Post workout / protein supplements?

PLuKE

Looking for some advice.

I want to improve my performance on the bike, and of late I have found my thigh muscles are fatiguing quicker.

I use electrolyte tablets in my water when out cycling.

I have seen post workout supplements and also protein powders.

Can anybody give guidance? I want to build the muscles up and stop them giving up!

I cycle from 20-40 miles 3-5 per week.

Many thanks
Luke

sub55

a fool and his money

frisbee

sub55 wrote:

a fool and his money

Buy's computer and posts sarcastic shite?

OP the theory is that you should have some protein and carbohydrate within 30 mins of finishing exercise. It could be a meal, it could be a recovery drink or it could just be a glass of chocolate milk.

kajjal

I just have a chocolate milkshake as well which also stops my legs aching a little the following day. Unless you are really pushing it a normal healthy diet will sort the rest out.

bahzob

As above. It's not theory though, it's a well established fact. When you exercise hard you damage your muscles.

When you stop exercising your body reacts by repairing the damage. In fact it does not just repair it makes them better than before to reflect the nature of the damage caused. This is how training makes you fitter.

To effect the repairs requires protein, since this is what the muscles are made of. Carbohydrates also help in 3 ways:
- The level of blood sugar is one signal the body uses to recognise that exercise has stopped and it can start repairs.
- They help in transporting the protein to the cells where the repairs will take place
- Hard exercise requires carbohydrates, The body stores these so it can exercise hard when needed, in the form of glycogen. Training depletes this so after exercise it needs to be replenished.

Immediately after exercise your body is especially sensitive to all the above and remains so for around 2-4 hours.

So eating a small amount of protein and carbohydrate is advised. Ideally both should be as rapidly digested as possible so that the body quickly recognises the stress has stopped and it can start recoverying. Hence why "recovery" products contain sugar and whey protein.

However any form of carb/protein is fine, especially if you are not doing very hard back to back sessions.

All this being said if trying too control weight its probably best to just eat normally and not take in extra calories as "recovery" as it can do more harm than good.

PLuKE

bahzob wrote:

As above. It's not theory though, it's a well established fact. When you exercise hard you damage your muscles.

When you stop exercising your body reacts by repairing the damage. In fact it does not just repair it makes them better than before to reflect the nature of the damage caused. This is how training makes you fitter.

To effect the repairs requires protein, since this is what the muscles are made of. Carbohydrates also help in 3 ways:
- The level of blood sugar is one signal the body uses to recognise that exercise has stopped and it can start repairs.
- They help in transporting the protein to the cells where the repairs will take place
- Hard exercise requires carbohydrates, The body stores these so it can exercise hard when needed, in the form of glycogen. Training depletes this so after exercise it needs to be replenished.

Immediately after exercise your body is especially sensitive to all the above and remains so for around 2-4 hours.

So eating a small amount of protein and carbohydrate is advised. Ideally both should be as rapidly digested as possible so that the body quickly recognises the stress has stopped and it can start recoverying. Hence why "recovery" products contain sugar and whey protein.

However any form of carb/protein is fine, especially if you are not doing very hard back to back sessions.

All this being said if trying too control weight its probably best to just eat normally and not take in extra calories as "recovery" as it can do more harm than good.

Thank you for the insight! Some good information there for me to take on board and better understand the body.

I am trying to shift body weight at this time, no diet or fad, just trying to eat better in general.

As you said, the Recovery supplements are good, but the weight part not so much, I guess there no such thing as a perfect product.

But I like the fact that a recovery supplement is easy to do, and no food intake. Adding to the fact it's going to help fix and build the muscles. I wouldn't take this product every ride, maybe every other to try and keep weight down.

Luke

BenderRodriguez

PLuKE wrote:

I use electrolyte tablets in my water when out cycling.

Why? If the idea is to avoid cramp, then you may have fallen foul of a myth. For one, if the depletion of electrolytes led to cramp it would affect all the muscles in the body, rather than just those that are working hard. Also, studies show that electrolyte concentration in the body actually rises as a result of sweating when exercising.

http://sportsscientists.com/2007/11/mus ... ps-part-i/

bahzob wrote:

Immediately after exercise your body is especially sensitive to all the above and remains so for around 2-4 hours.

