Post Workout Nutrition

Everyone’s always saying that you’re supposed to eat a healthy meal after working out, but what does that meal actually include? Well, first we have to understand that when it comes to training, you can’t dismiss the post-workout meal. If you look at the people working out in gyms today, you’ll see that most of them are just lifting weights without any real effect. They do the work in the gym maybe even perfectly, but since they don’t recognize the necessary nutrition to go with their training regimen, their results are miniscule.

However, you can fix this fairly easily, since exercising isn’t the issue most of the time. The issue is made up of people not paying any attention to what they’re supposed to eat, regardless if they’re bulking or trying to cut down. People spend all of their time focusing on what they’re supposed to train while dismissing what they’re supposed to eat – it simply doesn’t work like that! To be able to get to the bottom of this we need to look at what’s good and what’s bad regarding nutrition, including how to utilize it to get the best possible results in the gym.

Let’s begin.

1. What Is a Post-Workout Period?

Well, it’s the period right after you stop exercising, of course! Working out will help you with a number of tasks, including health and aesthetic reasons and benefits. Working out itself isn’t a positive thing for the body though, as it perceives it as a threat that weakens the body and the muscles through stress. Signs of this stress include needing extra sleep, an increased appetite and muscle soreness manifested through DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness). When you feel these symptoms, it means that your body no longer has any reserve in the muscles you’re trying to work on and there has been some minor damage to the tissue. Also, this means that your muscles need to recover and recuperate immediately, which would allow them to be repaired. When this happens, your muscle adapts and improves as to be able to better handle the same level of stress in the future.

If you’re working on some endurance training, the energy that your muscles store will become depleted and your muscles will sustain some damage in the short run. In the long run, it’ll fix itself because the muscle will rebuild itself into a more efficient aerobic machine. If you’re training for strength, you want to destroy the weaker muscle fiber in order to create stronger, bigger fibers. This is the case with all types of workouts, and it’s a naturally known occurrence called “remodeling”. While you’re working out and right after you finish, the stress the exercise puts on your carbohydrate storage in your muscles means that they become depleted and the muscle protein structure changes very little. After that, your immune system gets involved and starts fixing the problem. When you’re not consuming the necessary proteins and carbs, your body won’t be able to rebuild. This means that you’ll have no muscles ready to fulfill their potential, nor any that have already fulfilled it. Make sure you know that the time you invest in your exercise will return with necessary results only if you train smart and eat smart as well – so munch on those carbs and proteins!

2. Feeding Your Muscles!

People who are gym beginners, no matter what they’ve chosen to work on, have to have their post-workout nutrition to make the muscle grow by providing it with the necessary macronutrients. Every single jolt of energy that you spend comes from carbohydrates, so the depletion of the carb stores in your muscles can’t be avoided. This means that an after-exercise meal needs to have lots of carbs to put them back in your muscle storage and replenish the reserves You will need to eat enough carbs to make your body release a big dose of unsilin which will push the carbs and amino acids in your muscles. Also, this triggers an increase in muscle synthesis and your protein balance turns positive, which means your muscles will repair much quicker than if it was negative.

If you eat a lot of carbs, the body will release a large dose of insulin, which will in turn resupply your glycogen stores in the muscles, but it will also boost muscle tissue repair. The carbohydrates will boost your glycogen synthesis as well and will make your muscles regenerate more quickly, as opposed to when you work out, when your muscle protein starts degrading and you will need a lot of protein in your after-workout meal just to fix the structural problems of the muscle that arise when you lift heavy weights. After working out, your body will slow down the speed of your protein synthesis and it will also boost the speed of your protein breakdown, which means that your muscles will start degenerating. You can stop this by ingesting some protein and amino acid solutions, which will boost the synthesis process and negate the breakdown process.

3. What About Meal Timing?

When you consume a post-workout meal, you will need to have a few very important things in there – proteins, carbs and absolutely no fat. You need essential fats during your entire nutritional day, but when you eat fat right after working out, when the goal is to get macronutrients into your muscles as quickly as possible. If there’s fat in your meal, its effects will be slowed and you won’t get the full benefit of the post-workout beverage. Fat slows the movement through your intestines, which means that when you eat fat right after you work out, you’ll slow your system’s digestion and the absorption of carbs and protein will be slowed as well.

I can’t stress how important it is to eat your after-training meal right after you’re done with training. This is because your muscles will be really weak and will need a lot of protein and carbs to begin to function at their best, but keep in mind that they are also primed to receive nutrients, meaning it’s the best time to eat. This is known as an “anabolic window”, and it’s not constant – the longer your period of recovery grows, the shorter the anabolic window becomes, meaning you have to eat right after working out or you risk missing the golden time window and recovering fully. If you eat a meal 1 hour after working out, it will have a better effect than eating the same, or a better meal three hours after the training has concluded. If you wait more than this time, your glycogen synthesis process and your protein repair mechanisms will be diminished and you’ll have to deal with unwanted consequences.

