Nutrient timing is something that many people believe is important for optimizing training. The basic idea is that you want to consume certain nutrients at specific times in order to maximize their benefits. For example, many people believe that it is important to consume protein shortly after working out in order to promote muscle growth.
In other words, nutrient timing is how you can get the most out of your diet. Typically there are two ways I like to use nutrient timing with my clients:
- As a way to build adherence with new clients (i.e scheduling meals at times they’re more likely to not miss or overeat).
- As a way to improve the results of an advanced client during gaining or cutting phases.
The Goal of Nutrient/Meal Timing
The goal of proper meal timing is to get the most results by splitting up your macros appropriately.
When you are making a plan for your day, you need to figure out when you are going to have your meals. The meals that you have around the events of waking up, working out, and going to bed will vary the most in calorie amount and macronutrient makeup.
The ability to vary nutrient timing can be helpful in reducing hunger during a caloric deficit, making it easier to consume all necessary calories during a weight gain phase, or managing insulin resistance in general populations.
What is nutrient timing?
Changing your macronutrient intake at different times can improve your health, how well you perform during a workout, and help you maintain a healthy weight.
One of the most important principles of nutrient timing is that it is best to eat most non-fruit and veggie carbohydrates during and after exercise.
There are many factors that influence energy balance, such as the laws of thermodynamics. This means that how much we eat is the most important factor in changing our body composition.
The key point to take away from this is that “body composition” is important. If we are losing weight and losing equal amounts of fat and muscle or if we are gaining weight and gaining equal amounts of fat and muscle, we are not taking advantage of nutrient timing.
Nutrient timing has several important goals:
- Nutrient partitioning (where the nutrients go when you ingest them)
- Improved health
- Improved body composition
- Improved athletic performance
- Enhanced workout recovery
Why is nutrient timing so important?
Exercising regularly affects the body's ability to gain or lose fat and muscle, depending on the time of day. Eating the wrong foods at the wrong times can interfere with your progress in the gym, while eating the right foods at the right times can help improve your results.
If we take into account how much energy we're taking in and how much we're using, we can change our metabolism, the way our hormones work, and our body composition.
You can also take advantage of certain anabolic hormones by manipulating your nutrient intake, such as insulin.
Insulin
If you want your muscles to grow, you need to make sure insulin is elevated regularly. This can be achieved by eating more carbohydrates at times when your body can handle it.
Carbohydrate use
Generally, carbohydrates that take longer to digest and absorb can help control insulin response. These are usually carbohydrates that are high in fiber and low in simple sugars, such as beans/legumes and vegetables.
A diet full of added sugars and refined carbs can lead to insulin resistance, high blood triglyceride levels, and bad cholesterol.
The food and supplements we consume provide our bodies with the raw materials they need to create the desired metabolic environment.
What you should know
Protein and fat intake should remain constant, regardless of your goals or activity level. PN recommends consuming moderate portion sizes of lean protein and good fats at each meal. The macronutrient most commonly manipulated in nutrient timing is carbohydrate.
Carbohydrate tolerance and timing
The body can better handle carbohydrates when the person is physically active, as well as when levels of fitness are high and body fat levels are lower.
Therefore, higher-carb situations include some combination of:
- relatively intense physical activity (such as heavy resistance training or sprinting)
- relatively frequent physical activity (daily workouts, physically active job, lots of daily-life activity such as walking)
- a high level of physical fitness
- a lower level of body fat
Conversely, lower-carb situations include some combination of:
- sedentary or nonactive periods
- lower levels of physical fitness
- higher levels of body fat
If you want to learn more about how to eat for your body type, check out the Eating For Your Body Type video and All About Eating for Your Body Type.
No matter how much body fat you have or how fit you are, eating carbohydrates after you work out helps your body replace the glycogen it uses for energy and improves your recovery. Just like a sponge absorbs water, your body absorbs glycogen more easily right after you exercise.
When to consume carbs
After exercising, you should control your carb intake and consume plenty of protein-rich foods to keep the recovery process moving.
It is best to consume dense carb foods during and after exercise, for up to about 3 hours. And remember, carbohydrates have a protein sparing effect, so we require less dietary protein when carb intake is higher.
