How Long After Training Should You Eat? Your Definitive Post-Workout Nutrition Guide

You’re going to learn how long after training you should eat, and everything else you need to know about post-workout nutrition. But first, let’s set the all too familiar scene:

You just finished a killer leg workout. Barely able to stumble down the steps at the gym, you somehow make it to your car and reach for your post-workout protein shake. Oh no. You realize with a sinking feeling that you left your protein shake at home!

Is all hope lost? 

Will you lose all your gains?

Did that workout even count?!?!

I’m going to cover all that in this article today. So grab your protein shake, and let’s get started.

How long after exercise should you eat?

Before we can answer how long after training should you eat, we have to go back to an era where the internet was just getting started, iPods were all the rage, and reality TV was in its infancy.

In the early 2000’s, research came out that supported the idea of chugging a protein shake immediately upon finishing a workout. The idea was after a workout, your muscles are primed to take in nutrients and use them to build and repair your muscles.

Since that day, meatheads* in every gym across the world have been slamming protein shakes as soon as they finish a workout, to make sure they don’t miss this post-workout window of gains.

The research showed the post-workout window to be 60 minutes (1). If you waited any longer than that to get a meal in, you were missing out on a chance to maximize your workout.

But like the problems among the cast of “Jersey Shore”, there were a few problems with the research.

The research looking at post-workout nutrition mainly looked at changes in something called muscle protein synthesis and the replenishment of glycogen.

*meat • head (noun) “A person who devotes large amounts of time to the gym”. See THIS guy.

Muscle protein synthesis

Muscle protein synthesis (MPS for short) is the creation of new muscle proteins. All day long, you go through periods where your body breaks down muscle proteins and builds them back up. 

Different things will cause your body to break down muscle proteins and build them back up. For example, when you eat a meal or do a workout, you spike MPS and your body creates new muscle proteins.

Glycogen

When you consume carbohydrates, your body uses some of them for energy and stores some of them as something called glycogen.

Glycogen is your body’s main source of stored energy. After a workout, your glycogen stores are diminished and it can take up to 24 hours to restore them (2).

The problem with the post workout protein window

The research looking at the post-workout protein window looked at short term changes in muscle protein synthesis and glycogen replenishment, but didn’t look at the big picture.

Immediately following a workout, getting a meal with protein after a workout seemed to elevate muscle protein synthesis to a greater degree, which led people to think this meant better strength gains and building more muscle.

The question is, does this actually help muscle growth? Or lead to better recovery, and allow you to get stronger?

To put this to the test, nutrition researcher Alan Aragon and his colleagues performed a meta-analysis on all of the available research on post workout nutrition and found something interesting.

When the overall amount of protein was accounted for, there were no differences in body composition or strength when it came to the timing of a post workout meal (3).

It seemed it was much more important to get enough protein over the course of the day, rather than when you ate that protein.

And while it’s true that hard workouts can diminish your glycogen stores, this doesn’t really mean much unless you’re doing multiple workouts per day.

What really matters

When it comes to getting the most out of your workouts, what really matters is that you’re eating enough protein and carbs throughout the day (which I’ll get to in just a minute!)

Once you’ve got that covered, the specific time that you eat after a workout really doesn’t matter all that much.

If you reeeaaaalllyyyyy want to squeeze everything you can out of your workouts, it would be a good idea to sandwich (bad pun alert 😬) your workouts between meals.

This is because a meal rich in protein can have muscle building effects for up to 3-5 hours.

So as long as you’re eating a meal before and after your workout at some point during that 3-5 hour window, you’re going to maximize your chances of building muscle and recovering from your workout.

What if you workout fasted?

If you’re looking to maximize your strength training workouts and you want to get as strong as you can or build as much muscle as you can, it’s probably not a good idea to workout fasted.

When you first wake up, you’re not going to be in an optimal state to workout. Getting a meal with some carbs and protein will help give you energy for your workout and prevent breakdown of your muscle while lifting weights.

However, I get that some people enjoy working out when they first wake up or they wake up so early to workout that they don’t want food sitting in their stomach. If that’s the case, it would make sense to get a meal in with protein after you workout as soon as possible.

When it comes to cardio, there is no difference when it comes to working out fasted. At one time, it was thought that fasted cardio would burn more fat than doing cardio after having a meal. And there is some truth to that. When you do fasted cardio, your body will burn more fat than if you had a meal beforehand.

The catch is that your body will burn less fat the rest of the day, which will even out the overall amount of fat you burn throughout the day.

