How Soon After A Workout Should You Eat To Build Muscle? (IT MATTERS!)

One of the first tips you learn in the gym is the importance of post workout nutrition, with the idea being that if you didn't fuel your body with protein and carbs right after training, then you'd miss a crucial opportunity to accelerate your muscle growth and recovery and your muscles would instead go catabolic and slowly waste away. And this idea was enough for myself, and probably many of you as well, to obsess over this anabolic window and ensure that I had a shake or meal handy after every single workout without failing. Since then, though, although yes, plenty of gains were made, research methods have also drastically improved and we're now armed with better information with regards to the anabolic window and how important it really is for muscle growth. Before we dive into that research though, let's first take a look at the theory behind why the anabolic window is thought to be so important in the first place. So the anabolic window theory has to do with something called protein synthesis and protein breakdown, which which are simply two processes that are constantly occurring within your muscles. As their names imply, protein synthesis involves building your muscle and protein breakdown involves breaking down your muscle. And the net effect of these two processes is muscle growth. So as you can see, the more protein synthesis and the less protein breakdown that occurs within your muscles, the more it will grow. Whereas if your protein breakdown exceeds your protein synthesis, then the opposite will happen and you'll end up losing muscle. And it's what happens to these two processes after we work out where the anabolic window comes into the picture. Because research has shown that after a workout your muscles experience a significant spike in protein synthesis, but they also experience an increase in protein breakdown as a result of the damage that you did to your muscles during the workout. And it's been shown that the longer you go without eating an adequate post workout meal after your workout, the more your protein breakdown rates will continue to increase and eventually reaching the point where they exceed your protein synthesis rates and hence create a catabolic state that promotes muscle loss instead of muscle growth. So to prevent ever reaching this point and to instead stay in an anabolic state after your workout to support muscle growth, you can simply ingest a protein rich post workout meal or shake shortly after your workout, as this has been shown to not only prevent muscle breakdown from increasing, but it also increases protein synthesis levels to a far greater degree. Since during this post workout period, your muscles become highly sensitized to uptake and use of protein for growth. And to add to this after your workout, your muscles are also now very highly sensitized to carbs as well, with research showing that when carbs are consumed shortly post workout, you experience a super compensation of glycogen replenishment in your muscles. Whereas delaying this by just two hours reduces the rate of muscle glycogen resynthesis by as much as 50%, which is obviously important given that we use some of this muscle glycogen for energy in our workout, and now we want to replenish our muscles with glycogen as much as possible in order to improve our performance in the next workout. And so you can see how this theoretically would all lead to more growth and better recovery and is why we've been led to believe in the importance of hitting that anabolic window after every single workout. But it turns out that there is a catch, as there's a few flaws in the above argument that was only brought about recently in new research. The first flaw is that this theory was based on the findings of fasted training where subjects did not eat anything prior to their workout and instead worked out first thing in the morning. When you have a meal consisting of protein sometime before your workout though, things start to change. First of all, with regards to protein synthesis, multiple papers have now shown that although your muscles are in theory more sensitized to protein after your workout, if you have protein before your workout rather than after, you're still able to boost protein synthesis to the same degree. Secondly, with regards to protein breakdown, research does indicate that protein breakdown increases rapidly after your workout and after around three hours it does actually eventually lead to a catabolic state where muscles do start to break down. However, this is only the case if that workout was done fasted because in the event that you've ingested an adequate pre workout meal before you work out, then this no longer becomes a concern. In fact, a paper by Power and colleagues found that a simple pre workout meal consisting of just 45 grams of whey protein was enough to keep your body in an anabolic state and prevent protein breakdown from occurring for a period of three hours. And if you add carbs and fats to this meal, you can extend this anabolic state to even 46 hours depending on the size of that meal. And lastly, with regards to glycogen replenishment, although it is true that our muscles are highly sensitized to carbs after a workout, we research has also shown that as long as you eat enough carbs throughout the day, then your body will eventually fill its glycogen stores back up regardless of whether you had carbs in your post workout meal or not. Meaning that ingesting carbs right after your workout seems to be only really beneficial if you have another workout later on that day and you need your muscles to be refueled sooner rather than later. So in theory it seems that as long as you've had a properly constructed and timed pre workout meal, the anabolic window becomes irrelevant and that in general, suggesting