Interesting link today:-
What to eat before, during and after your workouts and races
Read the article but be prepared to scroll down until it gets to the ketogenic section. It covers all sorts of fueling from high carb, low carb/high fat, keto, protein only and junk food. I found it interesting as it quotes direct amounts from experience.
The most comprehensive and relevant quote of the article:-
Quote:
The Post Workout Fueling Myth
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked too much about what to eat after your workout – and there’s a reason for that.
It’s likely that you’ve seen somewhere the legend of a mystical, magical fueling window. From exercise books, magazine articles and websites to nearly every resource that exists on sports nutrition, you’ll commonly read that “after you finish a workout, you have 20-60 minutes to replace precious energy by consuming a mix carbohydrates and proteins”.
Here’s what they don’t tell you:
In every study or experiment that has investigated the benefit of immediate post-workout nutrition replacement, subjects were fed after completing an exercise session that they had performed in a fasted or semi-starves state.
In other words, of course you’re going to benefit if you eat a meal after a workout in which you were completely depleted of energy. But how many of us actually roll out of bed in the morning, hop on a bicycle, and ride hard for 90 minutes to 2 hours with absolutely no fuel?
So here’s the deal: if you’ve actually had a pre-workout meal, or any other recent meal, there’s no crucial, do-or-die need to eat after your workout – especially if you’re still “burping up” that meal you ate before your exercise session. This is especially true if you have no other workouts planned for the day, since your body is able to totally replenish energy levels within just 8 hours of normal hunger-driven, real-food eating. When combined with what you learned about the health, recovery and longevity benefits of fasting from the chapter 26 Top Ways To Recover From Workouts and Injuries with Lightning Speed, it simply makes sense to fret much less about post-workout nutrition than most of us do.
But it does make sense to fuel within that 20-60 minute window if you:
A) Haven’t had anything to eat before your workout and you’re in a totally energy depleted state (such as an early morning hard session before breakfast) and/or
B) You’re going to be working out again within the next 8 hours.
C) You’re trying to pack on muscle as fast as possible (AKA eat every piece of real food in sight and lift heavy stuff).
In any of these cases, after your workout simply eat a big meal real food in the form of a smoothie or any of the quick and easy-to-digest meals from Chapter 11 and you’ll be set. Contrary to popular belief, the fat content in these meals does not slow down amino acid or glucose absorption. Ideally, you can combine any of those meals with my comprehensive recovery tips in Chapter 8.
Finally, if you really want to geek out on the nitty-gritty, scientific details of this post-workout nutrition discussion, then you should check out the free Rock Star Triathlete Academy article “Putting the Pre & Post Workout Nutrition Debate Into The Grave” and also listen to my guest recording of the Podcast Episode #73 at David Warden’s Tri-Talk.
The only proviso would be that we are on very low caloric intake already and, in order to preserve our metabolic rate, we need to replace the calories expended. If you can calculate these accurately I would certainly aim for 100% replenishment within the 24 hour food cycle.
The best reference I can find to the "bulletproof coffee" they quote is a cup of high-grade black coffee with coconut oil and butter. All the reading I've done suggests that caffeine is a stimulant that is designed for burst activity like weight lifting, not for endurance sports like long distance running or semi-burst activity like intervals in C25K training, as it both leads to both an elevated heart rate (and OMG doesn't it go up enough as it is???) and
*can* stimulate insulin production (who wants that when you're trying to get your body to USE the few carbs, rather than store them?).
