Offseason Football Nutrition Part 2

One of the most popular topics in the sports nutrition world is nutrient timing. Specifically, people want to know how should they should be eating before and after their workouts to maximize their results in the gym. This is a topic that is chock-full of both real science and pseudo “locker room science.”

Let’s see what the research actually has to say about the big three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat), and what roles they can play during your pre- and post-workout nutrition so that this offseason is your most successful offseason yet.

Disclaimer: I feel it’s important for me to note that although pre- and post-workout nutrition does have a meaningful impact on your performance, progress and recovery, it is less important than your daily total intake of calories and macronutrients.

This means that the total amount of protein, carbohydrates and fats you consume daily is infinitely more important than your nutrient timing. A typical example from football players who have their priorities a little backwards is a conversation such as this:

Athlete: “I make sure to have 50g whey isolate with my creatine after every single workout. I would never miss it.”

Me: “Ok that’s great, but do you know how many grams of protein you’re getting throughout the entire day?”

Athlete: “No, I have no idea.”

This is a problem and it’s why I threw up the disclaimer. If you don’t have your calories and macronutrients in check, it is incredibly important that you do this before incorporating any nutrient timing strategies.

Once that’s done and the habit is ingrained, then it makes a lot more sense to start utilizing nutrient timing strategies.

Pre-workout protein

You will get some camps that say pre-workout protein doesn’t matter and other camps that say it absolutely does matter. There is also evidence to support both sides of this argument.

Why is that? Two reasons mainly:

#1: Pre-workout protein won’t do much if your daily protein intake isn’t being controlled (hence, the disclaimer), so short term studies don’t give us much support here.

#2: The benefit of pre-workout protein is largely dependent on the size and timing of the meal. If you have a very large meal, digestion and absorption times can last 6+ hours. Conversely, a smaller meal will take less time to digest and absorb.

What does this mean for you guys?

If you have a solid amount of protein 1-3 hrs before training, your blood amino acid levels are going to be elevated come training time and protein synthesis (muscle growth) will be stimulated at an optimal time.

Conversely, if you have a small amount of protein 3+ hours away from your workout, your blood amino acid levels are likely going to be quite low at training time and your protein synthesis rates will be as well.

Provided you have an adequate amount of protein not too far away from the training session, it will help you maximize your muscle growth due to elevated muscle protein synthesis rates before training.

Additionally, this meal and timing will help prevent muscle protein breakdown during training, sparing your current muscle from being used as energy substrate.

For men, this typically means 35-50g of protein 1-3 hrs before training.

For women, this typically means 20-35g of protein 1-3 hrs before training.

The 1-3 hrs range is there so you can individualize the process based on your own appetite. You don’t want to be starving in the gym. Some people are fine eating 2 hrs before training whereas others would be starving if they did that.

I recommend using animal sources of protein since they provide the most ideal amino acid spectrum for gains in muscle mass. Some examples include chicken, fish or eggs.

Pre-workout carbohydrates

Pre-workout carbohydrates improve performance, period.

Research on pre-workout carbohydrates is pretty clear: these carbs are more efficient at meeting the energy system-specific demands of your resistance training workouts.

Although this carbohydrate fuel won’t directly stimulate new muscle growth, it does so indirectly as a by-product of you being able push more weight for more reps during your training sessions. This creates an overall greater muscle-building stimulus to adapt and recover from.

Of very important note that I covered in last week’s article: carbohydrates are the preferred fuel source of both the nervous system and the muscular system.

This means that eating a pre-workout meal of carbohydrates can help delay fatiguing both nervous system and the muscles you’re training.

 

Ideally, these carbohydrates should come 1-3hrs before training in the form of real food (e.g. nuts, oatmeal, rice, sweet potatoes, etc.). For more information, read last week’s article.

Slowly building the meal, we are now sitting at:

For men, typically 35-50g of protein + 35-50g of carbs 1-3hrs before training.

For women, typically 20-35g of protein + 20-35g of carbs 1-3hrs before training.

Pre-workout fats

Fats don’t get talked about much in regards to pre and post-workout, and for some pretty good reasons in my opinion.

You will see MCT’s (medium chain triglycerides) get recommended from time to time in fitness circles as a “fast acting fat” energy source. It metabolizes much quicker than other more common fat sources, making it a more “readily available” energy source.

Consequently, people like to supplement with it in their low carb diets or discuss its faster metabolism to make a case for performance enhancement.

Here’s why I’m not on board from pretty much all angles:

The crowd that is generally plugging for MCT’s is the body composition and/or performance crowd, meaning they don’t necessarily care about looking at some of the clinical outcomes.

