Boost the Benefits of Your Exercise with the Right Nutrition
Staying fit and healthy takes a good deal of personal time, so it’s important to focus on what and when you eat, in order to maximize the benefit of your exercise.
When you exercise, you’re causing wear and tear to your body. You’ll need to replenish yourself with quality building blocks, so that your body can rebuild itself to be healthier and stronger.
Here are some tips on how to make sure you’re getting the most out of your exercise time:
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Make sure your body has the energy to exercise
Whether you feel like exercising or not is a key indicator towards whether you’re dieting properly or not. Reducing your caloric intake to 1400 or 1600 calories a day may help you lose fat, but it doesn’t necessarily help your health. If your problem is overindulging, it’s important to know that digestion takes a lot of energy, and eating too much late at night may be responsible for feeling groggy and inactive in the morning.
If you prefer to exercise in the morning before breakfast, you can avoid needing a snack first by having a meal that’s low in fat and high in complex carbs (whole grains). This will ensure you’ve got the energy to really give it your all during exercise sessions. If you’re unable to prioritize exercise in your schedule, having a granola bar or another light complex carb snack two hours before your scheduled workout can make all of the difference.
The best time to exercise really depends on your habits, but the most important thing is to feel ready when it’s time to start. Feeling good when you begin exercising will help you push yourself sufficiently through the entire session. Otherwise, your body will take twenty to thirty minutes acclimating itself to a higher level of intensity, and you’ll feel just as tired afterwards. Don’t waste your exercise time getting your body going!
- Eat a snack exactly one half-hour after exercise
After exercise, your body remains in a heightened state, even if your muscles are fatigued. Your resting heart rate will continue to be elevated, and your body will continue to metabolize higher amounts of energy per hour, until it has completely relaxed. Make sure to eat at least but no later than one half-hour after exercise.
Without sufficient nutrition, your body will begin to digest muscles that are too damaged to heal the rest of your body. Research shows that providing the right nutrients to the body around 30-40 minutes after exercise helps improve recovery, promotes muscle growth, and increases fat loss.
Younger people who are still growing (under 25) will need post-exercise snacks, as will athletes or anyone in a good state of fitness. An ideal nutrition boost includes a snack or light meal with lean protein (low or no-fat) and complex carbs, at a 2:1 ratio, such as a grilled chicken breast sandwich on whole wheat and an apple. A protein shake will also work, but it’s only recommended if you’re lifting weights or performing similar high-intensity exercises, since it has high sugar and fat content.
Eating right away will cause a burden on your digestive system and can cause indigestion. If you’ve sufficiently pushed your body to a reasonable limit, chances are, you won’t feel hungry anyway. If you feel that you’re not able to eat after a half hour, you may not be rehydrating enough after exercise. Make sure to drink plenty of water right afterwards.
- Approach your regimen holistically.
It’s essential to take into account your health status when making choices about your diet or exercise regimen. Dieting properly also requires you to consider what your body needs to exercise at the level that you would like to. Habits are formative, and it takes time to change them and improve your metabolic health.
Ambitious regimens such as P90X may discourage you from persisting with your decision to be healthier. If this happens, it’s ok to resolve yourself to accomplish a more intensive program when you are ready and able to. Take moderate steps with the intention of improving your long-term health. Weight loss progress is usually very uneven at first, so you’ll have to be patient with yourself, more than anything.
If you’re not sure whether you’re exercising enough or dieting correctly, try Bello 2!
Scale weights are notoriously unreliable, and tracking your fat levels is a more reliable way to see your progress. Our unique 9 Block Therapy program can help you with your health status assessment and provide you with exercise and diet suggestions that are best suited to your current status.
If you’re more concerned with optimizing your muscle gains, FITTO can definitely help you manage your dietary needs. It will also show you your lean mass gains by muscle group and your overall body balance, which can help you assess the effectiveness of your workout.
Make sure that the time you put into yourself really counts. Fitness time is your time.
