What to eat before, during, and after exercise.
By eating a healthy, well-considered meal 1-2 hours before exercise, & another healthy, well-considered meal within 1-2 hours after exercise, most people can meet their workout nutrition needs without anything else.
In other words:
If you’re a healthy person who exercises regularly, you probably don’t need special workout nutrition strategies.
Fat loss or strength sport support-
Eat normally 1-2h prior
Water or EAA drink during
Eat normally 1-2h after
Remember:
• if you’re exercising for general health and fitness
• if your goals are more modest; and/or
• you don’t have unique physiological needs…
…then you probably don’t need any particular workout nutrition strategies.
Focus on:
• eating more minimally processed proteins, veggies, & quality carbs
• ensuring your portions are the right size, & in he right amounts, for you
• eating slowly, until satisfied.
For a lot of people, they often stress out about:
• when to eat their carbs;
• when to eat their fats; and
• what to supplements to take in and around their workouts…this can be distracting, even self-sabotaging.
For other people, nutrient timing actually gives them a framework for making good food decisions & controlling total intake. Of course, if that’s you, rock on with the nutrient timing! Just finish your macros at days end!
Pre-exercise nutrition needs
What and when you eat before exercise can make a big difference to your performance and recovery.
In the three hours before your workout, you’ll want to eat something that helps you:
• sustain energy;
• boost performance;
• hydrate;
• preserve muscle mass; and
• speed recovery.
Here are a few ways to ensure you’re meeting your requirements.
Protein before exercise
Eating some protein in the few hours before exercise:
• Can help you maintain or even increase your muscle size. That’s important for anyone who wants to improve health, body composition, or performance.
• Can reduce markers of muscle damage (myoglobin, creatine kinase, and myofibrillar protein degradation). Or at least prevent them from getting worse. (Carbohydrates or a placebo eaten before exercise don’t seem to do the same thing.) The less damage to your muscles, the faster you recover, and the better you adapt to your exercise over the long term.
• Floods your bloodstream with amino acids just when your body needs them most. This boosts your muscle-building capabilities. So not only are you preventing damage, you’re increasing muscle size.
Before you rush off to mix a protein shake: While protein before a workout is a great idea, speed of digestion doesn’t seem to matter much. So any protein source, eaten within a few hours of the workout session, will do the trick.
Carbs before exercise
Eating carbs before exercise:
• Fuels your training and helps with recovery. It’s a popular misconception that you only need carbs if you’re engaging in a long (more than two hour) bout of endurance exercise. In reality, carbs can also enhance shorter term (one hour) high-intensity training. So unless you’re just going for a quiet stroll, ensuring that you have some carbs in your system will improve high intensity performance.
• Preserves muscle and liver glycogen. This tells your brain that you are well fed, and helps increase muscle retention and growth.
• Stimulates the release of insulin. When combined with protein, this improves protein synthesis and prevents protein breakdown. Another reason why a mixed meal is a great idea. No sugary carb drinks required.
Fats before exercise:
• Don’t appear to improve nor diminish sport performance. And they don’t seem to fuel performance — that’s what carbs are for.
• Do help to slow digestion, which maintains blood glucose and insulin levels and keeps you on an even keel.
• Provide some vitamins & minerals, & they’re important in everyone’s diet.
Post-exercise nutrition needs
Now let’s take a look at post-exercise nutrition.
Post-workout nutrition can help you:
• recover;
• rehydrate;
• refuel;
• build muscle; and
• improve future performance.
Protein after exercise
Eating protein after exercise prevents protein breakdown and stimulates synthesis, leading to increased or maintained muscle tissue. So it’s a great strategy for better recovery, adaptation, and performance.
Want fast & convenient? Make an awesome post-workout Super Shake.
Want real food? Then make an awesome high-protein meal.
Any high quality complete PROTEIN should do the job, as long as you eat enough. That means about 40-60 grams for men (or 2 palms) & 20-30 grams for women (1 palm).
Carbs after exercise
Contrary to popular belief, it’s unnecessary to stuff yourself with refined carbohydrates and sugars to “spike” insulin and theoretically restore muscle and liver glycogen as rapidly as possible after your workout.
In fact, a blend of minimally processed whole food carbohydrates, along with some fruit (to better restore or maintain liver glycogen) is actually a better choice, because:
• it’s better tolerated;
• it restores glycogen equally over a 24-hour time period; and
• it might lead to better next-day performance.
Fats after exercise
Dogma has it that we should avoid fats after exercise because they slow the digestion and absorption of nutrients.
While this is true, in most cases, it’s also irrelevant. We’ve already seen that speed of digestion of protein & carbs is not necessarily as important as we once thought. The same with fats.
While you don’t have to rush in the door & straight to the fridge the minute you finish at the gym, you shouldn’t dawdle & poke around forever before eating. Failing to eat within a two-hour window following training can slow recovery.
But this is context dependent; what you ate before your workout influences things.
If your pre-training meal was a small one or you ate it several hours before training, then it’s probably more important for you to get that post-workout meal into your system pretty quickly. Probably within an hour.
If you trained in a fasted state (say, first thing in the morning before breakfast) then it’s also a good idea to chow down as soon after your workout as you can.
But if you ate a normal-sized mixed meal a couple of hours before training (or a small shake closer to training), then you have a full one to two hours after training to eat your post-workout meal and still maximize the benefits of workout nutrition.
So go ahead — spend an hour in the kitchen cooking up a feast.
0-2 hours after exercise
The approach to recover from training is the same as your preparation for a workout: have a mixed meal of real food.
Again, here’s how men might build it:
• 2 palms of protein;
• 2 fists of vegetables;
• 2 cupped handfuls of carbs;
• 2 thumbs of fats;
• low-calorie beverage like water.
And here’s how women might build it:
• 1 palm of protein;
• 1 fist of vegetables;
• 1 cupped handful of carbs;
• 1 thumb of fats;
• low-calorie beverage like water.
Sometimes after training you might not feel hungry. And that’s okay. If you don’t feel like eating, you can go with liquid nutrition.
For most of us, people without athletic competitions on the horizon, the best pre- and post-training meals will contain some combination of high quality protein, high quality carbohydrates, healthy fats, and some fruits and vegetables.
These whole foods provide an awesome blend of nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, fats, fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytonutrients that build muscle, supply energy, decrease inflammation, and boost recovery.
The conclusion in terms of timing, you have about one to two hours on both sides of your training to still get maximal benefit.
And, according to the most recent data, the total amount of protein and carbohydrate consumed over the course of the day is far more important to lean mass gain, fat loss, and performance improvements than any specific nutrient timing strategy.
So enjoy your workout.
And your meals!
~COACH B
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