From a health perspective, there was a well-controlled study done 11 years ago by Tholstrup et al examining just 3-weeks of a diet supplemented with 70g MCT versus a more common LCT (long chain triglyceride; 2004).

The outcomes were not favorable, to say the least.

MCT intake caused a 12% increase in LDL cholesterol, 32% higher VLDL, 12% higher ratio of LDL to HDL, 22% higher plasma total triacylglycerol and significantly higher glucose levels.

After just 3 weeks, that’s an impressively bad outcome. Especially since it was paired up against the LCT’s which did not significantly raise ANY of those parameters. This study is only one example of several that I’ve seen with similar outcomes.

Looking at it from a body composition perspective, St-Onge et al compared olive oil to MCT’s and their effect on weight loss over a 4-month period (2003). They found that the MCT group lost 1.5kg more weight.

This might actually be interesting, if the study wasn’t 4-months long.

Three pounds of weight loss over a 4-month period means absolutely nothing; that’s a drop in the ocean. Three pounds is a good trip to the bathroom, nothing to write home about.

Put another way, this is 0.75lbs a month extra weight loss for a much more expensive, less tasty option. Exercising for 5 minutes every day would burn a similar amount of calories, which is nothing compared to the energy demands of playing football!

What about eating MCT’s around the workout? It’s a fast acting fat so it might be good pre-workout or intra workout, right?

“Eat fat to burn fat!”

Again, unfortunately, MCT’s just keep dropping the ball.

PRE-WORKOUT: Jeukendrup and Aldred did a solid review of lots of research on pre-exercise MCT’s dating back into the early 80’s (2004). Dosages, timing and exercise intensity all at varying levels. Not only did MCT’s not boost performance measures, it wasn’t even effective at preventing glycogen breakdown.

INTRA-WORKOUT: Another review from Jeukendrup et al on the intra-workout use of MCT’s found only 1 study of 8 with a positive result, and anybody who consumed over 50g had notable gastric upset (1998). Pretty clear cut answer here if you ask me.

Long story short on pre- and intra-workout nutrition is that carb’s beat MCT’s every time by a long shot.

At the end of the day, we have a higher priced option (as far as fats go) that seems to do no good and can also have detrimental effects on our health AND performance.

Obviously, as football athletes we need to be concerned with our performance. However, we also need to be concerned with our career longevity.

There are enough ways to get wrecked out there on the field to cut a career short. Let’s not create more potential problems outside the field.

So what can we draw from this?

LCT’s aren’t a bad pre-workout because they help stabilize blood sugar, which is important for keeping your energy levels high during training. The only caveat here is that fats really slow down digestion.

So if you’re going to have a moderately higher fat pre-workout meal, it needs to be eaten more like 2-3hrs pre-workout. If you’re going to have a lower fat meal, you can bump that forward to 1-2 hrs.

Post-workout nutrition

Anyone who has played football or who has even been in a gym for a few weeks has heard that is absolutely critical to take protein post-workout.

Although post-workout nutrition can be advantageous for maximizing your recovery, it’s not the “magic pill” that people make it out to be.

This is especially true if you are taking care of your pre-workout nutrition. Like I said earlier, you can be breaking down a meal and providing your body with nutrients for up to six hours.

There is no real need to run to the locker room after training and slam your shake down as fast as you can. There are still nutrients kickin’ around so you can relax.

The two biggest goals we are after within the post-workout period are glycogen replenishment and increased protein synthesis.

We know that daily total calories and macronutrients are the most important determinants of whether these goals are met.

But what does the research specifically say about post-workout nutrition?

Post-workout protein

Although the stimulus from resistance training is anabolic (muscle building), the process ofactually training is catabolic (muscle breakdown). This results in a state which is known as proteolysis, meaning protein breakdown.

Proteolysis occurs but is somewhat mild during training. However, it increases steeply during the post-workout period. This becomes much more magnified if you are training fasted, which is something I don’t recommend any football players do.

Getting back to proteolysis: this process isn’t necessarily bad. It needs to happen in order to create the stimulus for new growth. Breakdown before build up.

What we don’t want to happen is breakdown and no build up, which can result in a net protein loss. Our job after a workout is to maximize muscle protein synthesis and minimize muscle protein breakdown.

The good news: the process of eating protein post-workout is enough to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and bring muscle protein breakdown to a halt.

While a protein shake post-workout may seem like a trivial process for a small result, they add up over time. The more time you spend building up proteins instead of breaking them down, the more muscle you are going to gain over the offseason.

So we can agree that post-workout protein is a scientifically-validated strategy that makes sense to reach our goals.

Then the big question is: what should I have and how much of it should I be having?

This varies from athlete to athlete depending on variables such as your age, total muscle mass, total dietary intake and current hormonal health.

