Exercise and Nutrient Timing

One issue that always comes up with folks looking to advance their health and fitness is what and how to eat to best fuel their workouts.  This becomes more important the farther along you are with respect to your goals, and it can be the deciding factor whether or not you successfully move past a plateau.   For example, how to lose those last 10 pounds that seem to just not budge, or perhaps how to increase your cardio by 15 more minutes or maybe how to move a bit higher in your repetition range or weight selection in your lunges.  Proper nutrition and some healthy/safe effort in your exercise are the keys to successfully advancing in your fitness goals.  In this context, food serves to both fuel your activities and recover from your activities.  Recovery is based on the fact that a sufficient amount of time for rest is required to make the muscle stronger, coupled with the nutritional restoration of depleted energy stores.

As you know, exercise takes energy to perform, and we can measure the intensity of the exercise depending on the effort required to perform it.  A leisurely walk is of far less intensity than the same amount of time given to resistance exercise.  Overall effort exerted mainly defines exercise intensity.  If you are interested in receiving the benefits of having good, solid lean muscle mass – muscle tone, good body shape, stronger bones, greater strength, even greater self-confidence, then this is where some time needs to be dedicated to building up your body.  As little as 15-30 minutes, 2-3x per week can make all the difference in the world.   Now, I don’t mean to imply bodybuilding as it is known today, but developing a lifestyle of what used to be known in the 19^th century as physical culture (click), where health and strength training were seen as integral to developing a well-rounded individual.  This involved numerous platforms of physique enhancement, from sports, dancing and folk games all the way to gymnastics, calisthenics and other structured programs.  Yoga, pilates, resistance bands all fit in to this description. 

The building up of your body requires a greater level of intensity than what your body has currently grown accustomed to.  This is the supreme law of adaption where the body will constantly adapt to achieve balance and stability in response to a changing environment.  If your body senses it is having to do things it has never done before, it is forced to adapt.  Thinking about it this way further, the body’s perfect adaption to a sedentary lifestyle coupled with caloric excess is to become overweight and even obese.  If it was not for the body’s ability to create fat tissue, we would die rather quickly because all this extra fuel would choke our metabolic engines.  On the same token, beginning an exercise program is a change in your body’s environment right?  And your body will adapt to that level greater intensity by losing weight (if your diet stays the same) and/or gaining strength and maybe even putting on some muscle.  After the adaptation occurs, it levels out once again and then you are forced to change your diet and/or exercise to keep your body changing.

Many training programs entice you into thinking you have to ‘confuse’ your muscles every workout to resist this adaptation response.   While you could take this route, in my opinion this adds unnecessary stress to your program by having to learn and think about new movement patterns which you have not developed the skill to do properly and this can and does lead to greater injury.  For the average individual, there are far more simpler and effective ways to avoid adaptive plateaus, which brings me back to my first point –  increasing intensity.

At the Body Sanctuary(click), we focus more on gradually increasing intensity in people’s workouts while sticking to basic, fundamental movement patterns which then work to provide a functional carryover to people’s lives.  The advantage to this is that your brain, through constant repetition, learns and locks in proper movement patterns.   This allows you to do simple things in life, safely and  effectively, such as walking up stairs and inclines, bending down and picking up grocery bags from the ground, lifting bags overhead in the airplane compartments, etc……things most of us end up not being able to do as we age.  The intensity is increased in our exercise programs by doing more work in a given amount of time (more repetitions and/or less rest between sets) and/or greater resistance in the movement, and/or moving the body through a greater range of motion.  All this requires more effort, right?  More effort even equates to greater caloric burn for those of you interested in weight loss.

Now, back to the main topic -  how to eat to maximize the benefit of exercise!  Understand this:  the body’s preferred fuel source for low intensity activities is fat, and for higher intensity activities is glucose.  Simply put, it is best for your health to reduce the amount of starchy, glucose-rich carbohydrate in the diet if your lifestyle and exercise plan does not call for high effort activity.  Conversely, if your lifestyle and exercise program does call for greater effort, it is just fine to fuel your exercise sessions with some starchy carbohydrate both before and after your workout and then minimizing it during other times.  It does not have to be a large amount either, but your body can utilize this starch/glucose much better timing it around your workout.  More and more scientific evidence is pointing out the dangers of having too much carbohydrate in the diet as it can prolong elevated circulating blood sugars.  I use this approach in clinical practice when dealing with many a health disorder.

So, the specifics:

• For low intensity activities and beginner programs, reduce starchy carbohydrates (grains, pasta, potatoes, fruit, beans) and eat low starch carbohydrates (green leafy vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, summer squash, zucchini )—- as well as proteins (beef, chicken, fish, eggs, turkey, lamb) and healthy fats (avocadoes, olive oil, coconut oil, macadamia nuts, almonds).  Look at my easy time veggie recipe (click) for ideas on cooking tasty vegetables.
  • No need to eat right before these activities due to their low intensity (though it won’t hurt you either and it may help for fat loss)
• For higher intensity activities, you can add more of the above mentioned starchy carbohydrates.  Make sure though there is enough protein though, as you will need the protein to help repair muscular damage and promote muscle protein synthesis if you are looking to gain some lean muscle mass.
  • If you are eating whole food meals, eat no closer than 1 hour before your exercise, preferably 90 min. to 2 hours so that you do not become nauseous while you exercise with good effort
  • If you are rushed and are hitting the gym right after work and you have not eaten since lunch, then it is advisable to drink a quick digesting protein drink in water, with a quick digesting carbohydrate like a piece of fruit
  • Perform your exercise, then have a whole food meal shortly afterwards.  This is where you can splurge a bit if it fits your program, to have some more sweets and treats when the special occasion comes around.  As Teryl says, “you gotta pay the lady!” meaning exercise to merit the planned indulgence in these treats.

 These are some general starting points supported by the scientific literature, and we always suggest to work with your doctor and/or health practitioner to find the right program for you.