A lot of people skip breakfast in the morning, whether it be they want an extra ten minutes in bed or they want to reduce calorie intake. What effect does this have later in the day, when you finish work and go to the gym, training session or even participate in an evening match?
1. If you usually eat breakfast, and end up skipping it the day of a session, in the late afternoon/evening it has been found that your performance can drop by almost 5%.
2. This drop in performance includes if you skipped breakfast but then have a good lunch. Therefore don’t think you can catch up the missed breakfast by having a bigger lunch.
The message is – if you normally have breakfast, try not to skip it if you have a training session or match that evening. What needs looking at with this study is whether the same effects occur with habitual breakfast skippers.
More information
Clayton, D. J., Barutcu, A., Machin, C., Stensel, D. J., & James, L. J. (2015). Effect of Breakfast Omission on Energy Intake and Evening Exercise Performance. Medicine and science in sports and exercise.
Thanks to Livescience.co.uk for the picture