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Workout Nutrition to Fuel a Lean Strong Body

Pre-exercise nutrition needs.

What and when you eat before exercise can make a big difference to your performance and recovery. You not only want to fuel your workout but you need to have enough of the right types of food in your body to preserve muscle mass and speed recovery.

Strategy #1 - Protein before exercise.

Eating some lean protein, (dairy, meat, fish, chicken, protein powder) in the few hours before exercise:

Can help you maintain or even increase your muscle size. That’s important for anyone who wants to improve health, body composition, or performance.
Can reduce markers of muscle damage (myoglobin, creatine kinase, and myofibrillar protein degradation). Or at least prevent them from getting worse. (Carbohydrates or a placebo eaten before exercise don’t seem to do the same thing.) The less damage to your muscles, the faster you recover, and the better you adapt to your exercise over the long term.
Floods your bloodstream with amino acids just when your body needs them most. This boosts your muscle-building capabilities. So not only are you preventing damage, you’re increasing muscle size.

Strategy #2 – Carbs (fruits, veggies and healthy starches) before exercise.

Eating carbs before exercise:

Fuels your training and helps with recovery. It’s a popular misconception that you only need carbs if you’re engaging in a long (more than two hour) bout of endurance exercise. In reality, carbs can also enhance shorter term (one hour) high-intensity training. So unless you’re just going for a quiet stroll, ensuring that you have some carbs in your system will improve high intensity performance.
Preserves muscle and liver glycogen. This tells your brain that you are well fed, and helps increase muscle retention and growth.
Stimulates the release of insulin. When combined with protein, this improves protein synthesis and prevents protein breakdown. Another reason why a mixed meal is a great idea. No sugary carb drinks required.

Strategy #3 – Healthy Fats (olive oil, fish oil, avocado, nuts) before exercise:

Don’t appear to improve nor diminish sport performance. And they don’t seem to fuel performance — that’s what carbs are for.
Do help to slow digestion, which maintains blood glucose and insulin levels and keeps you on an even keel.
Provide some vitamins and minerals, and they’re important in everyone’s diet.

Pre-exercise nutrition in practice

If you work out late enough just eat a well-balanced meal 2-3 hours before exercise. If, however you are working out upon waking try these options that digest quickly:

A protein shake made with protein powder with some veggies and fruit and juts thrown and a low calorie milk or almond milk
Greek yogurt with fruit and nuts

During Exercise Nutrition Needs:

If you are only working out 30 – 120 minutes there is no need to fuel with anything but water and maybe an electrolyte drink, however if you are training for longer you will need to eat some protein and carbs during the workout to enhance performance. During-exercise nutrition needs.

For training that is longer than two hours, sports drinks can be a huge help. Every hour you’ll want to consume:

15 grams protein
30-45 grams carbs

This can come in the form of liquids, gels, or even some solid food.

Post-exercise Nutrition Needs.

Post-workout nutrition can help you recover, rehydrate, refuel, build muscle, and improve future performance.

Strategy #1 - Protein after exercise:

Eating protein after exercise prevents protein breakdown and stimulates synthesis, leading to increased or maintained muscle tissue. So it’s a great strategy for better recovery, adaptation, and performance.

Want fast and convenient? Make an awesome post-workout protein shake.
Want real food? Then make an awesome high-protein meal. Any high quality complete protein should do the job, as long as you eat enough. That means about 40-60 grams for men, and 20-30 grams for women.

Strategy #2 - Carbs after exercise:

Eating healthy carbs, (fruits, veggies and fiber rich starches) will restore our energy after a workout so while eating your protein throw some fruits and veggies into that shake OR add ½ cup brown rice and a veggie to that post workout meal.

Strategy #3 – Fats after Exercise:

Emerging research suggests that healthy fats eaten post exercise can actually increase the amount of available protein that we are eating. So use 2% milk in that protein shake and reduce the amount of milk OR drizzle some olive oil or add ¼ of an avocado to your meal.

Eating properly will keep you energized and create a lean fit body in no time!

The Skinny on Burning Fat

j01818
Jan 27, 2014
4 min read

The Skinny on Fat Burning

Fat burning in the body is complicated to say the least. My hope with this article is to tell you in plain English what you can do to maximize your fat burning potential.

