You’ve taken your pre workout to amp up, you’ve nailed your
whey protein isolate for your day to day protein needs, what more could you need to fuel that body and build those muscles? A
post workout recovery supplement, that’s what.
Support during your workout as well as after your workout is essential to building a better body.
What happens to your body in the post workout recovery phase?
After your workout you have depleted your body of it’s natural stores. Here’s what’s happening on the inside:
- Your muscles have been torn due to the stress you’ve placed on them during your workout
- You have depleted stores of glycogen - what carbohydrates are stored in your muscles as
- Protein is breaking down within the muscle
What you need to do is arrest all these states, and start to reverse the changes. This is where your post workout supplement comes in.
Immediately following your workout, within the first 45 minutes, is when it’s most effective to put back into your body what you just took out of it. Of course this should start with rehydration, either with water or with added electrolytes for fast absorption, but there’s other ways to help your body too.
What’s in a post workout supplement and what does it do?
Beta-alanine
Also often included in your pre-workout, beta-alanine is essential for restoring your pH levels within the muscle to reasonable levels. Working out leads to lactic acid build up. Beta-alanine helps raise carnosine levels which restores the correct levels and helps with lean muscle gains.
Creatine monohydrate
Creatine monohydrate is a rapidly absorbing form of creatine that is perfect for your post workout recovery. Helping to increase ATP production in your muscle cells, it gets that energy right back into your muscles to prevent further break down that is occurring following your workout.
Glutamine
Glutamine is key for adding fuel back to your muscles to help you repair them faster. It’s also anti-catabolic, which works well if you are shredding.
BCAAs
BCAAs, or
branched chain amino acids, L-leucine, L-isoleucine, and L-valine, helps to build muscle protein. They are an essential part of your day if you’re going to be working out. But studies have shown that adding these
post workout gives better anabolic effects on your body than if you took them during a workout. 5g of BCAAs post workout can help supplement the BCAAs that you took
before your workout.
Carbs
Your muscles have just exhausted themselves of their
carbohydrate stores so you need to get them right back up again. Add around 35g of carbs (depending on your body type, age and metabolic capacity) to your post workout mix. Different brands have different types of carbohydrate mixes so shop around to determine what’s right for you.
Vitamin C
Get your antioxidants in the form of Vitamin C. Antioxidants help to protect your
immune system (important when you’ve just run yourself down), and protect yourself against free radicals that your body may be producing. A great effective protection, Vitamin C should be an essential ingredient as part of your post workout recovery.
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