How to refuel after training

The most important element in getting faster and progressing your performance is to get the right balance between stimulus and recovery. You obviously have to do the training necessary to get stronger and faster but it won’t count for anything if you fail to get adequate recovery and absorb the load that you’re putting your body through. 

‘You don’t get faster when you train. You get faster when you recover.’ 

There are many factors to consider when looking at how to recover properly from training and get the most out of the stress you have undergone. One of the most critical components of recovery is refuelling. What you eat, or don’t eat, after training will have a significant effect on how you recover. Eating the right type of recovery fuel after training is completely within your control. The aim of this article is to help you understand what you should eat after training. 

 The Basics:

 This section goes through the core elements of recovery fuels and the basics that everyone should be practicing. 

 After Hard or Intense Sessions:

 Doing a hard training session will require carbohydrate to be utilised for energy. As you’ll know from the article ‘How to fuel your sessions’, there’s a limited amount of carbohydrate stored in the body as muscle glycogen. Hard training sessions will usually deplete your glycogen stores. Muscle glycogen stores can take as long as 96 hours to return to normal if you don’t follow the right recovery protocol. This is why many athletes find it difficult to perform well for a couple of days after a hard session. They simply haven’t got enough carbohydrate available to perform at high intensities. 

Fortunately, there’s a lot that you can do here in order to improve your ability to recover from hard training and perform higher intensity training on consecutive days. It’s even possible to perform more than one hard session in a day if the appropriate recovery methods are used. 

 Timing:

 The faster you replenish what you’ve used up in a hard session the better. Ideally you should have a meal or recovery drink within 20minutes of finishing. It is always best to have a meal if you have time but many of us live our lives on the go and we usually have to be somewhere after we’ve finished training. This is when a recovery drink is incredibly convenient and enables us to replenish our energy stores when we’re under time pressure. It just takes a little bit of planning first to make sure we’ve got that ready or packed in our bag. 

 Having a meal or recovery drink immediately after a session will significantly improve muscles glycogen re-synthesis. This should then be followed up my another more significant meal in the following 2 hours. We convert carbohydrate back to muscle glycogen faster in this time window and that’s why timing is so important. Delaying carbohydrate intake after a hard session won’t have any benefit and will inhibit high intensity exercise in the immediate and near future. 

 Following this protocol can actually allow you do complete more than one hard session in a day. You should be able to get up to 80-90% of your glycogen stores replenished in 4 hours if you consume adequate amounts of carbohydrate post exercise. Following this strategy should definitely make it possible to complete hard exercise on consecutive days. Your muscle glycogen stores should be back to normal within 24-48 hours. As said above, it could be 4 days before they’re back to normal if you fail to re-fuel. If you do have to complete 2 hard sessions in a day, look at the timing of sessions in a day alongside your food intake so that you can optimise your performance around these timing windows. 

 What should this re-fuelling look like?

 You want to have a meal, recovery drink or self-made shake that has about 15-20g’s of protein and 3 times as much carbohydrate (~50-70g’s of CHO). It is well established in sports science that consuming carbohydrate and protein in a 3:1 ratio is the optimal amount to promote muscle glycogen re-synthesis. There is no point in taking more than 20g’s of PRO as you simply won’t absorb it as we can’t process more than 20g’s at a time, irrespective of how much you weigh. There’s no best brand of recovery shake here. Just find something you like the taste of and meets this brief. You can easily make this kind of shake yourself. 

 Your second ‘recovery meal’ within the 2-hour window should be similar in macronutrients but will probably look like a more balanced meal. Aim to consume fruit, vegetables and high-quality food sources in this meal. It’s normal to not want something like this after completing a hard session. This is because the blood has been diverted from our gut to our working muscles so we can find it difficult to stomach a meal. That’s why a shake can be particularly useful for people as it’s easy on the stomach. Making sure our body gets the nutrients it needs in this second meal is vitally important. 

 I think it’s important to note that many athletes may not think about this process at all and many completely overthink it. As we’ve said in other articles, there’s no magic bullet here and there’s no wonder product out there. What pays off is consistently doing the basics right and adhering to these principles as much as possible. Failing to replenish what you have used up will lead to burn out, plateauing and a downward spiral in some circumstances. Equally, being totally obsessive over it can lead to stress, anxiety and wasted energy. 