Your ability to burn fat depends not only on your genetics, it also depends on several factors that you have control over. These factors have to do with whether or not you workout AND other factors such as how often, how much, and how hard you workout.

So first let’s look at someone who does not workout at all. If you are not currently working out, your fat cells can release just as much fat for energy as someone that does workout. However, an untrained adult’s muscle cells are not efficient at USING the fat once it is mobilized. So most of that fat is sent right back where it started from, the fat cell. Bummer…

Now that you know that fact I am sure you want to workout right? And certainly you want to workout smart in order to teach your body how to burn fat and utilize a workout strategy that will maximize your fat burning potential? Read on to discover just how you can do that.

The Benefits of Low Intensity Training:

As you begin exercising the increase of blood flow signals the fat cells to release fatty acids into the blood steam for your muscles to utilize.
You burn the most fat when exercising at low to moderate intensity—that is, when oxygen consumption is between 25% and 60% of maximum (Horowitz & Klein 2000). At these very low exercise intensities you mostly use the fat in your blood stream until it is gone.
Research shows that as intensity increases fatty acids get trapped in the fat cell and cannot get out so beginning the exercise with 10 – 20 minutes of low intensity work will help to release the greatest amount of fatty acids into the blood.

Bottom line in plain English – A little is better than nothing at all…

Spend at least 1 day a week performing low intensity exercise to maximize your bodies ability to release fatty acids from fat cells, and teach your muscle cells how to use fat. For all of your other workouts spend 10-20 minutes in low zone training to release and use as much fat as possible before you stop releasing fat.

The Benefits of Moderate Intensity Training:

As exercise increases to moderate intensity (around 60% of VO2max), most of the fatty acids oxidized appear to come from fat stores in the muscle cell. Think of wax dripping off a candle, the fat in your muscle cells is released to energize the workout. Pretty cool huh?
At higher exercise intensities (>70% VO2max), most of the energy used is from carbohydrate breakdown to meet the energy demands of the exercise (Horowitz & Klein 2000).

Bottom line in plain English:

Moderate intensity training should be performed to best use up the fat that is in the muscle cell itself. This fat will be replaced for future use, thus less fat stored in fat cells.

The Benefits of High Intensity Training:

Fat burning during high intensity training is very low during the exercise bout but after exercising, your body still needs to burn more energy, primarily to help muscle cells recover and to replace lost glycogen. This elevated metabolic rate is called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), which appears to be greatest after high-intensity exercise. Many studies indicate that EPOC appears to utilize fatty acids for this recovery process. So you are releasing fat from fat cells and using it to replace energy in the muscle cells after the high intensity exercise bout.
This EPOC is also elevated after strength training.

Bottom line in plain English:

Perform high intensity cardio training once or twice a week and perform strength training once or twice a week to maximize your fat burning post exercise.

So as you see, you can indeed have quite an impact on fat burning! Here is my plain and simple plan to help you become a fat burning machine.

First of all check with your physician before starting any exercise program, and I highly recommend hiring a nationally certified fitness trainer (ACSM, CSCS, ACE, NSAM) to teach you correct exercise execution.

Decide how many days a week you can realistically set aside exercise time and follow my chart.

Days of Training

Low Intensity

Moderate Intensity

High Intensity

Incorporate 2 days of strength training into your cardio and perform compound exercises such as squat, lunge, chest press, push ups, row, pull ups, or shoulder press

Examples of High Intensity Training Regimens:

HIIT - High-Intensity Interval Training

High-intensity interval training requires that you perform maximum effort bouts of cardio for six intervals of 4 minutes each with 1, 2, 3 or 4 minutes of recovery.

SIT - Sprint Interval Training

Sprint interval training is a series of maximum-effort bouts of exercise. The maximal effort generated in SIT requires a short work interval and a longer rest interval. SIT often employs a 30-second all-out effort followed by a 4.5-minute rest.

Tabata-Inspired Interval Training

Tabata-style intervals use 20 seconds of high-intensity work followed by 10 seconds of rest (this is one interval) these intervals are repeated 8 times then active rest for 3 minutes. Tabata-style training can use cardiovascular equipment (such as a treadmill, rowing machine or stationary bike) or calisthenics (such as burpees, mountain climbers or body-weight squats).

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