Consider these commandments etched into stone tablets. Okay, perhaps a tad extreme, but important nonetheless. What you put into your body after training matters, and it can go beyond just thinking about consuming a healthy ratio of proteins, carbs, and fats in the abstract. While this kind of guideline is great for many people, we can fine-tune this some more once those basics are nailed. Specifically, limiting a certain macronutrient altogether after working out. But before that let's do a quick recap of how our bodies produce energy for training.
ATP: The body’s battery power
ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate, and is needed for every action in the body:
Moving our muscles
Contracting our digestive muscles
Producing enzymes
Carrying molecules across cell membranes
Formation of more ATP
As these jobs are constantly going on, we need a constant stream of ATP. Luckily for us, the nutrients we eat allow us to create ATP.
Most of the time during exercise, our energy comes from nutrients that have been stored in our liver (glycogen), muscle (glycogen), and fat cells. The most important nutrients for making ATP are carbs and fats. Let's forget about the fats for the time being and just focus on the carbohydrates, which are by far the fastest-acting macronutrient source for energy transfer.
We already know that glycogen is the form of stored carbohydrate in the liver and muscle cells. In order to be able to use the stored glycogen for training, it needs to be converted into glucose. While the liver likes to share ATP produced from the breakdown of glycogen with other cells in the body, muscle is more selfish. Once glycogen is stored in a muscle, it must be used there. During training, the stored muscle glycogen is converted into ATP to help power contraction and movement, which depletes the cell of its glycogen stores. This is a key point, as following a bout of intense training, one of our primary goals should be to replenish these depleted glycogen stores.
Limit fats post-workout
Foods that are packed with fat - salmon, eggs, steak, nuts - are all great sources that improve our health and performance in many ways…
But you shouldn’t eat them in high amounts post-workout. Recall the glycogen-depleting effects of training we briefly touched on earlier. Following training, we want our carbs and proteins to be absorbed as quickly as possible. If we do this within 2 to 3 hours immediately after training, we will rapidly and easily replenish our muscle glycogen, which means our recovery will improve. Better recovery = faster return to training. Adding fats into the mix only gets in the way, because fat slows down digestion.
This begs the question, what carbohydrates should I eat after training?
We can take advantage of the fact that after training, our insulin sensitivity and ability to uptake glucose into the muscle is higher. Insulin is the main hormone responsible for glucose being shuttled into cells. Fast-digesting carbohydrates can be beneficial here so that we reduce the time it takes for muscle glycogen stores to be replenished. This doesn't mean slamming down chocolate bars, bags of sour patch kids, or cinnamon buns. Common sense, as always, should prevail.
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