Before you break out your sun watch and start meticulously timing carb gram intake, the window here depends on many factors, including:
- Intensity of exercise
- Previously fasted/fed
- Body composition
- Medications
- Underlying health conditions
- Sleep schedule
- Length of exercise
- Type of exercise
- Food selection
- Time of day
There are many factors that affect how long carb tolerance stays high after exercise, so it is difficult to give an exact time frame. Most people can assume that carb tolerance is best for around 3 hours after exercise. If you sleep 8 hours per night, this leaves you with about 13 hours of “non sponge-like carb tolerance” to work with, or 2 to 4 meals.
It's important to adjust your diet based on your tolerance during the “non sponge-like” period. If you are slim and trying to maintain your body weight, you can eat some dense carb foods (25% of your meal). If you want to lose weight, eat more proteins and fats, with dense carb foods accounting for less than 25% of your meal.
How to Use Nutrient Timing to Your Advantage
You can use nutrient/meal timing to your advantage by simply splitting the total amount of protein you consume equally across all meals. This is because while protein will almost always be used for various processes within the body, only a certain amount of it can be used effectively for muscle protein synthesis.
If you want to split your protein evenly, you can do so by dividing it into all your meals. However, if that doesn't work with your macros, it's best to increase your protein consumption after your workout and at your last evening meal. This will help you create a positive net protein balance, especially after a very tough workout, and will also make you feel fuller during a cut when you're likely to be hungrier.
You can also use meal timing during a gaining phase to push most of your caloric intake around workouts or times when hunger levels are very high to avoid having tofeeding yourself to stay on track.
Here is how we can look at meal timing to optimize workouts:
Pre-Workout
Your goal with your pre-workout meal is to eat foods that will help you have the energy you need to fuel your workout. As I've mentioned before, you're in the gym to lift weights and gain or preserve muscle mass. To do that, you want to make sure your pre-workout nutrition is focused on making your workout better.
Your pre-workout carbohydrate intake should be your second highest of the day, but it's not the only thing you need to eat. Your protein intake before working out will have two effects: increasing the amino acids in your blood, causing a positive balance of proteins, and promoting muscle growth by ingesting at least 20 grams of whey protein. It seems that these methods also provide enough nutrients to stimulate protein production immediately after working out.
If you eat too close to your workout, your body will be focused on digesting the food instead of working out. Try to eat 2-3 hours before working out, and make sure the meal is mostly carbs and protein, with little fat and fiber.
Intra-Workout
Intra-workout nutrition is not necessary for most people to see results from their lifting. The exceptions to this are high-level athletes who train for more than an hour at a time. These athletes include high-level bodybuilders, Olympic lifters, powerlifters, and some CrossFit athletes. If you don't fall into this category or you're not competing in a sport that requires an all-day event, you might be better off saving the calories for your meals.
If you participate in activities that require a lot of physical exertion, it's important to choose foods that will help you maintain energy and avoid breaking down muscle tissue. For activities that last a long time, like team sports, it's beneficial to consume carbohydrates and electrolytes during the event, and then focus on protein intake after the event to improve recovery.
Post-Workout
Mostlifters focus their nutrient timing efforts on the post-workout period. Although research does not strongly support the notion of a post-workout anabolic window, there are other reasons for optimizing your post-workout nutrition.
The main attribute of post-workout nutrition is carbohydrate intake. Something that I picked up from the guys at Renaissance Periodization has to do with putting 35% of your daily carb allowance at your post-workout meal. Research has shown that muscles become more sensitive to insulin and therefore to glucose absorption post-training which creates an optimal opportunity to ingest a larger amount of carbohydrates. This is especially helpful for those that tend to put on body fat easily during a gaining phase.
Some people will also talk about needing to ingest carbohydrates post-workout to quickly resynthesize glycogen stores or to become more anabolic. However, the research on this topic is divided. On the one hand, you do utilize stored glycogen to fuel intense workouts. However, we’ve also seen that it is rare to completely deplete glycogen. In addition, some research has also suggested that adding carbohydrates to a protein dose of 20-25g has no added stimulus to muscle protein synthesis.
Although it is disappointing to learn that your post-workout nutrition is important, it is still useful, and you should focus on it.
