Eating Before and After your Workout

Eating Before and After your Workout

If you’re working out to stay in shape, good for you! Living an active lifestyle is important and crucial for your health. However, eating well is also crucial. A lot of people wonder about what foods to eat before they work out and which foods are the best to eat after.

It’s important that you eat before you workout. Why? Because working out on an empty stomach can cause your body to draw protein from your muscles instead of from the food you’ve eaten. Plus, exercising without eating can leave you without enough energy to get through your workout. If you exercise without eating, you don’t feed your muscles and you may deplete your energy stores before your workout is done. This can limit your ability to exercise and make it more difficult to build muscle and burn calories.

Here are a few tips for foods to eat before and after working out.

The first thing to note is that there isn’t necessarily a “perfect meal” or a meal plan that you need to follow in order to get a good workout. However, there are guidelines that you can pay attention to.

Eating Before Exercise

Before you exercise, eat foods that are low in fat. Foods that are high in fat take longer to digest and this process takes energy away from your muscles. In addition, high fat foods are also likely to give you a stomachache, which makes exercising more difficult. For this same reason, avoid foods that your body might not be used to since they could make you sick.

Choose foods that have moderate amounts of healthy proteins and carbohydrates as well as ones that are low in fiber. Pick complex carbohydrates over simple ones when possible. Good choices include brown rice, beans, oatmeal, hummus, bananas, Greek yogurt, fresh fruit, almond butter, etc.

Eating After Exercise

After you exercise, try to eat within 20-60 minutes. This allows your body to use the food that you eat to recover from your workout. You should try to consume both carbohydrates and protein during this time. Options include chocolate milk, quinoa, grilled chicken, salmon, hummus, eggs and other such foods.

Staying Hydrated

It’s very important that you stay hydrated when you’re exercising. The best way to stay hydrated is to drink water before, during and after exercise. For most people and more exercises, drinking water is enough. However, if you’re exercising for more than an hour, a sports drink may help. These drinks contain carbs and sodium, which your body loses during exercise. However, you’ll want to avoid sports drinks that are high in sugar.

What you eat can make your workout more enjoyable and more effective. You don’t need to fret about specific foods or meeting perfect ratios of carbs to protein, or anything else like that. Eating healthy food in moderation is often enough.