It could be that the existence of a post-exercise 'recovery window' is yet another myth fostered on everyone by the 'experts', who have drawn unjustifiably generalised conclusions from studies that only really apply to specific situations, such as exercising in a fasted state. Having a tuna sandwich before you train might be just as an effective way of ensuring protein synthesis and repair as eating one in the supposed post-exercise 'window'. That said, starting to eat as soon as you can after extended exercise is probably still a good idea, simply because you will have longer to process that food than if you wait till later.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 3-10-5.pdf

phreak

frisbee wrote:

sub55 wrote:

a fool and his money

Buy's computer and posts sarcastic shite?

OP the theory is that you should have some protein and carbohydrate within 30 mins of finishing exercise. It could be a meal, it could be a recovery drink or it could just be a glass of chocolate milk.

That theory only applies if you're going to exercise again within 24 hours. If the OP is doing less than that (which appears the case), then their regular diet should be fine for getting all the nutrients required for recovery.

frisbee

phreak wrote:

frisbee wrote:

sub55 wrote:

a fool and his money

Buy's computer and posts sarcastic shite?

OP the theory is that you should have some protein and carbohydrate within 30 mins of finishing exercise. It could be a meal, it could be a recovery drink or it could just be a glass of chocolate milk.

That theory only applies if you're going to exercise again within 24 hours. If the OP is doing less than that (which appears the case), then their regular diet should be fine for getting all the nutrients required for recovery.

5 times a week is potentially 4 days a week when you are cycling the next day...

sloppyschleckonds

frisbee wrote:

phreak wrote:

frisbee wrote:

sub55 wrote:

a fool and his money

Buy's computer and posts sarcastic shite?

OP the theory is that you should have some protein and carbohydrate within 30 mins of finishing exercise. It could be a meal, it could be a recovery drink or it could just be a glass of chocolate milk.

That theory only applies if you're going to exercise again within 24 hours. If the OP is doing less than that (which appears the case), then their regular diet should be fine for getting all the nutrients required for recovery.

5 times a week is potentially 4 days a week when you are cycling the next day...

Either way, a sensible diet should be fine for getting all the nutrients required for recovery.

hypster

The way I look at it food is food - you still have to buy it whether it is a piece of chicken, a tuna sandwich or a protein shake. Personally I look forward to a protein smoothie at the end of a long ride which kicks off recovery and helps rehydration. There seems no real reason to delay the recovery process even if there is no need to ride next day.

Everyone has to decide what is to their taste and works for them.

Grill

Frijj has the perfect 3:1 carb to protein ratio. Chocolate tastes best.

simon_e

PLuKE wrote:

I want to build the muscles up and stop them giving up!

I cycle from 20-40 miles 3-5 per week.

Train more. The lack of protein shakes is not the problem.

More specifically, I'd suggest you ride harder on your hard rides and less on the ones in between so you can recover.

By all means try protein supplements if you have enough money but for most people real food does the same job. I don't think electrolyte tablets are much of a benefit either but lots of people are seduced by the 'science' in the glossy ads.

diy

general guidance is carbs before and protein after, unless you are training for an endurance event. However the answer may not be in your food, but specific exercises. Try some HIIT training or do some quad specific training e.g. squats to build the muscle.

A simple (but painful option) would be to pre-fatigue the quads before going on a training ride to get the muscle to react and adapt with growth. Obviously this will make things worse in the short term, but should build stronger quads fairly quickly.

bahzob

diy wrote:

A simple (but painful option) would be to pre-fatigue the quads before going on a training ride to get the muscle to react and adapt with growth. Obviously this will make things worse in the short term, but should build stronger quads fairly quickly.

Weird advice that I have never heard before and seems to make no sense if your objective is to become a better cyclist. You use far more than your quads to ride. If you pre-fatigue them so that they fail quickly all the other muscles and associated physiological systems will surely not be stressed much and so not adapt?

Also the adaptation will, as you say, be caused by the exercise you use to pre-fatigue. Which may make you a better weight lifter but not necessarily a better cyclist as the forces that need to be applied by the quads to lift a heavy barbell for a few reps are quite different from those that need to be applied to turn a pedal hundreds of time.

So you end up with great quads but are slower and tire quicker than a skinny wimp who trains in a balanced manner. e..g the legs of most every pro road cyclist which look like pipe cleaners compared to the average bod.

