What do certain nutrients do for you pre and post workout?
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:
Here are a few ways to ensure you’re meeting your requirements.
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 muscle damage, or at least prevent it from getting worse. The less damage to your muscles, the faster you recover, and the better you feel in the long term when exercising.
Provides you with amino acids 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, consumed within a few hours of the workout session, will do the trick.
Eating carbs before exercise:
Fuels your body and helps with recovery. It’s a myth that you only need carbs if you’re engaging in a long and strenuous exercise. In reality, carbs can also enhance shorter term, 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.
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 and minerals, and they’re important in everyone’s diet.
With these things in mind, here are some practical recommendations for the pre-exercise period.
Depending on what suits your individual needs, you can simply have normal meal in the few hours before exercise. Or you can have a smaller meal just before your exercise session. (If you’re trying to put on mass, you may even want to do both.)
Here is a sample pre-workout meal for a male:
You don’t have to rush in the door and straight to the fridge the minute you finish at the gym; however, you shouldn’t wander and poke around forever before eating. By not eating within a two-hour window following training can slow recovery.
This isn’t the case however for every situation; it also depends on what you ate before your workout.
If your pre workout meal was a small one or you ate it several hours before training, it’s probably more important for you to get that post-workout meal into your system relatively quickly-probably within an hour.
If you trained in a fasted state (such as 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.
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.
