17 January 2016
BS7 Gym personal trainer Henry Roy has given us his top tips for eating to improve recovery after exercise.
- Protein.
As the building blocks for many bodily structures that get used during training, protein is very important for optimising recovery and improvement. The amount that’s shown to be optimal varies person to person, but here is a very rough guide for men and women, based on lean bodyweight in kg (see below). As men tend to be leaner than women, women may not want quite as much. The same is true for people with excessive fat mass, though remember that eating proportionally high protein also helps cut fat.
-1.4g per kilo per day if endurance sports (you may want to aim for 6 palm sized portions of protein per day)
-1.4 – 2g per kilo per day for sports that are part strength part endurance
-2g per kilo per day for strength sports, muscle repair, muscle gain for fat loss. (you may want to aim for 8 palm sized portions of protein per day)
-20-30g protein should be enough to maximize gains per that feeding (though you may want more at another meal to hit daily protein target)
Very few people would need more than this (although you may hear otherwise if someone’s selling supplements) and some people won’t need so much, especially if doing less strength/size training (though if you are trying to lose fat eating lots of protein can help as it is satiating, and would replace carb and fat calories. It’s been shown that when eating the same number of calories, having a higher percentage of them from protein helps cut more fat).
It differs person to person but eating plenty of protein up to the amounts above has been repeatedly shown to improve muscle recovery, and if that does overshoot the mark a little it’s not going to do any harm. A good rule of thumb is to try to eat at least one portion of protein at every feeding (including breakfast - if you’re just eating toast or cereal - sort it out.)
Protein supplements can help although they are less nutritious than meat. The most common is whey protein, a highly bioavailable and quick to digest protein from milk which makes it great immediately after exercise to maximise recovery. This is also useful to bump up your protein intake, but ideally don’t use it to replace solid food meals as it lacks a few things like fiber. I find one shake on training days works well.
For more info on optimising protein for fat loss, muscle growth, health or performance, and on good and bad sources of protein and disease risk check out: http://www.bristolpersonaltrainer.com/protein/
- Carbs
During exercise your muscles will have burned their stores of glycogen (fuel) and afterwards will be in a state to greedily reabsorb more. By timing an intake of simple carbohydrate shortly after training you can restore your muscle glycogen stores quicker, though the importance of this will vary greatly between individuals. If you have just done an easy jog at a steady pace you won’t have worked at an intense enough pace to burn calories anaerobically and therefore won’t have used much carbs. Alternately, if you’ve just worked up to a new 1 rep max Deadlift you may have worked at a high intensity but not done enough total movement to burn much carbs. In either case you won’t need much to refuel and if you want to cut fat you may want to avoid them to increase fat burning.
However, if you are a bodybuilder who has done a lot of volume and wants to trigger muscle growth you may want plenty of carbs, especially if you have a lot of lean tissue. Carbs can also help make the body more anabolic and improve gains (and potentially also improve ‘pump’).
An athlete who has played a hard two hour game and needs to refuel as quick as possible before playing the next day will likely also benefit from more simple carbs, especially if they didn’t eat much before the game.
The bodybuilder and athlete may even want to supplement some simple carbs (and/or protein/BCAAs) whilst training to maintain performance if the session lasts more than 1 hour.
As useful as simple carbs are right after training, once the carbohydrate stores in your liver and muscles are replenished they become problematic. They can overload blood sugar causing you to crash and function less effectively. So opt for more complex, lower GI carbs at other times.
I find some people function better on more or less carbs than others, so try and find your own optimal amount for rest days (some people thrive on next to no carbs, some on plenty of complex carbs and a little of simple). If you have trained a full session hard enough to get out of breath - add an extra portion of carbs at the following meal.
An example of good simple post workout carbs: potato (white or sweet), white rice, figs, pineapple, kiwi, apricot (these fruits are also good as they are low fructose).
Examples of good complex carbohydrates for other times: Spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, onion, radish.
- Antioxidant rich foods
This is a weird one. Antioxidants are great; they’ve been shown to improve life span, reduce numerous diseases such as cancer and heart disease, help brain function, and even slow ageing. Eating antioxidant rich foods has been shown to help you recover from training. Drinking blueberry juice after training, for example, has been shown to improve recovery and this has been put down to high levels of antioxidants, and reducing inflammation and oxidative stress caused by exercise: http://www.jissn.com/content/9/1/19.
So if foods high in antioxidants improve recovery, surely taking a high dose antioxidant supplement such as vitamin C or E immediately after training would really help - you would think. This has often been recommended but unfortunately it doesn’t quite work. Research has shown that mega dosing single ingredient antioxidants doesn’t have the same effect as the varied mix of nutrients and phytonutrients in whole-foods, and can even having a negative effect by blunting the beneficial adaptive response to exercise: ie stealing your gains!
Here’s a link to some research on this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22060178
So make sure your diet has a wide variety of many anti-oxidant rich foods such as fresh vegetables and fruits of different colours. If you’re looking to cut fat, aim for vegetables and berries more, if you’re looking to gain muscle be more liberal with fruits.
Blueberries are a really good choice if you’re cutting fat.
If you can deal with the extra sugars, raisins are one of the world’s densest sources of antioxidants, and much cheaper than many other ‘superfoods’.
- Omega 3
Omega 3 from fish oil can help with exercise recovery in several ways. Firstly it helps your body’s anti-inflammatory processes, which helps speed up recovery. Secondly it can reduce stress hormones and boost anabolic hormones, further aiding recovery and gains. Additionally it’s also used to build your cells lipid layer (other fats can be used too, but Omega 3s can work better) which improves insulin sensitivity, and this enables you to take in nutrients more effectively- again enabling quicker recovery (as well as improved fat loss and muscle gain). All of these thing also help long term health and disease prevention.
For more info on this wonder nutrient check out: http://www.bristolpersonaltrainer.com/whats-so-great-about-omega-3/
- Curcumin
Research has shown many benefits of curcumin due to its anti-inflammatory and hormonal effects for exercise recovery. You could supplement it, but my preferred method is to regularly use the spice tumeric in cooking.
- Water
Over half of your body is made from water, if you don’t get enough of it, recovery will quickly become impaired. Make sure you drink enough. Simple.
- Zinc and magnesium
Zinc and magnesium are two of many essential nutrients that you need to survive and be healthy. They help with many things such as hormone production, sleep, anti-inflammation, immune function, protein synthesis and others. The reason they deserve special mention is that they are also often lacking in a western diet, so they are both usually worth supplementing.
For more on generally useful supplements check out: http://www.bristolpersonaltrainer.com/introduction-supplements/
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