Recovery and Protein Shakes for Women - Any Ideas?

All right.

Post workout is the anabolic window of opportunity where your body absorbs the most from nutrients in foods and vitamins from what you eat. Your body will be completely depleted and need something to recover from. This is the anabolic window and it closes very quickly within 20-30 minutes.

Your BEST bet for this is a fast digesting protein that has low carbohydrates.

Go for any good blend of protein that "Whey protein isolate" or "WPI" for short. Look at "Optimum Nutrition 100% Gold standard whey" - That's voted best WPI protein for 2008-2010 I believe and still holds up to its name. But any WPI will do the trick.

Don't worry about the sugar contents of it. All Whey proteins have sugar, since Lactose (Milk, cheese etc.) is a form of sugar.

Usually, when people are cutting fat - They take WPI as a meal replacement as well as a post-workout shake. You can also add Vitargo or some Oatmeal to the shake if you want to take advantage of a 'carbohydrate' kick to restore glycogen levels after a workout too.

Hope this answers your question!

The postexercise "anabolic window" is a highly misused & abused concept. Preworkout nutrition all but cancels the urgency, unless you're an endurance athlete with multiple glycogen-depleting events in a single day. Getting down to brass tacks, a relatively recent study (Power et al. 2009) showed that a 45g dose of whey protein isolate takes appx 50 minutes to cause blood AA levels to peak. Resulting insulin levels, which peaked at 40 minutes after ingestion, remained at elevations known to max out the inhibition of muscle protein breakdown (15-30 mU/L) for 120 minutes after ingestion. This dose takes 3 hours for insulin & AA levels to return to baseline from the point of ingestion. The inclusion of carbs to this dose would cause AA & insulin levels to peak higher & stay elevated above baseline even longer.

So much for the anabolic peephole & the urgency to down AAs during your weight training workout; they are already seeping into circulation (& will continue to do so after your training bout is done). Even in the event that a preworkout meal is skipped, the anabolic effect of the postworkout meal is increased as a supercompensatory response (Deldicque et al, 2010). Moving on, another recent study (Staples et al, 2010) found that a substantial dose of carbohydrate (50g maltodextrin) added to 25g whey protein was unable to further increase postexercise net muscle protein balance compared to the protein dose without carbs. Again, this is not to say that adding carbs at this point is counterproductive, but it certainly doesn't support the idea that you must get your lightning-fast postexercise carb orgy for optimal results.

To add to this... Why has the majority of longer-term research failed to show any meaningful differences in nutrient timing relative to the resistance training bout? It's likely because the body is smarter than we give it credit for. Most people don't know that as a result of a single training bout, the receptivity of muscle to protein dosing can persist for at least 24 hours: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21289204

Here's what you're not seeming to grasp: the "windows" for taking advantage of nutrient timing are not little peepholes. They're more like bay windows of a mansion. You're ignoring just how long the anabolic effects are of a typical mixed meal. Depending on the size of a meal, it takes a good 1-2 hours for circulating substrate levels to peak, and it takes a good 3-6 hours (or more) for everythng to drop back down to baseline.

You're also ignoring the fact that the anabolic effects of a meal are maxed out at much lower levels than typical meals drive insulin & amino acids up to. Furthermore, you're also ignoring the body's ability of anabolic (& fat-oxidative) supercompensation when forced to work in the absence of fuels. So, metaphorically speaking, our physiology basically has the universe mapped out and you're thinking it needs to be taught addition & subtraction.