This was shown in a study that directly compared fasted and non fasted cardio. 

Two groups performed the same amount of cardio while eating the same amount of calories. The only difference between the groups was whether or not they were fasted.

At the end of the study, both groups lost the same amount of weight, with no significant difference between the groups (4).

How much protein do you need throughout the day?

If your goal is to get the most out of your workouts, getting enough total protein throughout the day is going to help you repair your muscle tissue and build it back bigger and stronger.

You’re going to want to shoot for 0.7-1 grams of protein per pound of lean body weight. You can also use lean body weight here if you need to drop some body fat.

So for someone who is lean and weighs 180 pounds, you would aim to get 126-180 grams of protein every day.

To help maximize MPS, you would want to spread that amount of protein out evenly among all the meals you eat. 

How many carbs should you eat?

Eating enough carbohydrates throughout the day is going to help give you energy for your workouts.

And while you don’t actually need to eat carbohydrates to survive, getting enough carbs is going to help you get the most out of your workouts.

For most clients, I don’t have them shoot for specific carbohydrate targets. 

As long as you’re getting enough protein and eating within a certain range of calories, you’ll be able to build muscle and recover from your workouts just fine.

In other words, as long as you’re eating some carbs, your workouts won’t suffer.

But if you’re looking to squeeze everything you can out of your workouts, having a specific target for carbohydrates will keep your glycogen stores full and give you the best results in the gym.

Shooting for somewhere between 1.4 and 3.6 grams of carbs per pound of lean body weight is going to cover all your bases as far as getting stronger and building muscle (5).

For someone who weighs 180 pounds, this would be between about 250 and 650 grams of carbs per day.

What should you eat before your workout?

Once you’ve taken care of your overall protein intake and you’re making sure to get some carbs in every day, you can figure out what and when to eat before your workout.

What you eat is going to depend on how long you have before you start hitting the weights.

The closer to your workout you’re going to eat, the less fat your meal should contain.

Fat takes the longest to digest. If you’re eating a meal high in fat and then 10 minutes later hitting your first set of an exercise, that meal is probably going to be sitting in your stomach.

So if you want to eat a meal that’s higher in fat before your workout, I would just wait longer before heading to the gym.

You’re definitely going to want to get some carbs and protein in before your workout. 

The carbohydrates are going to give you energy, and the protein will help prevent muscle protein breakdown as you start lifting weights.

The closer to your workout you eat, the more you’ll want to stick to fast digesting carbohydrates. These include:

• • Fruits
  • White breads
  • Rice cakes
  • White rice
  • Cereal

These carbs will digest quickly without sitting in your stomach during your workout.

As far as what you should specifically eat before your workout?

This is going to sound crazy, but hear me out..

You should eat things you enjoy.

Crazy right?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you need to eat this food or that food, because everyone has different preferences and it honestly really doesn’t matter.

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What should you eat after your workout?

This is again going to depend on what you enjoy.

As long as you’re getting a balanced meal with some protein, carbohydrates and fats, the actual foods you eat really don’t matter.

If you’re someone who is doing multiple workouts in a day, getting in more carbohydrates might make sense because you want to replenish your glycogen stores before your next workout.

But for everyone else, it’s really not going to matter that much.

I personally enjoy eating mostly carbs and protein after a workout.

I tend to eat more carbs on workout days, because that’s what makes me feel best and what I feel helps me recover most from my workouts.

It might be because that’s what some of the world’s best bodybuilders still do, even though research hasn’t shown a clear benefit.

Or maybe it’s because I grew up reading fitness magazines that pushed getting in carbs and protein after a workout, and part of me still believes that there might still be a benefit to it.

Whatever the reason, that’s what I enjoy.

And you should eat whatever you enjoy.

Wrapping up: How long after training should you eat?

If you were looking for a black and white answer as to when you should eat after exercise..

I’m sorry to disappoint you.

How long after exercise you should eat depends on how much overall protein you’re eating throughout the day. Whether or not you workout fasted, and if you’re doing multiple workouts in one day.

Hopefully you can use this article to make a decision based on your situation.

For most people, it really doesn’t matter all that much how long after exercise you eat.

As long as you’re getting in 3-4 meals a day and eating enough total protein, you’re going to be all set.

And if you workout fasted? You should probably get in a post-workout meal as soon as you can.

If you want someone to take care of your fitness and nutrition and take all the guesswork out of reaching your fitness goals, you can apply for coaching to see if we’d be a good fit for each other. I’ll help you come up with a plan that fits around your lifestyle.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions below!