 After easy or moderate sessions:

 Easier or moderate intensity sessions shouldn’t deplete carbohydrate stores so there isn’t the same need to replenish energy stores like after a hard session. It’s best to consume a light snack after these sessions like some fruit or have your normal meal if you happen to do a session like this before a planned meal. 

 It is important to rehydrate and this also applies to harder sessions. You’ll know more about this if you’ve read our article about hydration but to recap; water moves to the highest concentrations of salt, so simply drinking water after exercise isn’t as effective as drinking fluid with the right amount of sodium in it. I’ll usually consume about 500ml of Precision Hydration 1500 after a session of any intensity if I’ve been sweating a lot and I’ve been training for more than 35-40mins. This just makes sure I’m rehydrated faster and the next training session won’t be affected by dehydration.  

 If you do want to take things to the next level:

 Now I know I said that we shouldn’t obsess over anything but there are some more advanced recovery methods that you can employ if you want to take your performance to the next level. Some of the science here is sketchy but there is good evidence for a lot of it and a lot of elites practice these methods. 

 Purposely not eating after you’ve trained:

 You should always refuel after high intensity sessions but there is some merit in not eating after some strategically placed sessions that can be up to a moderate intensity. The basis for this is as follows: Doing an easy to moderate intensity session after a high fat meal or being fasted can lead to an increase in fat metabolism. Not eating after the session can increase the amount of adaptations we go through, on a metabolic level, and potentially improve our performance. Consuming carbohydrate after the exercise in this situation can switch off some of the pathways that will cause adaptations, like mitochondria production. There’s also some evidence that following this protocol can improve the rate of muscle glycogen re-synthesis when we do consume carbohydrate after intense sessions and therefore make us recover faster when we need to. 

 So, there is some merit in doing this but it must be carefully planned and it takes a significant level of compliance from the athlete when completing their programme. Doing this in the wrong way could easily be counterproductive and be detrimental to future performance. 

 Avoid Antioxidants:

 This may come as a surprise but consuming antioxidants after exercise could actually be detrimental to performance and here’s why. Free radicals are known as reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS can be harmful to cells and the functional capacity of them. These ROS get produced as a result of metabolic processes and exercise will cause the production of ROS. 

 It would seem natural to think that taking antioxidants after exercise would be a good thing as this would help to combat the ROS production. This could potentially benefit recovery and improve performance because of the associated link between ROS and cell damage. 

However, here’s the issue with thinking something; research has shown that ROS from exercise acts as a signalling molecule which can actually bring about important physiological adaptations. A transient increase in ROS, post exercise, has been shown to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis. Mitochondria are essential to exercise performance and improving mitochondria function is a key goal of training. 

 Therefore, consuming antioxidants post exercise could reduce the amount of adaptations we get. It should be very clear that completely avoiding antioxidants is not what is being recommended here. It’s simply consuming them at alternative times to immediately after you’re trained.

 Additional Recovery Aids:

 Cherry Active is a tart cherry concentrate. This is very effective for reducing inflammation and can be beneficial for athletes who need to recover quickly between big training sessions or ahead of races. This should be used at the right time though because inflammation is a process that is necessary to make us adapt and improve. Blunting inflammation the whole time can actually reduce the amount of adaptations that occur. This is why having an ice bath after every session would be incredibly flawed. 

 Consuming caffeine with your recovery meal or drink after training can increase muscle glycogen re-synthesis. This should be music to most cyclists’ ears. Maybe you should consider finishing your ride at the café as opposed to stopping at it half way. There’s a lot of evidence to support this and some studies show significant improvements in muscle glycogen re-synthesis after consuming caffeine alongside a recovery drink or meal. 

 To conclude:

 Hopefully this gives you some helpful information about how to get more out of the hard work you do on a daily basis. It’s worth saying again, there’s no magic bullet and there’s a lot of nonsense out there that’s very misleading. Do the simple things right and the results will come. Please get in touch if you have any questions on this.