Eat Prior to Workout? Protein Shakes? Thoughts??

I usually wake up at 5:30 to workout and don't normally eat beforehand...but maybe I should. I think I will try a tbsp of peanut butter or something to get me going. Usually afterward I make a home-made shake with Isopure protein powder. It's a little pricey, but has a lot of protein, zero fat and not high on cals. I mix with FF milk, ice, Splenda, a banana and a little peanut butter.

Hi butterfli! Yes, I feel the same way - I feel like I *should* be eating something so it's good to read your comments also.......I'm also doing a post-workout high protein shake which I LOVE! Thanks for your recipe - sounds YUMMY!!

I usually wake up at 5:30 to workout and don't normally eat beforehand...but maybe I should. I think I will try a tbsp of peanut butter or something to get me going. Usually afterward I make a home-made shake with Isopure protein powder. It's a little pricey, but has a lot of protein, zero fat and not high on cals. I mix with FF milk, ice, Splenda, a banana and a little peanut butter.

Hi butterfli! Yes, I feel the same way - I feel like I *should* be eating something so it's good to read your comments also.......I'm also doing a post-workout high protein shake which I LOVE! Thanks for your recipe - sounds YUMMY!!

There was a study that showed that runners who swished a glucose solution around in their mouths and then spit it out were able to run as far/strong/fast/etc. as runners who actually took in carbs prior to the run. Apparently, there's a mechanism that's triggered just by having the carbs in your mouth.

You don't need to eat before you workout, but what the heck, you can if you want.

If you're going to eat before you workout, really, anything other than carbs doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. PB, for example, will just sit in your stomach. What does that do for you? But you can argue that carbs will give you an energy boost.

Tiger, I agree with you, but post-workout nutrition is very important. The 1-hour window has been proven to death at this point, and eating with 20 minutes of finishing is even better. Some carbs and some protein; the carbs help the body metabolize the protein.

Shoot for 1g protein per lb of lean body mass; and .35g of fat per lb of body weight. Fill in the rest however you want. Use whatever meal frequency you feel best with. Don't worry about pre-workout or post workout nutrition. That's it.

This. Meal frequency and nutrient timing is 100% personal preference.

THE LAWS OF NUTRIENT TIMING
The first law of nutrient timing is: hitting your daily macronutrient targets is FAR more important than nutrient timing.
The second law of nutrient timing is: hitting your daily macronutrient targets is FAR more important than nutrient timing.
-Alan Aragon

Tiger, I agree with you, but post-workout nutrition is very important. The 1-hour window has been proven to death at this point, and eating with 20 minutes of finishing is even better. Some carbs and some protein; the carbs help the body metabolize the protein.

Obviously, if you're not eating well, or you have a post workout meal and then eat crap the rest of the day, or don't eat at all the rest of the day, you're not helping yourself. But eating right after a hard workout is definitely an important aspect of nutrition.

When speaking of nutrition for improving body composition or athletic performance, it’s crucial to realize there’s an underlying hierarchy of importance. At the top of the hierarchy of effects is total amount of the macronutrients by the end of the day. Below that — and I mean distantly below that — is the precise timing of those nutrients. With very few exceptions (i.e., the intermittent fasting crowd), athletes and active individuals eat multiple times per day, to the tune of at least four meals. Thus, the majority of their day is spent in the postprandial (fed) rather than a post-absorptive (fasted) state. The vast majority of nutrient timing studies have been done on overnight-fasted subjects put through glycogen depletion protocols, which obviously limits the applicability of the outcomes. Pre-exercise (and/or during-exercise) nutrient intake often has a lingering carry-over effect into the post-exercise period. Throughout the day, there’s a constant overlap of meal digestion and nutrient absorption. For this reason, the effectiveness of nutrient timing does not require a high degree of precision. -Alan Aragon, Alan Aragon’s Research Review, January 2008

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

Tiger, I agree with you, but post-workout nutrition is very important. The 1-hour window has been proven to death at this point, and eating with 20 minutes of finishing is even better. Some carbs and some protein; the carbs help the body metabolize the protein.

O RLY? I confess that I used to go around believing this and even preaching it. My physique and strength have improved leaps and bounds since those days though. There might be some minuscule advantage to eat right after a work out, but it's so minuscule as to be insignificant - especially to people who are new to all this. The anabolic window is really more like 24 hours, not 1 hour.

Sorry, sounds like you're actually saying that eating within an hour of your workout was actually holding you back? And you suddenly exploded into success when you started waiting 24 hours?

