Recover from your workouts faster with the right foods
Adding proper nutrients to diet helps before and after exercise
We all know how beneficial exercise is to overall health. While many view exercise as a way to help accomplish weight loss or physiquerelated goals, moving every day offers so much more to the inside of your body. It can help boost heart health, decrease stress levels, promote better blood sugar levels and regulate blood pressure. If you exercise daily, I’m sure you have noticed some, if not all, of these benefits and consider activity a crucial part of your daily routine.
Anyone exercising daily should take care to fuel their body adequately both before and after exercise. Strategically snacking and planning meals according to your activity will help you perform better and last longer during workouts. It is equally important to use food as a tool to help your body recover from exercise. Recovery nutrition is just as important as your cool down and stretching routine in giving your body what it needs to bounce back from all it just did for you during your workout!
Exercise strongly stimulates many of our physiological systems. During exercise, the body is put under a certain level of stress, which essentially creates exerciseinduced inflammation. This stress and inflammation contributes to the things we “feel” after a workout, like stiffness and soreness. This physiologic response is actually healthy and allows the body to adapt to exercise, making you stronger and more fit. However, if the body undergoes a high amount of this stress regularly without proper recovery, uncontrolled inflammation can lead to greater risk of illness and injury. Pushing yourself as hard as possible in the gym every day is neither healthy nor productive if you don’t resupply your tissues and energy stores.
Foundationally, there are three key pieces to recovery nutrition: replenishing your carbohydrate stores, rebuilding your muscle tissues and rehydrating.
As we’ve discussed before, carbs are the main source of fuel for the body and the brain. Part of the stress created by intense exercise lies in the depletion of the body’s carbohydrate stores. As you exercise, your body uses the carbs stored in your muscle as muscle glycogen for fuel. It also pulls carb stores from your liver — liver glycogen — to help you maintain your blood sugar and subsequent energy levels to stay focused during your workout. As time goes on, your carb stores dwindle, leading to a fatigued, tired feeling.
To replenish your body’s carb stores, it’s important to meet your daily carb needs. Many people base the amount of carbs they need daily on a percentage of their overall calories or food intake. For active individuals, it’s better to aim for a certain number of grams of carbs per kilogram of one’s body weight each day. If your activity levels are lower, this is closer to 3 grams of carbs per kilogram of weight. If you’re extremely active and even work out multiple times a day, you might need closer to 10 grams of carbs per kilogram of weight. For example, a 140-pound woman (64 kilograms) would need about 190 grams of carbs daily if she is not very active. On the other hand, if she is exercising heavily, her daily carb needs could be as high as 600 grams or more. I know, that was a lot of math — but knowing this can be helpful to gain a rough estimate of your daily carb needs.
If you’re someone who exercises longer than an hour and sweats a lot or really gets your heart rate up during workouts, it’s helpful to eat or drink a solid source of carbs and protein within an hour after you exercise. A study investigating the effect of consuming carbs with or without protein after exercise found that recovery was better after ingesting the carbs plus protein in terms of soreness, mental energy and physical fatigue. Pairing carbs with protein has been further shown to attenuate exercise-induced muscle damage and make the replenishment of carb stores more efficient. Carbs and protein help each other out when it comes to post-workout nutrition.
Why is protein so important?
Part of the body’s adaptive response to exercise includes breaking down and rebuilding muscle tissue. This translates to higher protein needs to help the body build up the muscle tissues that were damaged during exercise, which will help make you stronger and able to maintain and build muscle. More muscle equates to a more robust metabolism and greater strength and overall function. To optimize this process, aim for 20 to 40 grams of lean protein at each meal — not just dinner. This equates to about 3 to 6 ounces of lean meat, which varies based on activity levels and body size.
It’s important to note that not all protein sources are created equal. Whey protein is milk-based and has been shown to be superior for muscle building, thanks to its leucine content. Whey protein can be found in dairy products such as milk, cheese and yogurt. Eggs and other animal-based proteins are also very high-quality sources of protein. Plant-based proteins, such as beans or quinoa, offer many additional nutrients, but you will need a larger quantity to stimulate the same level of a muscle-maintaining response. A protein-rich snack before bed can also provide an additional opportunity to optimize your recovery nutrition.
A prime example of an excellent pre-bedtime recovery snack is a glass of milk. Not only is milk a great source of whey protein, it also contains a slower-digesting protein called casein, which many serious athletes like to take in before bed to build muscle during sleep. In addition to protein, milk
also contains its recovery counterpart, carbs, as well as electrolytes like sodium to promote rehydration. Milk advocates boast that it is a more affordable alternative to many commercially available recovery drinks.
Another excellent food or food group to include in your refuel routine is antioxidants — specifically anthocyanins, which are phytochemicals found in the category of red, blue and purple fruits and vegetables that have been researched for their recovery-promoting properties. A literature review of 39 studies found that these nutrients can contribute to increased antioxidant capacity, lower levels of blood inflammatory markers, delayed muscle soreness and increased strength and power. These antioxidants should be coming from real foods, not supplements. Supplemental forms of antioxidant compounds can provide too large and concentrated quantities of nutrients. Such plantbased compounds are meant to be ingested as whole foods. Add some berries or cherries to your next recovery snack for an extra recovery boost.