a post worker meal or shake immediately after workout wouldn't provide further growth or prevent muscle breakdown from occurring. And research that has now actually taken a look at muscle growth as opposed to just protein synthesis is in agreement with this. For instance, a recent meta analysis by Schoenfeld and colleagues took a look at a total of 23 nutrient timing studies and found that when protein intake is controlled for, there doesn't seem to be any significant benefit on hypertrophy to have a post worker meal or shake within one hour of your workout if inadequate pre workout meal had already been consumed and if anything the benefit in growth would be minimal. However, with all of that being said, when diving even deeper into the research, it's clear that the past studies I went through including this meta analysis, focus mostly on untrained individuals. And what's really interesting is that if you take the time to read between the lines, research actually suggests that post workout timing in the anabolic window may become increasingly important as you gain more training and experience. Illustrating this is a 2014 paper which compared the protein synthesis responses in untrained lifters versus trained lifters with an average of six years of experience. So they had both groups ingest a pre workout meal a few hours before the workout and then after the workout they delayed their post workout meal for six hours and as shown in the following graphs, what they found is that the protein synthesis response following a workout was significantly lower for the trained individuals immediately after the workout and six hours after the workout when compared to the untrained individuals. Meaning that theoretically for the train lifters, even though they already had a pre workout meal a few hours prior, ingesting protein immediately post workout would still be beneficial for growth as it would boost that diminished level of protein synthesis response that they seem to experience. Whereas for the untrained lifters, since they already experience a near maximal protein synthesis response from their workout alone that lasts for months six several hours after the session, ingesting protein immediately after the workout wouldn't be necessary and would provide little to no benefit for growth so long as they get enough protein throughout the day. This effect has also been shown in another study which had untrained subjects trained just one of their legs using the leg extension machine for a period of eight weeks and left the other leg untrained after the eight weeks. They then had both legs undergo the same leg workout and what they found is that despite subjects being in a fed state during the workout, the trained leg of the subjects now exhibited a significantly lower protein synthesis response after the workout when compared to the leg that they left untrained. Again suggesting that post workout protein becomes increasingly important as you gain more experience. As for whether this would result in additional muscle growth for train lifters though, research is very limited in this regard, but there is a well designed recent 2017 paper that seems to support this theory. The researchers took trained men with at least one year of experience in the gym and split them into two groups to determine whether or not post worker protein would make a difference in muscle growth. To do so, one group had a protein shake before their workout and then ate nothing for at least three hours after the workout. The other group ate nothing for at least three hours before their workout and instead had their protein shake immediately after the workout. Both groups followed the same controlled diet and total daily protein intake. After 10 weeks of working out three days a week, the post workout protein group managed to very slightly but non significantly outperform the pre workout protein group in terms of strength and muscle growth at the various sites measured, with their biceps growth showing the greatest increase and as stated by the researchers likely would have reached significance had the study lasted longer. Now, although the benefits shown here were quite minimal and indicates that post workout protein isn't as important as we once thought, it does hint that it may become slightly more important for trained individuals and as a result may in fact make a significant improvement in your rate of muscle growth and strength as you progress and gain more experience in the gym. So I know I've covered a lot and gone through a bunch of theories in this video, but here is a brief summary of how all of this research applies to you. Although the timing of your post worker meal isn't as important as we once thought in the various scenarios that I've outlined here, it does become something that you should take seriously and may become increasingly important as you gain more experience in the gym. And even if at the end of the day it provides just a slight benefit, it's the little details like this that can all add up and end up making a significant difference in the rate of gains that you're making. And for a step by step program that optimizes all of these little variables for you by showing you exactly how to work out and when and what to eat week after week in order to build muscle as efficiently as possible with science. Then simply head on over to builtwithscience.com and take the analysis quiz to discover which science based program is best for you and where your body is currently at. Anyways guys, I hope you enjoyed this one. Please don't forget to show your support by giving the video a like leaving a comment down below. So what you'd like to see me cover next? Subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really does help me out and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much everyone and I'll see you next time.