Only exception I can possibly imagine is if you are an out and out track sprinter who relies who needs a few seconds of a max power and nothing more. Even then not convinced by this, think separate strength building workouts would be more effective.

imposter2.0

diy wrote:

Obviously this will make things worse in the short term, but should build stronger quads fairly quickly.

As Bahzob says above - why on earth would you need 'stronger' quads..?

JayKosta

This is a good article about the use of protein for recovery after exercise -
http://www.ajcn.org/content/89/1/161.full.pdf+html

My view is that use of a 'recovery item' after an exercise session is never a bad thing - maybe it will help, but it won't ever do any harm.
For me (an 'old guy'), a limiting factor is how much time I need for recovery after a hard session. Finding a useful blend of recovery items is important if I want to exercise again the next day, versus being fatigued and needing to take a full rest day.

I use a mixture of whey protein and Gatorade because it is inexpensive, and convenient.

Jay Kosta
Endwell NY USA

ric/rstsport

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19997018

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12617691

briantrumpet

Imposter wrote:

diy wrote:

Obviously this will make things worse in the short term, but should build stronger quads fairly quickly.

As Bahzob says above - why on earth would you need 'stronger' quads..?

Where's Dennis when you need him? He'd clear it up in a trice.

imposter2.0

Don't. There merest mention of his name is usually enough to make him re-appear...

briantrumpet

Imposter wrote:

Don't. There merest mention of his name is usually enough to make him re-appear...

I just revisited the "squats and leg presses" thread, for old times' sake.

It's OK. I feel better now. Just had a funny turn there.

sloppyschleckonds

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19997018

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12617691

Didn't read the whole document, but do they recommend the chocolate or banana flavour?

markp80

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19997018

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12617691

Did I read these two correctly? -
No point taking protein pst ride, as it makes no difference.
No point taking glucose (carb) post ride as you can't absorb it quick enough and even when you do, it goes to the liver and fat rather than the exercised muscles?

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of this nutrition stuff.....

MarkP

JayKosta

MarkP80 wrote:

...
Did I read these two correctly?
...

=========================
I don't think so....

The one about carb intake seems to verify that soon after exercise is good. But too much intake isn't helpful.

The one about carb & protein is confusing because it has the riders drinking carbs, and carbs + protein DURING the 2 hour warm-up session, and THEN doing a 1 hour TT with no mention of what drinking was done during the TT, or AFTER the TT.
Also for the test of 'recovery' 24 hours after the test session, there is no mention of how well the riders would typically perform without having done either of the carb / protein intakes. If the riders typically recover quickly - say in 12 - 18 hours without doing anything special, then it is not surprising that there isn't much difference after 24 hours.

If you are still fatigued when you want to do the next exercise session, you have 2 options -
1) wait longer to do the next session
2) find a way to recover more quickly

Jay Kosta
Endwell NY USA

bobmcstuff

MarkP80 wrote:

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19997018

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12617691

Did I read these two correctly? -
No point taking protein pst ride, as it makes no difference.
No point taking glucose (carb) post ride as you can't absorb it quick enough and even when you do, it goes to the liver and fat rather than the exercised muscles?

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of this nutrition stuff.....

MarkP

No, it says "may therefore limit the amount of glucose available to maximise muscle glycogen synthesis rates" not "will". Additionally just because "a large part" may go to liver/fat that isn't the same as "all". The rest of the abstract seems to suggest that ingesting carbohydrate is likely a good thing on the whole ("When carbohydrate ingestion is delayed by several hours, this may lead to ~50% lower rates of muscle glycogen synthesis"), although there's no point ingesting stacks because there's a limit to how quickly you can absorb it (seems common sense).

BUT there is no detail on methodology, sample size, even what sort of study it was (is it just a literature review?) so without getting a look at the full paper it's hard to say much more about it. And given how that abstract is written I'm not sure I could cope with trawling through the full paper.

