Basics: What to Eat Before and After Exercise

Written by Dan Kottmann

Pre-workout nutrition is an important topic.

It’s important in that what you eat and when you eat it adversely affects the quality of your exercise. Not eating correctly reduces the effectiveness of your workout and/or the potential work output your muscles can produce.

Let me start by first saying that your pre- and post- workout meals are distinctly different depending on whether you are performing cardio work or lifting weights. There are also subtle differences depending on your goals (e.g. to lose fat, to gain muscle, etc.).BMI is used by many health insurance providers such as  (http://www.aviva.co.uk) when calculating your insurance policy, so working out and lowering your BMI could have more of an impact on your life than you think.

Before discussing what to eat, let’s first discuss how different workouts utilize energy from different sources. Lifting weight uses glycogen (energy stored in the muscles) to fuel short, explosive, intense bursts of energy output. Muscle glycogen is very effective in producing strong bursts of energy for very short durations of time such as doing a set of lifts or sprinting. It’s very important to note that intense activity actually depletes the muscle’s glycogen store. Adequately resting between sets or sprints gives the body time to replenish the muscles supply of glycogen so that you may repeat the exercise.

Slow to medium paced cardiovascular exercise such as jogging, walking, or using a cross trainer first uses energy in the blood stream (glucose) and then uses energy by burning fat.

It is absolutely critical to your performance and to your workout results to understand the different methods by which the body produces energy. When planning on lifting weights you must provide your muscles with adequate glycogen to allow an intense workout. After all, the effectiveness of lifting weights is directly related to the intensity of your workout. Providing your muscles with adequate glycogen is what allows you to produce a workout worthy of results.

So let’s get to the point. How should you eat to maximize your weight lifting results? As a general guideline you should do the following…

   1. Eat a meal complete with protein (chicken, fish, beef, cottage cheese, eggs, etc) and low GI complex carbohydrates (pasta, rice, oats, etc) 60 to 90 minutes before your workout. This will give your food adequate time to digest and will build up your stores of muscle glycogen (from the carbs) while at the same team releasing a slow, steady stream of energy (low GI carbs).

   2. Eat a high GI carb (banana, sports drink, pineapple, etc) roughly 30 minutes prior to working out. This will give you an immediate, yet not sustainable, burst of energy.

   3. Consume a fast digesting protein source within 30 minutes of completing your workout. Your muscles are starving for nutrients so the faster the digestion the better. For example, liquids digest faster than solids so a fast digesting protein shake (e.g. whey protein) is the best way to go.

When performing low intensity cardiovascular exercise you should practice the following eating habits…

   1. Try to avoid eating anything within a few hours of your workout. Low intensity cardio will burn the energy that’s most readily available: blood glucose and then fat and then muscle. If you haven’t eaten anything for several hours prior to your exercise then your body will have low stores of blood glucose. Therefore, your exercise will begin burning fat sooner than if it had to burn through the available stores of blood glucose first. With that said, it is generally accepted in the fitness community that low intensity cardio is most effective if performed first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. Doing so promotes the burning of fat for energy.

   2. It is recommended that a meal complete with protein and carbs be eaten shortly after low intensity cardio - especially if you performed your cardio on an empty stomach. However, you may find that you don’t have much of an appetite after cardio. In which case, just listen to your body.

   3. High intensity cardio should follow eating rules similar to the that listed above for weight training. You should never perform high intensity cardio on an empty stomach. Remember that high intensity cardio burns muscle glycogen as its primary source of energy (just like weight training) and not glucose or fat (like low intensity cardio).

Exercise is beneficial regardless of your diet. However, 80% of your physique is a result of what you eat and 20% is exercise. To maximize your results it is critical to eat correctly to turn your body into an efficient, fat-burning machine. Working out is more enjoyable if you feel your workouts are working.

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