You can do much to take advantage of the dynamics of food and fluid consumption in relation to sports and exercise performance, including weight training and muscle building.
Meal Timing and Sports and Exercise Performance
Since essential nutrients, such as carbohydrate, protein and fat, provide energy for the body, when you provide these nutrients -- and to a lesser extent in what form you provide them -- can influence your performance either in training or during an event. This is not just a theory, it is the cornerstone of modern sports nutrition with science to back it up.The essential elements of meal timing for exercise performance are:
- The pre-activity meal, including fluids
- Food and fluids during the activity
- The post-activity meal and fluids
- Total food consumption over 24 hours, especially carbohydrates
These factors need to be adjusted for energy intake and expenditure according to any particular session, sessions over 24 hours and extended training periods.
How you should eat to maximize an average weight training session is necessarily different from eating to maximize a lengthy endurance training run, swim or team sports session that may involve more or less continuous exercise for two hours or more. Such activity involves a much higher energy expenditure and a food intake to match.
In this article, I'll concentrate on weight training and bodybuilding while providing an overview of meal timing in sports nutrition.
Myths of Meal Timing and Eating
There are several recommendations from various fitness and training sources that have little basis in fact, even though they are mostly impractical rather than harmful. These myths are widely disseminated and repeated.Myth 1. You should only eat grains, starches and sugars near to your training session and eat fruits and vegetables at other times during recovery. This advice says that exercisers should only consume grains and starches (i.e., bread and oatmeal) for breakfast or in recovery from an exercise session. At other times, they say, your carbohydrates should come from fruits and vegetables. I'm not sure where this idea came from -- Paleo diets perhaps -- but for men and women doing "serious" training, the demand for energy is too great and grains and starches (and sugars) are the number one form of food energy. Often, the main problem is eating enough, let alone being picky about different carbs.
Consider this example. Doing five or six 90-minute sessions a week at an energy expenditure of around 1,200 to 1,500 calories per session is not a trivial amount of energy to replace. That's about 6,000 to 7,000 calories per week, conservatively, in addition to your resting energy expenditure. (Resting energy expenditure or resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the amount of energy you use for basic functions such as breathing, digestion, and brain activity, while at rest.)
Let's say 5,000 of those calories are in carbohydrates. At 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate and 15 grams of carbohydrate in the average slice of bread, that's approximately 83 slices of bread a week or the equivalent that you would require to fuel that quantity of activity. That's a lot of fruit and vegetables you would need to eat ... and, frankly, I don't want you exercising next to me at the gym unless you have very good bowel control.
It's just not feasible for most heavy trainers -- although it may be possible -- to meet those demands without snacking on bread, pasta and sugars randomly over the course of refueling and pre-fueling over 24 hours. In fact, some high-level athletes - swimmer Michael Phelps was a good example - might need 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day!
I'm suggesting that you don't get carried away with some silly eating protocol because a so-called "authority" said it on a web site -- even this one, except I'll back it up with logic and references. If you're a bodybuilder or casual fitness trainer, you may get away with a protocol that restricts grains and starches, but I don't see the point. Whole grains are associated with lower rates of heart disease and diabetes and probably bowel cancer. Even refined and high-GI carbs (such as added sugar and white bread) are easily assimilated and provide valuable and convenient refueling for athletes.
Myth 2. You should eat six small meals each day instead of three main meals. I think the idea here is that insulin will be kept lower by keeping meals small and that this will also reduce appetite and assist with weight management. There is no solid basis for this. Insulin may even function better with fewer, rather than more, regular meals. Even so, if you're a big athlete exercising hard, you may need to spread out your meals just to be able to consume the quantities of food required.
