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After a sweat session, the foods you choose to replenish and refuel your body are critical to your recovery… Ideally, you want to prioritise digestible carbohydrates, and a source of protein post-workout, along with plenty of hydrating fluids! But if you fill your belly with sugary, low-quality, less nutritious foods, your body will pay the price!
There are several foods in particular that you want to avoid after a workout because they could be unknowingly hampering your recovery and therefore your results and progress in your workouts!
Okay, this one isn’t technically a food, but your choice of post-workout beverage is key to supporting or hindering your recovery.
After every session, it’s so important you replace the electrolytes you’ve lost while sweating it out. Water is the ideal choice and will help rehydrate your body, giving your body the best chance to repair itself, and supporting its recovery.
However, if you’re turning to energy drinks, fruit juices or even soft drinks post-workout, you’re seriously compromising your recovery. Instead of rehydrating you, these drinks actually do the opposite, making you even more dehydrated and interfering with your body’s recovery. Plus, they cause a huge spike in blood sugar levels, followed by a rapid crash. That means that, while you may feel great for a whole five minutes after drinking them, you’ll quickly feel lethargic, shaky and even dizzy if they’re your post-workout beverage of choice.
Not to mention, sugary drinks are the easiest way to unknowingly add excess energy to your daily intake, meaning you’re essentially undoing all the hard work you’ve just done each time you smash one of these after a session.
While energy bars can be a great pre-workout option, you want to avoid processed and packaged snacks or bars after a session at the gym.
Many of these products are super processed, high-sugar options, marketed for their convenience and energy-boosting properties. But in reality, they’re usually packed with sugar (often in the form of dates or artificial sweeteners, which have the same effect on your body as regular sugar).
A better alternative if you’re after a post-workout snack that supports recovery, rather than hindering it, would be a banana and some nut butter, or a protein smoothie with fruit and peanut butter. This way, the fibre from the fresh fruit helps slow the absorption of sugar in your body, preventing the rapid spike and drop in blood sugar levels we see with processed snacks and sugary drinks. Plus, the added fat and protein will provide you with longer-lasting energy, and the nutrients your body needs to properly recover in time for your next workout.
Sorry in advance to all the keto advocates out there, but it turns out opting for a low-carb post-workout food or meal could be interfering with your recovery, big time!
After each session, your body desperately needs easily digestible carbohydrates to provide the energy needed to replenish the glucose stores you’ve just depleted through your workout. Carbohydrates are the most effective, readily accessible way of providing your body with this glucose, helping to stabilise your blood sugar levels and keeping them level throughout the day ahead.
If you’re sticking to low-carb options, your body has to look to alternative fuel sources to replenish it and support its recovery efforts post-workout. This can either be from stored fats, or from breaking down protein in your body - which can mean your body is effectively breaking down your own muscle tissue in order to provide much-needed energy to your brain and body!
So avoiding carbohydrates after a workout is a sure-fire way to compromise your body’s recovery efforts. Carbs are key!
Don’t panic, we’re not saying to avoid caffeine altogether! In fact, as a pre-workout option, caffeine is fantastic - with studies showing it reduces your perceived effort required in a session, so you can go harder and longer, without feeling like it’s as hard to do so as you would before you’ve had your morning cuppa!
But post-workout, caffeine is a different story… Exercise is a significant stress on your body, and so is caffeine. So downing a strong coffee after your workout is adding excess stress to your body, leading to heightened levels of your stress hormone, cortisol. Chronically high cortisol leads to inflammation, hormonal imbalances, compromised immune function and other health issues, and definitely is not conducive to supporting your body’s recovery after a session.
Plus, caffeine is dehydrating, so it’s again doing the opposite as a bottle of water would do after a workout.
This means caffeine should definitely not be your go-to post-workout drink of choice, to prevent it from hampering your recovery, dehydrating your body, and causing health issues like hormonal imbalances.
Some of us are absolutely starving after a workout, while others aren;t hungry for a while afterwards. But it turns out that no food may be the worst post-workout choice of all, if you’re looking to support your recovery.
It’s essential to eat something around 30-60 minutes post-workout, in order to nourish and replenish your body after all the hard work it’s just done. Not only do you need to provide energy and nutrients to your body to replace what it just used, but you also need enough energy readily available for your body to be able to repair the damage a workout does to your muscles. Each time you lift a weight, you’re creating little micro-tears in your muscles. The process of repairing these tears is what helps you grow stronger, and progress in the gym.
However, if you’re not refuelling after a workout, your body doesn’t have enough energy available to efficiently complete this process. This means, that instead of getting stronger, you’re likely to see your performance decline over time, and you probably won’t be able to sustain your workout routine long-term.
What’s more, when you sweat it all out in a session, you’re excreting calcium, salt and potassium, and large quantities of water too. If you’re not eating a good quality meal afterwards, then you’re also not replacing these essential minerals or rehydrating your body. Food contains each of these minerals, as well as electrolytes to help your body be hydrated, so if you want to optimise your recovery and avoid dehydration and blood sugar crashes, you need to eat soon after training.
Plus, if you don’t eat a good meal with carbs and protein post-workout, your blood sugar levels will remain extremely low, leaving you fatigued, tired and desperately craving sugar throughout the rest of the day. If you’re feeling fatigued, imagine how much trouble your insides are having in finding the energy needed to recover…
So there you have it, five things that could be hampering your recovery if you’re eating them (or not eating them!) post-workout! Your post- and pre-workout meal choices can be super effective in either supporting or compromising your performance and results in the gym, so make sure you choose wisely! And if you’re smart about it, you’ll pick such a delicious, nourishing and balanced meal, it will act as an extra incentive to smash out your workout, knowing you’ve got something yummy waiting on the other side… Happy munching!
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