Pre Workout Supplements

Welcome to our Pre Workout Supplements section. Find valuable online nutrition advice such as diet tips, fitness guides, and general health information.

The Importance Of Pre And Post Workout Meals

When you’re on a mission to build muscles, gain weight or just get fit, it pays to make sure you optimize your workouts. Not only by doing the correct workouts for what you want to achieve but also by eating correctly to get the most benefit from your exercise. After all, what’s the point in spending hours in the gym or pounding the pavements if you’re going to undo all the good work by eating the wrong things? For this reason, what to eat before and after your workouts is an important consideration in any workout program. Essentially, this could make or break your work out in terms of its effectiveness.

The Pre-Workout Meal – It’s All About Balance

Regardless of whether you’re doing a cardio or a resistance workout, you need to eat balanced meals of carbohydrates and proteins. It’s the type of workout – cardio or resistance – combined with the intensity of your workout, which determines the exact percentages of proteins and carbs.

When it comes to the question of “When and what should I eat before a workout?” most experts agree that the best time to have a pre-workout meal is about an hour before you commence your workout. For a low intensity workout, a pre-workout meal of around 200 calories should be sufficient to fuel that workout. For high intensity workouts, you’d likely need 4000 to 5000 calories.

For a resistance workout, your pre-workout meal should ideally be around one third carbohydrate and two-thirds protein. This balance ensures you get the extra protein required to repair, and reduce, the inevitable muscle damage caused by resistance exercise. It also supplies enough carbohydrates to provide the energy to perform your workout.

Those percentages are reversed if you’re doing a cardio workout because you need to be able to sustain your energy levels for longer doing cardio, hence the extra carb content. And because muscle breakdown with cardio is not as severe, the requirement for protein is less. So a meal that is one-third protein to two-thirds carbohydrate will do the trick nicely for a cardio workout.

Don’t Forget The Post Workout Nourishment!

Post workout meals are just as important for several reasons. First of all, exercise depletes glycogen supplies. If you don’t replace glycogen as quickly as possible, your body starts converting muscle tissue into amino acids. These amino acids are then turned into fuel to supply organs like your brain, and your central nervous system. Both of which use glucose as their primary fuel source!

Secondly, resistance training in particular also causes minuscule muscle tears. As soon as you finish working out, your body starts repairing this damage. To do this effectively it needs a quick top up of protein. If you don’t supply this, you won’t get an effective repair job! It’s also this constant repairing and rebuilding of muscle tissue that builds muscles, and muscle strength. Given that building strong muscle is one of the primary reasons for doing resistance training, it therefore makes sense to supply your body with the protein it needs to do this! Along with the replacement carbs to prevent muscle tissue from being used as fuel to keep essential services like brain and central nervous system functions running!!

How do you do this? By eating before and after you work out of course!

Appropriate Foods And Snacks To Take After Workout

After a cardio workout, you need plenty of carbs to replace the glycogen stores you’ve depleted. You would therefore typically try to eat some high fiber carbs like whole-wheat pasta, oatmeal, rice and some types of fruits. Thirty to fifty grams of these eaten within 5 to 10 minutes of finishing your workout is generally the recommended practice. Post-workout snack bars specifically designed to provide these carbs is an ideal way to do this.

A resistance workout needs a combination of both protein and carbohydrates. The protein is needed to effectively repair muscle tissues and build strong muscles. The carbohydrates supply the glucose needed to not only replace what you’ve used but also to help with the transport of proteins into the muscle cells. The ideal time to have a post-resistance workout meal is around half an hour after finishing your workout. This gives the blood stream time to remove metabolic waste products from your muscles prior to beginning the rebuilding process.

If you’re interested in learning more about the best types of foods and snacks to take before and after workouts, check in with Planet Supplement’s Heath and Fitness blog for plenty of impartial tips and advice.