Your mother probably always told you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Well, she was right; for most people this is the most important meal. However, for Crossfitters doing intense workouts, breakfast gets moved to second place. For you, the most important meal is the Post Workout Meal.
When you workout with intensity, you deplete the muscle glycogen in your body, and you produce a high about of cortisol. Your body needs glycogen, and when glycogen levels are depleted, one of the ways your body is able to produce it is by “eating your muscles.” (Obviously, this kind of defeats the purpose of the workout). In addition, you create micro-tears throughout your muscles during the workout. It is the repair of these muscle tears that actually produces muscle growth.
When to Eat: It is critical that you have a Post Workout Meal as soon as possible after your workout in order to re-stock your glycogen stores, lower your cortisol levels and begin the process of muscle repair. In addition, right after the workout, your body is in a state of high insulin sensitivity. So with the proper meal, the nutrients will be fast-tracked into your system. This ideal window begins to close about 10 minutes after the end of your workout. After 30 minutes, about 50% of the value is gone, and after 60 – 90 minutes, all the advantage is gone. You need to eat quickly after your workout! I make my post workout meals for the week on Sunday night, put them in individual containers, and bring them with me to the gym.
What to Eat: The best Post Workout meal is a combination of fast digesting proteins, and a quick absorbing, high glycemic index carbs, and zero fat. In short, the opposite of what you should eat the rest of the day. For all other times of day, we want to eat slow absorbing foods, and especially slow absorbing carbs to keep from spiking our blood sugar and subsequently spiking our insulin. However, the goal in post-workout is to get the nutrients into the bloodstream as quickly as possible. The best meal is a 4:1 ratio combination of quick absorbing carbs to protein. The meal many people recommend is a combination of sweet potato and applesauce (I also sprinkle some cinnamon in mine), and a whey protein shake. And remember, no fat. Fat slows the absorption, and you want to inject this carb/protein concoction into your muscles as quickly as possible.
For those of you on the Zone, many of the fire breathers from Crossfit (e.g., James “OPT” Fitzgarald, who won the Crossfit Games in 2007, and Dutch Lowy, who was 7th in the 2008 Games) consume 50% of their TOTAL daily carb blocks in their post workout meals.
Rehydrate: In addition to getting carbs and protein into your body quickly, you also need to start replacing all the water you lost during the workout. The average person loses between 25 and 50 ounces of fluid an hour through sweating (if you’re interested, you can calculate your actual sweat-rate using this link: http://www.active.com/triathlon/Articles/Cracking-the-Code-on-Sweat-Rates.htm). In other words, you lose about 1.5 to 3 pounds an hour through sweating. You need to drink 16 ounces of water for every pound you lose to rehydrate. Instead of going through all the calculations, though, just make sure you down a big water bottle within 30 minutes after exercise, and keep drinking throughout the day.
Nutrition is always a contentious topic. There are many experts with varying opinions. However, when it comes to Post Workout Meals, there is actually a high level of agreement. In the links below, I show groups that rarely agree on anything -Bodybuilders, Nutritionists, Robb Wolf – the Crossfit Nutrition Guru, and Barry Sears – the inventor of the Zone Diet, all basically agreeing on this topic. In addition, Loren Cordain, the author of book The Paleo Diet wrote a follow-up book called The Paleo Diet for Athletes in which nearly the entire book is dedicated to why you should make an exception to his original diet for pre- and post-work out meals, including “taking in carbohydrates that are high on the glycemic load scale for quick replenishment of expended glycogen stores” along with protein, preferably in liquid form “within 30 minutes postexercise.”
Some diverse references with a common theme:
Bodybuilders: http://www.intense-workout.com/post_workout.html
Nutritionists: http://www.truthaboutabs.com/Post-Workout-Nutrition.html
Robb Wolf: http://robbwolf.com/?p=272
Barry Sears: http://library.crossfit.com/free/video/CFJ_Sears_ZonePerformance1.wmv
While I mentioned above that there is an amazing level of agreement among various experts on this topic, nutrition always comes down to the individual person. What works for most other people may not be ideal for you. Also, the standard formula needs to be adjusted according to your goals (improved performance, leaning out, gaining muscle, longevity, etc.). You can use this as a baseline and then tweak it until you find the ideal Post Workout Meal for you.
Obviously, many people at MCCF have found the proper eating that generates impressive results (e.g. Tom B., Carey, JP, Vinny). Post to comments the things that have worked for you. And that goes for everyone, including all of you non-members who are on the website.
Jim I really like this info it will help me out alot– After all we all want the most out of our WOD or we really like torture!!! Keep up the good info!!!!
I need to work on the immediacy of my pwo meal but what has helped me alot is having 3-5 raw eggs in my smoothie (strawberries, bananas, plain organic yogurt) every morning and eating chicken & veggies just about every day for lunch. My strength is going up and I’m leaning out.
Other good Hight GI carbs PWO – Grapes and bananas. Maybe dates and raisins as well. I’ll stick with chicken as pwo protein. But my question is. Cottage cheese. is there too much fat in there?
JD – Again, it all comes down to what works best for the person and their goals. Whatever you are doing is obviously working. If you have already tried other things and found your current approach to be best – stick with it. However, some of what you said goes against what works for most people in most situations. The chicken as a PWO meal will take too long to digest and will not reverse catabolic actions of training (unless you are grinding it in a blender and drinking it).
And if you are talking about mixing cottage cheese and grapes for PWO, using the cottage cheese as the protein source, it is really tough to get the 4:1 ratio. If you have a cup of cottage cheese, you would need to eat over 300 grapes with it to get that ratio. That’s a lot of grapes, and it would add 6-7 grams of fiber, further slowing digestion. If you are not using fat-free or low-fat cottage cheese, that will slow digestion even further.
If you are eating cottage cheese with a reasonable amount of grapes (like 30 instead of 300), then you are having a low-carb pwo meal. This is reasonable alternative for many people. It is also a good alternative for several specific situations: 1) someone who is significantly over-weight, 2) someone who is main goal is to lean-out and doesn’t mind trading off performace – especially in high intensity met-con workouts and 3) as a PWO meal after low-intensity workouts. Obviously, the 4th situation is if you have found through experimentation that it works best for your particular body – which it sounds like is the case with you. I think we all should spend some time experimenting to see what works best for us individually. This blog was just about a starting point for that experimentation.
I like your suggestion of raisins. I try to eat raisins after a particularly intensive workout that produces a lot of lactic acid. Raisins are a very high alkaline food, and they help to restore the balance by counteracting the elevated acid levels.
the only thing i worry about is getting out of the ‘zone’. I’m going to try this though and see what happens.
Jim… I need to know your recipe for that sweet potatoe/apple sauce, cinnamon and raisin concation that you let me try. However, I would have it be a 1 block meal for me. Hook a sista up!