WHAT TO EAT AND DRINK AROUND EXERCISE
Last Sciencecast, I covered when to eat around training, and the (limited) virtues of training fasted. Today, I’d like to offer you some guidance on what to eat specifically around training.
The perfect plate:
For this, I think it’s first important to remember what you’re aiming to eat in each meal, regardless of training:
Protein: 1 palm sized amount
Veg: 1-2 fist sized amount
Carbohydrates: 1-2 cupped hands (in most meals)
Fat: 1 thumb sized amount (in most meals). Here’s a reminder of what that normal plate might look like …
So, how does this change around exercise?
Protein:
Protein helps your body repair and adapt to exercise, so it’s definitely important to eat it during the day that you exercise. That said, I’d recommend having 1 palm of protein at each meal (around every 3-4 hours), regardless of whether you’re training or not so the targets might not actually change that much.
Perhaps if it’s a particularly challenging session, then you might want to achieve closer to 1.5 palms of protein. However, as we covered last week, your body does become more sensitive to protein in the full 24-hour period after a session, so it can use whatever protein you have ingested more effectively anyway (note that there is always a limit to the amount of protein your body can absorb in a certain time frame).
Carbohydrates:
Have you ever heard the expression, “Carbs make you go, protein makes you grow”? Think of carbohydrates like petrol in your car, if you’re doing a lot of driving, or in our case exercise, you need more fuel, or carbs. Use carbohydrates on more of a sliding scale depending on the demands of your day and the intensity and duration of the exercise:
A fuelling plate (tough session): 1.5-2 handfuls per meal – have before and after challenging sessions and/or on busy days
A maintenance plate (normal session): 0.5-1 handfuls per meal – have before and after light sessions and/or on more sedentary days
My podcast playlist: “Food as Medicine” by Ella Mills
“Tim Spector, a world expert on gut health, reveals the at-home muffin test that’ll help you understand how healthy your gut is, why food is medicine and how to improve our health”.
Fluids:
Finally, let’s not forget about fluids. On an average day, we should be aiming for approximately 1.6-2 litres of fluid per day and we should increase this to match our exercise. If we’re being “sciencey” about it (and this is the Scienecast, after all!), then you should weigh yourself before and after exercise. Every 1kg of weight loss is 1 litre of fluid lost (mainly in sweat), and you would aim to drink 1.5x the amount you’ve lost, in this case 1.5 litres. There is a slightly easier way to do this though: Drink regularly throughout the day (OK, easier for most people), drink “to thirst” during exercise and monitor the colour of your urine, aiming for a 1-3 on the chart below.
Remember the 3 ‘R’s of recovery:
Repair – Protein
Replenish – Carbohydrates
Rehydrate – Fluids
TAKE-HOMES:
Hopefully, you can see that despite quite a lot of hype and global marketing campaigns, you don’t actually need to change too much of what you eat around your training, especially if you are in a regular exercise routine and not training for high-performance or professionally. Just remember to increase carbohydrate and fluid portions to match the duration and difficulty of the session, and a half extra portion of protein if you’re training hard.