Everybody knows that post workout protein intake is vital for optimal recovery and improved performance. What may not be as commonly known is post workout carbohydrate intake is equally, if not more important, than protein intake regardless of your goal - to gain muscle, lose fat, or improve your performance.
Carbs Intake
During workouts, especially when conducting resistance training, our muscles are being torn apart on a microscopic scale. In order to let our muscles recover and grow bigger for better performance and increased muscle mass, we need to fill those gaps with amino acids for repairing the damaged muscle fibers. Post workout protein intake gives us the building blocks to fill these gaps. Carbohydrates are responsible for transporting the amino acids into the gaps. Imagine your body as a house, the amino acids from protein are the bricks; and carbohydrates are the manpower that puts the bricks into the right pattern.
The Role of Carbs
The thing about post-workout carbohydrate intake is that the insulin spike from the carbohydrates will help you shovel nutrients from your bloodstream into your cells for optimal recovery.
Not only can simple carbohydrates provide a bigger insulin spike for better nutrient absorption into cells, simple carbohydrates also provide a more rapid replenishment of the glycogen store that we have drained during the workout. The better we replenish our glycogen storage in our muscles, the better we can recover and perform in the next workout.
Even if your primary goal is to lose fat instead of gaining muscle or improving performance (who wouldn’t want to improve their performance anyways?), post-workout carbohydrate intake is also beneficial for losing fat! You see, increased muscle mass actually boosts up our metabolism and makes our bodies better fat-burning environments! Pound for pound, the same weight from fat has more volume than muscle. So increasing our muscle to fat ratio can actually make us look slimmer and more toned! Improved performance can also enable us training harder and burning more calories in our next workout as well!
So ladies and gentlemen, next time when customising our post-workout shake, make sure to add some simple carbohydrates into the equation on top of protein to kickstart our recovery and maximise the results of our workout! Adding some carbohydrate supplements or instant oats would be two easy ways to get some quick and easy carbs in!
Post-Workout Meal Alternatives
If including some carbohydrates in the protein shake doesn’t sound like a good idea for you, you can also include some carbohydrates in your post-workout meal to reap the benefits of optimal recovery. A few slices of bread, a bowl of rice, a plate of pasta, the post-workout window is the time when the food we enjoy but usually have to refrain from can actually be beneficial for improving our fitness! So take advantage of this golden carbohydrate window and enjoy ourselves!
Not All Carbs Created Equal
Some may think since fruits are high in sugar and thus are great source of carbohydrates for the post-workout window, but that is not particularly true. Most fruits have a high ratio of fructose, which cannot be absorbed by our muscles as glycogen, and thus are not optimal for having post-workout.
Minimise Post-Workout Fat Intake
Also, we would like to minimise fat intake in our immediate post-workout meal since fat can slow down digestion in a rather significant manner, which can also slow down the process of kickstarting our optimal recovery.
With these simple, yet fundamental principles, we can now get the most out of our efforts with our next post-workout shakes to fuel our progressions!
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