Getting the Most From Your Workout
When it comes to muscle and fitness advice, few sources actually hit the mark as it pertains to a reasonable, competent way to tailor your post workout meal and consistent eating plan. Average Joe hard-gainers everywhere are constantly blocked from reaching their genetic potential through these faulty advice channels, when instead they could be receiving constant, appreciable gains in both body composition and muscle growth.
The key to understanding how to manage your post workout meal to maximize growth, while also giving full weight to the importance of your daily eating habits, is to realize that your workout days are in many ways different from your recovery days, and should be treated as such. This realization first comes with knowledge of the physiological processes that occur when you fully exhaust a muscle or muscle group, and how this changes your biological processes for that day, and for many days to come.
The Workout Day
While a standard fat loss workout, that is designed to keep the heart rate low and constant, can prove effective at burning fat while offering significant cardiovascular benefit, the only way to cause new muscular growth is to engage in high intensity exercise. This tie between muscle and fitness is where the distinction is made between exercise and muscle building exercise. Any exercise that does not fully exhaust the entirety of a muscle group will not result in the positive hormonal cascades that lead to increased insulin sensitivity, health benefits, and the growth of new muscle.
With high intensity exercise comes a need for an increase in muscle building protein to provide for the regeneration of damaged muscle fibers and growth. An excellent example of a muscle building protein that is successful at both being present in the bloodstream during a workout, and being available to assist in recovery during the post workout window, is a supplement that contains branched chain amino acids.
Your post workout meal plan should also focus on the ingesting of simple carbohydrates to account for the deficit created when muscle are exhausted of their sugar stores during high intensity lifts. Simple carbohydrates such as dextrose are quickly absorbed by the body, resulting in a rapid intake of carbohydrates by spent muscles.
The Recovery Day
Your off days differ from those in which you challenge your muscles, in that your need for carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates, is greatly diminished. Instead, you should focus on increasing your fat intake, especially your saturated fat intake, to make up for the created deficit in carbohydrate. This is, of course, while keeping protein constant and keeping total calories even, if not diminished.
It’s important to note, that even if you choose to engage in a fat loss workout during an off day, consuming an increased amount of fat will not block the ability to burn fat stores. In fact, eating enough fat bolsters fat burning during exercise if sufficient carbohydrate is present in the diet.
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