4. Supplements or Whole Foods?

Sometimes, it’s better to take a supplement instead of eating whole foods. I know it sounds ludicrous, but it’s the truth. When you’re working on your post-workout nutrition, the fact that the protein shake is liquid means that it will do a far better job than any solid whole food. Here’s why:

• After working out, you’ll hear a lot of people say that they can’t stomach eating a large meal. This is because the training stresses your body to a point where your instinct for hunger is pretty much dead, but I can’t stress how important it is to eat if you want to keep your muscle structure ready to heal at all times. Eating right after working out will help your muscles remodel, but it will also help them recuperate and make them bigger.
• Liquid supplements are easy to drink, they’re full of nutrients and they’re relatively delicious. They’ll give you all you need right after training, and they’re relatively simple on the molecular level which means your intestines will process them with ease.
• The liquid supplements that have fast-digesting protein such as whey hydrolysates and isolates, as well quickly-digesting carbs like dextrose and maltodextrin have a better chance of absorption than whole food meals, which is another advantage for supplements.
• If you take a liquid post-workout shake it’ll be in your system in half an hour to an hour, which means your muscles will get all they need in a very short time. If you eat a solid meal, you might need a few hours for the nutrients in it to reach your muscles.

You need the protein and carbs to reach your muscles as soon as possible to improve your chances of recovery and muscle tissue synthesis. There are some nutrients that improve your recovery period when you eat them right after your workout. This type of nutrition will have a lot of water as well as high-glycemic index carbs and amino acids in certain ratios that your system deems healthy. Also, you should definitely steer clear of any fat in the post-workout period. The best way to make sure these nutrients are in your system is through a liquid blend of your make and choosing.

Source: www.fitnessandpower.com

What does food do for us anyway?

Besides providing some extremely pleasurable taste and social experiences the reason we even seek it out at all is to provide the nutrients and nourishment we need for health and growth.

That’s the main crux of it: the nutrients and energy. Within that we have macronutrients, which we need large amounts of. We’ll get to them. And we have micronutrients which we need very tiny amounts of relatively speaking. We’ll get to them too.

And we define the energy content of food through kilocalories (kcals), generally just referred to as ‘calories’. In terms of what a  calorie actually is. Technically it’s the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1 degree celsius but let’s just leave it that it’s a unit of energy for simplicity’s sake. They are the units of energy stored in foods which are then used up in the body or stored. This is why you’ll hear that eating too many calories leads to weight-gain, the excess can be stored as body-fat once our body has taken what it needs.

Calories (kcals) then come from each of the three* main macronutrients which I’ll go through now.

*Alcohol is also technically a macronutrient but will not be discussed here. It is 7 kcals per gram.

Protein

You may or may not picture a large, muscular man or woman with no visible neck chugging down a shake when the topic of ‘protein’ is brought up. While protein is important for muscle-building yes, it’s so much more than that though. Without protein and the amino acids it provides we wouldn’t be able to make any of the body tissues we hold so dear. Organs, skin, hair, nails, muscle, ligaments, tendons, enzymes, antibodies, many hormones and much much more. They all need protein and amino acids as the building blocks.

So it’s probably a good idea to get enough. In general having a decent serving of protein-rich food at every meal is going to be a pretty good idea. Not only does this make sure you get enough but it also comes in super-handy for managing hunger, blood sugar and energy levels. Want to feel nicely stable energy levels throughout the day without dips? Trying adding in some protein at every meal.

Animal proteins tend be nutritionally superior to plant proteins and good sources of protein overall are:

• Fish
• Seafood
• Poultry
• Beef
• Pork
• Lamb
• Eggs
• Dairy
• Game meats
• Soya protein like tofu
• Pulses/legumes like beans, chickpeas and lentils
• Mycoproteins derived from fungi (like Quorn)
• Nuts & seeds
• Protein powders (dairy, like whey or plant based)

A good rule of thumb is that the more unprocessed the protein source the better. This applies to other foods too! Not just protein. And 1 gram of protein consists of about 4 kcals.

Carbohydrates

Carbs seem to get a bad reputation in certain and unfortunately influential parts of the nutrition world these days. Depending on who you listen to they must be removed if you want to have good health and be in shape. But what do they actually do?

Carbohydrates and the glucose they provide are the primary fuel source for the body and are especially the main player when it comes to fuelling the vast majority of athletic performance and sports. There is actually no physiological necessity for carbohydrates in the diet since we can make all we need using fats and protein if carbs were super-restricted so they’re not actually considered to be ‘essential’ (i.e. we can’t make them ourselves) in the diet. Carbohydrates, like protein, provide about 4 kcals per 1 gram.

