Ra 4 Food - Health and Nutritional Tips

The post exercise meal (the meal you eat after a workout) is probably the most important meal of the day for anyone who cares about nutrition or wants to build muscle, lose fat or improve their body. It is pretty common to see folks having a protein shake after their workout, but how much protein do you really need? Is more protein better?

After exercise, it starts. The body begins the process of recovery, adapting and preparing for the next challenge. There are two basic types of recovery. The first is the restoration of fuel supplies–the carbohydrates and fats that supply energy to the working muscle. The second is adaptation, in which the structure and metabolic processes of the muscles are rebuilt and reinforced to be stronger and more efficient.

There is a window of time about 20-60 minutes after you exercise in which your muscles will readily accept the carbohydrates and protein that you consume and suck them up to be stored away as precious energy and building blocks for recovery. But if you wait too long after exercising to eat, your body become less likely to use what you eat as fuel and recovery, and more likely to run out of energy during your next exercise session, whether later in the day or even the next day.

The ideal post-workout meal is comprised of a blend of carbohydrates and protein. There are all sorts of fancy ratios used by elite athletes, but the basic rule is to eat just a little more carbohydrates than protein, and to consume about 2 calories of carbohydrate for every pound of target bodyweight. For example, if your target bodyweight is 150lbs, you should eat about 300 calories of carbohydrate, and about half that many calories of protein. A sample post-workout meal would be chicken with brown rice, yogurt with almonds, or a protein shake with a banana.

See, eating this meal soon after a workout is important, but just because you are putting the food into your body quickly doesn’t actually mean the food is being digested and absorbed by your body equally as quick.

So, while chicken, meat, fish, and eggs are all fine sources of protein that I personally eat daily, they aren’t the ideal type of protein for the meal after your workout.

These foods are solid foods, and the protein in solid foods digest pretty slowly. You may have eaten a high protein food in your post workout meal, but by the time the protein is digested and finally ready to be used by your body, a whole lot of time would have passed. So a whey protein shake will be digested by your body much quicker than a solid food for two reasons:

Liquid meals digest faster than solid food meals.

Whey protein is the fastest digesting form of protein there is.

This is what makes whey protein pretty much the official choice of most people as their post workout meal protein source.