Getting the body you want is a journey. Everything from how you plan your workouts to how you plan your meals can contribute to your health, your satisfaction, and your success. It is important to find the proper nutrition to fuel your workouts and make your recovery more effective. This becomes even more important when it comes to snacking. While it’s easy to plan our meals, sometimes we find ourselves deep into post-workout snacks, and before we have time to think, we’ve provided our bodies with the wrong type of post-workout fuel. This is where high protein snacks come in. Simply being prepared with the right snacks for muscle repair can do wonders for your diet, your overall health, and your workout progress.
Why do I need a high-protein snack?
You’ve finished your workout, whether it was strength or cardio focused, you’re ready to refuel and move on with the rest of your day knowing that you’ve invested in your health and fitness. Following a workout, however, you may be craving a number of things. If you’ve trained your gut, you’re probably craving proteins and fats. Red meats, sweet potatoes, avocado, or even a meal like tacos may be what your body asks for.
If your gut is not yet ready for a post-exercise diet, you may find yourself craving high-carbohydrate foods. Desserts and pastries fall into this category. Because of this, we want to plan our nutritional intake around our workout.
During your workout, your body needs energy, and there are two primary areas that your body gets energy: fats, and carbohydrates. Carbohydrates serve as fast-access energy for the body. If your body does not use the calories in carbs, then it converts them to fats for storage. If there are no carbohydrates to access, then the body utilizes fats for energy (which contain twice as many calories-per-gram as carbs). Because of this, the time for carbohydrates is before a workout. This gives you a boost and allows you to avoid crashing mid-workout.
Ideally, your body also enters a fat burning stage during your workout, or towards the end, this is where your post-workout routine becomes important.
Throughout your workout, you are performing micro tears on your muscles, and creating a calorie deficiency. If performing aerobic exercise (running, swimming, cycling, etc.), you are focusing less on tearing your muscles and more on conditioning your cardiovascular system—although both still occur. This demands a large caloric use during your workout, and can switch your metabolic system over to a fat-burning process. If you quickly reintroduce a large amount of carbohydrates to your system, you negate this fat burning process. However, eating high protein snacks will maintain your fat burning state, while still meeting your body’s caloric needs.
In the case of anaerobic exercise such as heavy weight lifting, dry land strength training, and manual labor, you are creating a high number of micro tears in your muscles. The human body requires two things to repair these tears: energy, and protein. Because of this, supplying your body with a high protein snack gives it the resources to effectively repair your muscles, and allows it to enter a fat burning state for energy to perform the repairs.
It’s a lot of information, but selecting a quality high protein snack can make or break your workout and nutritional routines.
Selecting your post-workout snack
Now that you know what you want before and after your workout, you need to select the best post-workout snacks for you, and make sure you’re prepared for your aprés lift. You may consider making your own post-workout snacks, or purchasing excellent high protein snacks, such as those on myfitfoods.com.
Your first question when deciding what foods to get post-workout, is how hungry are you? Do you want a small meal, or something on the lighter side. If you tend to workout extremely hard and need more food in order to get through your day, consider something like a wrap, tacos, or even a high protein yogurt. All of these options will quickly restore your necessary calories and help you effectively repair muscle fibers. If you’re looking for something on the lighter side, a protein bar, bite, or cookie can be the best option for you. Finding or creating a protein cookie can also be a great way to quell your post-workout sweet tooth.
What’s most important about your post-workout snack is that you feel good, and that your body heals. It’s okay to try a number of different snacks to find out what makes you feel the best, gives you workout and body confidence, and leaves you feeling energetic for the rest of your day.
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