Shoot for 1g protein per lb of lean body mass; and .35g of fat per lb of body weight. Fill in the rest however you want. Use whatever meal frequency you feel best with. Don't worry about pre-workout or post workout nutrition. That's it.

This. Meal frequency and nutrient timing is 100% personal preference.

THE LAWS OF NUTRIENT TIMING
The first law of nutrient timing is: hitting your daily macronutrient targets is FAR more important than nutrient timing.
The second law of nutrient timing is: hitting your daily macronutrient targets is FAR more important than nutrient timing.
-Alan Aragon

Tiger, I agree with you, but post-workout nutrition is very important. The 1-hour window has been proven to death at this point, and eating with 20 minutes of finishing is even better. Some carbs and some protein; the carbs help the body metabolize the protein.

Obviously, if you're not eating well, or you have a post workout meal and then eat crap the rest of the day, or don't eat at all the rest of the day, you're not helping yourself. But eating right after a hard workout is definitely an important aspect of nutrition.

From Alan Aragon:

When speaking of nutrition for improving body composition or athletic performance, it’s crucial to realize there’s an underlying hierarchy of importance. At the top of the hierarchy of effects is total amount of the macronutrients by the end of the day. Below that — and I mean distantly below that — is the precise timing of those nutrients. With very few exceptions (i.e., the intermittent fasting crowd), athletes and active individuals eat multiple times per day, to the tune of at least four meals. Thus, the majority of their day is spent in the postprandial (fed) rather than a post-absorptive (fasted) state. The vast majority of nutrient timing studies have been done on overnight-fasted subjects put through glycogen depletion protocols, which obviously limits the applicability of the outcomes. Pre-exercise (and/or during-exercise) nutrient intake often has a lingering carry-over effect into the post-exercise period. Throughout the day, there’s a constant overlap of meal digestion and nutrient absorption. For this reason, the effectiveness of nutrient timing does not require a high degree of precision. -Alan Aragon, Alan Aragon’s Research Review, January 2008

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

Tiger, I agree with you, but post-workout nutrition is very important. The 1-hour window has been proven to death at this point, and eating with 20 minutes of finishing is even better. Some carbs and some protein; the carbs help the body metabolize the protein.

O RLY? I confess that I used to go around believing this and even preaching it. My physique and strength have improved leaps and bounds since those days though. There might be some minuscule advantage to eat right after a work out, but it's so minuscule as to be insignificant - especially to people who are new to all this. The anabolic window is really more like 24 hours, not 1 hour.

Sorry, sounds like you're actually saying that eating within an hour of your workout was actually holding you back? And you suddenly exploded into success when you started waiting 24 hours?

No, it wasn't holding me back. It was just an unnecessary constraint to worry about. I don't wait 24 hours. I eat all the time. I just make sure that at the end of the day my numbers look good, as many days as possible, and don't spend a single moment worrying about optimum meal timing or anything of the sort.

If one was going to worry about making something optimal, I would apply that energy into making sure training is optimal.

How is eating after a workout a constraint?

Which leads us towards an ideal of post-workout nutrition. First and foremost I should point out that if you train and don’t eat anything afterwards (and this assumes you haven’t eaten a few hours before), the body will actually remain in a net catabolic state. That is, protein breakdown will be greater than protein synthesis. That’s bad. But only really applies if you’re training first thing in the morning after a fast (how many studies are done) and haven’t eaten anything.

But let’s assume that you eat something following training. Should it be protein, carbs, both, or some other combination? First let’s look at the single feeding studies. That is, let’s say that you could only choose one or the other following training, which should you choose. The answer there is clearly protein alone which will be vastly superior to carbohydrate alone. Because while consuming carbohydrates will decrease protein breakdown, only protein will increase protein synthesis (and provide the building blocks for building new muscle).

And this is also where a rather silly idea has come from in the post-workout recommendations. Folks will often state that “You only need protein post-workout because carbs don’t effect protein synthesis.” This is true but ignores the impact of decreasing protein breakdown on net protein gain.

Certainly increasing protein synthesis appears to be relatively more important than decreasing protein breakdown but the simple fact is that you get the biggest overall effect if you target both at the same time. Which means a combination of protein and carbohydrates.

You should eat before, eat something as soon as you can after (carbs and protein), and then eat again within 3 hours of that second breakfast - 2 rice cakes and cottage cheese, or piece of fruit / nuts, etc.

Dude, that is a seriously sill example...