quick Fat Loss

When it comes to losing body fat, the gold standard is to combine exercise and nutrition. The goal is to eat in a way that allows you to train hard, preserve muscle mass, and achieve an energy deficit.

Several different exercise/diet combinations have proven effective but very low carb diets are generally avoided due to the fear that exercise performance will be compromised. Glucose is the body’s preferred energy source for high-intensity exercise and the theory goes that a keto diet that deprives the body of glucose in the form of dietary carbs will lead to reductions in training quality. There is also a fear that lack of carbs will compromise lean mass gains compared to higher carb diets.

In reality, the effect of low-carb keto diets on performance and body composition outcomes is not so cut and dried. For example, a study that used well-trained college-age men and put them on a keto diet or a traditional higher carb diet for 10 weeks found similar improvements in strength and power performance between the groups (1). Meanwhile, the keto diet group lost 2.2 kg of body fat and increased lean mass by 2.4 percent, whereas the higher carb group lost 1.5 kg of body fat and gained 4.4 percent lean mass.

The study authors concluded that the keto diet can be effectively used to reduce body fat and improve body composition without compromising performance. If mass gaining and hypertrophy are the primary goal, then a higher carb intake is recommended.

Other recent studies done on men show similar outcomes. But what about women?

A common belief is that keto diets are harder for women to follow due to women’s greater reliance on glucose at rest than men. In fact, recent studies show women can benefit to a similar degree from keto diets combined with anaerobic training protocols. For example, a recent study from Spain tested the effect of an 8-week keto diet or a traditional high-carb diet in conjunction with a strength training program on trained young women (2).

The dietary intake in each group was as follows:

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