But a great general guideline to follow would be 40-50g post-workout for men and 25-35g post-workout for women.

Ideally, this would be in the form of whey protein because it contains a large amount of the amino acid leucine, which maximizes this protein synthesis response. Whey protein also metabolizes very rapidly, giving your muscles access to these amino acids at a much quicker pace.

Post-workout carbohydrates

Here is where we cover the second main topic of the post-workout discussion: glycogen replenishment.

But first off, I think it’s important to point out that most talk about post-workout carbohydrates focuses on insulin because it supposedly “maximizes the anabolic response.”

Although this is true – insulin stimulates mTOR pathways to kick off a muscle building response— we don’t need carbohydrates to get this process done.

Whey protein by itself stimulates insulin enough to elicit a maximum synthetic response.

A little known fact about insulin is that it isn’t as anabolic as people claim. Insulin plays a much larger role on the anti-catabolic side of things. Meaning, it doesn’t build a ton of muscle mass so much as it protects you from losing the muscle mass you already have.

With carbohydrates and protein both stimulating insulin secretion for us, we are doing a lot of good here.

Where post-workout carbohydrates really come into play is in glycogen replenishment. I say this to all my athletes and I’m going to say it again here:

Pre-workout nutrition starts when the last workout ends.

As soon as you’re done training, your post-workout shake will help you maximize recovery pathways and give yourself the best possible advantages to come 100% ready for your next training session. This will set you up to make progress during the entire offseason.

Weight training and intense conditioning are glycolytic activities, meaning, they deplete your body of the carbohydrates stored in your muscle cells.

During the post-workout period when you’re still in this newly depleted state, your body is primed and your ability to store incoming carbohydrates as glycogen as opposed to fat in drastically increased.

Within this state, your muscles can even supercompensate and store even more glycogen than they had before the depletion. That’s powerful stuff and it’s something we need to take advantage of.

You can compare this process to digging a ditch. Every time you work out, you dig a recovery ditch. Your diet and sleep allow you to fill that recovery ditch back up before the next time you train.

However, if you don’t eat well and sleep well, you’re going to be digging a deeper ditch with each training session that will ultimately lead you into overtraining syndrome.

Post-workout carbohydrate content can vary depending on the volume and intensity of the workout. Yet one thing that’s certain is that it is actually beneficial to have high glycemic index carbohydrates within this time period.

High glycemic index refers to the stuff people typically call “bad carbs.” I’m talking about sugars, white rice, sports drinks, etc. It is beneficial to have these following a workout because they will metabolize faster (taking advantage of the enhanced glycogen loading window) and also stimulate insulin.

Additionally, research has shown that high glycemic index carbohydrates result in faster, more effective glycogen storage compared other carbs sources, even when carbohydrate content is controlled for.

There’s not much to say about post-workout fats, so I’ll sum them up here:

As a by-product of the need for this quick uptake of both carbohydrates and protein, we also need to eliminate fat intake from the post-workout equation. If you recall from before, fat intake slows down digestion. This ultimately defeats what we are trying to accomplish here (glycogen storage, protein synthesis).

Taking it a step further

Although the food you eat over the entire day is what matters most, there are some very real and very legitimate reasons to incorporate both pre- and post-workout nutrition into your offseason football nutrition system.

I’ve seen athletes increase their speed, enhance their mental and physical game, and develop their strength rapidly… by adjusting their nutrition.

There’s so much more information that I won’t be able to discuss here– like how to adjust your eating based off of the position you play or how you should be eating on game day for peak performance.

But if you want the best possible results, I can show you exactly how you should be setting up your eating in my Fueling the Football Athlete Performance Nutrition System.

Follow the link and see how you can transform your nutrition and performance just like the other NFL pro’s I’ve helped.

References

Jeukendrup, A.E.; Aldred, S. Fat supplementation, health, and endurance performance. Nutrition. 2004, 20: 7-8, 678-688.

Jeukendrup, A.E.; Saris, W.H.M.; Wagenmakers, A.J.M. Fat metabolism during exercise: a review- part III: effects of nutritional interventions. Int. J. Sports Med. 1998, 19: 371-379.

St-Onge, MP.; Ross, R.; Parsons, W.D.; Jones, P.J. Medium-chain triglycerides increase energy expenditure and decrease adiposity in overweight men. Obes. Res. 2003, 11: 3, 395-402.

Tholstrup, T.; Ehnholm, C., Jauhiainen, M., Petersen, M., Høy, C-E., Lund, P., and Sandström, B. Effects of medium-chain fatty acids and oleic acid on blood lipids, lipoproteins, glucose, insulin, and lipid transfer protein activities. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 2004, 79: 4, 564-569.