Although there's enough detail on the first study to see that it was pretty rigorous, it did only look at 12 people and without knowing exactly what "trained" means in this study it's difficult to say what conclusions we should draw from it. Given it was a relatively short duration exercise (2hrs low intensity followed by a 1hr time trial), we could say that based on this study taking carb + protein during your warmup doesn't seem to improve TT performance. However this thread is about having protein straight after exercise, and this study is about having carbs and protein during your warmup/exercise so it's not actually all that relevant to the OP.

bahzob

Couple of things:

- Training Peaks hosted an excellent webinar on endurance nutrition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnCmTTNx_Jo&index=1&list=WL It is quite long and a bit pedestrian but it has a wealth of useful information backed up by various scientific studies. It gives very specific information on exactly what quantity of macronutrients should be consumed when and why. As the title suggests one key take-home point is that it is not just a question of "what" and "how much" you eat but also, crucially, when. Which is sort of the point of the OP and the cause of some of the confusion above.

- From the vast majority of material on exercise+nutrition you may get the misleading impression that all the energy demands for exercise come entirely from carbohydrate and fat. In fact protein also accounts for a small but not insignificant amount, around 10%-15%. The reason for this omission is down to testing protocols. It is relatively easy to measure fat/CHO using a respirometer and this can be combined with other tests like VO2max. Measuring protein requires a quite different and more complicated technique. Initial attempts to do this simply using urine analysis were flawed which resulted in the misinformation that protein contribution is negligible. Later more sophisticated measures yielded the 10-15% figure but also found the amount varied far less as a function of exercise intensity than fat/CHO. All this does not mean much if you exercise infrequently and/or for short durations <2 hours. In this case the typical western diet has more than enough protein and you only need to concern yourself with getting the right amount of carbs in appropriate to exercise intensity/duration/weight target. However if training very hard then it makes sense to take in some protein both during and afterwards since on the assumption that its preferable to get protein needed from digestion rather than catabolising muscle.

- Linked to both the above, immediately on cessation of exercise a small amount of high GI carbs (sugar) are needed. This acts as a signal to the body to switch from a energy burn mode/protein catabolis mode to an anabolic muscle regrowth/rebuild mode, which basically is what you want to achieve by exercising in the first place.

ric/rstsport

Most of the current data around protein requirements suggest that an increased amount of protein is required by exercising individuals (especially endurance athletes). The ranges usually suggested range from 1.2g of protein per kg body mass up to 2.0g of protein per kg body mass (for elite endurance athletes performing at the extremes of performance - such as the TdF). I think the average protein requirement for non-exercising individuals is 0.8g of protein per kg of body mass. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22139562 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22000743
etc

Most western people consume greater amounts of protein than is generally recommended. see (e.g.) http://www.ausport.gov.au/ais/nutrition ... -_how_much

Many males will consume 2000+ Kcal/day and the vast majority of people eat a mixed diet (even vegetarians and vegans) as opposed to a diet that is specific/faddy and uses just a couple of foods (e.g., cabbage soup diet). The same applies to females as well but i don't have specifics to hand (i think 1500 Kcal/day). Generally, most people consume a mix of carbohydrates, proteins and fats, with most people consuming around 50 to 60% of their diet as carbs (these are people who exercise regularly). Given that 1g of protein has 4 Kcal, and most people split protein and fat approximately equally (lets say 20% of a diet is protein) then 0.2 x 2000 = 400 Kcal / 4 Kcal = 100 g of protein per day which would be about 1.5 g of protein per kg body for a 70 kg person.

Many athletes will consume more than 2000 Kcal/day and it's unlikely that you need more than 1.5g of protein per kg body mass per day if your training is no more than 20 hrs/week, it is therefore highly likely that the vast majority of people consume sufficient protein with a normal diet.

There are exceptions to this rule though, e.g., people who eat 'faddy diets' (e.g., cabbage soup diet, or only consume energy gels/drinks, etc), people who have recently suffered from a burn (protein requirements are increased), those on an energy restrictive diet (e.g., you're consuming a very small amount of energy), those who may be ill, etc.

If you eat normally it's probably unlikely you need additional protein supplementation.

As an anecdotal aside, i've been a strict vegetarian for 23 years and at the beginning was always warned (by everyone!) that i'd not be consuming sufficient protein. When i eventually got the chance to do a full dietary analysis 16 years ago (weighed components of everything i ate and drank for 14 days) i found out that my actual dietary intake of protein was 1.9 g of protein per kg body mass per day. At the time i was aiming for a high carbohydrate diet!

It's also worth noting that many foods that we traditionally think of as being carbohydrate rich also contain significant amounts of protein (e.g., pasta, rice, bread, etc).

Ric