Beyond providing glucose for energy carbohydrates also have important roles in providing other nutrients, digesting other foods and in the sub-category of carbs (fibre) they provide food for your gut bacteria as well as roughage for digestive health. Some good sources of carbohydrates are:

• Vegetables (yep, they’re carbs – hard to say carbs are bad now isn’t it?)
• Fruits
• Pulses/Legumes
• Tubers like potatoes and sweet potatoes
• Grains, particularly whole grains

Interestingly when carbs and sugar get blamed as being the ‘bad guy’ when it comes to nutrition and health the typical foods that get pointed to like cakes, pastries, cookies, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream, pizza, fries etc. all tend to have very high levels of fat in them too – making them very calorie dense and very easy to overeat.

And it’s no surprise that someone who consumes the majority of their (excessive) calories from carbohydrate-rich foods would experience weight-loss when they ‘cut them  out’ but the reason is the excess of calories the carbs are providing in that context. Not the carbs themselves.

Fats 

Here’s the other one that has played the villainous role in the nutrition world before carbohydrates started to take the heat recently.

Similarly, it’s misdirected to blame any one macronutrient or food as being the root of poor health or body composition. In terms of functions, fats have many, as you’d expect from an essential macronutrient. They provide a massive energy store in the form of body-fat and are the most energy-dense macronutrient at 9 kcals per gram.

After that fats are needed to make most hormones in the body, they make up part of our cell membranes and are what your brain and nervous systems are made from. Finally they help to transport the important fat-soluble vitamins like D, E, A and K.

There are 3 main types of dietary fats: Saturated fats, Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats. It’s important that these are consumed in balanced ratios for good health. Often people will over consume saturated fats and under consume the important omega 3 fats which are in the polyunsaturated category.

One type of fat, ‘trans’ or partially hydrogenated fat is absolutely shown to be very bad for health and should be avoided as much as possible. Fortunately because of their health risks you won’t find them too easily in the European food supply anymore.

And since we eat foods and not specific fat types or nutrients it’s more useful to talk about food sources when it comes to fats (and other macronutrients for that matter). Also, most foods contain not just one type of fat (and there is another layer to this where there are different types in each of the 3 categories) so with the exception of some pure oils like coconut oil you are likely to get some mixture of all three types but for handiness sake I will lump them together to give ideas of which foods are good sources for fats:

Saturated

• Good quality beef/lamb
• Dark chocolate
• Dairy products
• Coconut products
• Eggs

I’d point out here though that anyone consuming a decent amount of animal products won’t have to worry about getting enough saturated fat and likely they’ll have to look more at getting a balance of the other two instead.

Monounsaturated

• Avocados
• Olives and extra virgin olive oil
• Good quality beef/lamb
• Eggs
• Nuts
• Rapeseed oil
• Peanuts and peanut butter
• Pork

Polyunsaturated

• Oily fish like sardines, mackerel, salmon and marine omega-3 supplements. These contain the two primary marine omega-3 fats which are crucial for health so if you’re not eating oily fish a few times per week supplementation would be advised. Vegans can use supplemental algae oil instead of fish oil or krill oil. If using fish oil supplements store them in the fridge and don’t buy them if they’re in a clear container. Light damages the fats very easily.
• Flaxseeds
• Rapeseed oil
• Nuts/seeds
• Soybeans/tofu
• Poultry
• Pork

I’d point out here that within the polyunsaturated category there are two main types.

Omega-3 and omega-6. Most people consuming typical foods will have no problem getting in enough omega-6’s but as mentioned above they are probably not getting in enough omega-3 fats. The balance between these omega-6 and omega-3 fats is important and most people would do well to actively increase their intake of omega-3’s. To avoid getting too technical remember that a large portion of omega-3’s MUST be marine in origin. Plant sources do not cut it.

Micronutrients:

That’s macronutrients taken care of so let’s talk about micronutrients. As we said above micronutrients are needed in relatively tiny amounts compared to macronutrients but are still critical for good health. These are all the vitamins and minerals you would have heard of as well as important plant chemicals (phytonutrients).

Going into any depth for sources of each of the micronutrients is beyond the scope of this article but know that their functions in the body are far-ranging and important. And certain micronutrients are more important in certain contexts, for example folate in the case of women of child-bearing age to prevent neural tube defects.

To get full coverage without having to think too much about specific micronutrients aim to eat a widely-varied diet, not just the same 8-12 foods the whole time and choose extensively from the different foods mentioned above. Consume lots of fruits and vegetables (like 10+ servings per day) as well as animal proteins and it’ll be hard to go wrong.

 

By Brian Ó hÁonghusa,
BSc (Hons) Human Nutrition, ANutr
Precision Nutrition Level 1,
Precision Nutrition Level 2 Master Coach