Ben Greenfield explains post-strength-training nutrition and recovery timelines. Key points: full glycogen replenishment takes ~8 hours; eating within a ~20-minute to 2-hour post-workout window accelerates muscle glycogen resynthesis and recovery and is recommended for maximizing muscle growth, while delaying eating 1.5–2+ hours can favor fat burning and boost growth hormone/testosterone for longevity-focused training. He notes inflammation from microtrauma lasts ~24–48 hours and that repeated training of the same muscle (bodybuilding splits) can require ~3–5 days for recovery.
Questions this video answers
About eight hours.
Within about 20 minutes to 2 hours after strength training.
About 24 to 48 hours.
As long as 3 to 5 days.
Generally an hour and a half to two hours, sometimes longer.
Chapters
Foreign.
If you eat ad libitum, right, according to appetite after a strength training session, this doesn't necessarily mean you're setting down the barbell and rushing off to suck down your maltodextrin and whey protein isolate within that 20 minute magic window. But you're just eating too appetite. It generally takes about eight hours to replace all of your glycogen stores. Now technically feed within about a 20 minute to 2 hour window after a strength training session, you accelerate the rate at which muscles recover because you supply them with glycogen. But at the same time, if your goal is weight loss, or if your goal is even to maximize say like growth hormone or testosterone, or your ability to be able to tap into fatty acids as a fuel, there is a little bit of a catch 22 there. Because if you wait for a little while after strength training to eat, you actually train your body's ability to burn fat and you get an increase in growth hormone and testosterone. So for that it kind of depends. If someone is trying to get big and add as much muscle as possible, I tell them to eat within that 20 minutes to two hour window. If someone's lifting more for the longevity and anti aging benefits, I tell them to wait a little while after the workout. What's a little while? A little while would be anywhere from two to two plus hours. I generally wait an hour and a half, two hours, sometimes longer than that after a strength training session to eat because I'm not necessarily trying to get swole, I am just training for anti aging and longevity more. Some other things that of course can affect, and this is a big one, would just be micro trauma to the muscle. You tear a muscle fiber and you get the accompanying swelling or edema and inflammation. The inflammatory response that occurs when you weight train that takes about 24 to 48 hours. And if you do like, if you're doing like a bodybuilding split like I described earlier, like working one body part over and over and over again, we're talking about as long as three to five days for that muscle to recover, for the inflammation to subside to the point where you aren't just damaging a muscle or piling damage on top of damage by training again.
