In this episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio, Ben and Alice dive into the topic of peri-workout nutrition: what to eat before, during, and after your workouts to maximize energy, performance, and recovery.
They discuss the pros and cons of training fasted, how carbohydrates and glycogen protect your muscles, the importance of hydration and electrolytes, and practical strategies for vegan athletes to stay fueled without overcomplicating meal timing.
Whether you train early in the morning or later in the day, this episode offers science-backed tips to help you train smarter and recover stronger on a plant-based diet.
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Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins and Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Ben.
[Alice]And I’m Alice.
[Ben]Welcome to the show. Alice, feels like it’s been a little while since the two of us caught up. I was just editing the podcast that you did with Giacomo, which will be coming out this Monday as of recording this today, and I was listening a little bit about your foray into strong woman training, so I think that’s really cool, and I would love to know a little bit about what that process has been like for you so far.
[Alice]Yeah, so finally my body seems to be adapting. I’m not having crazy doms thinking that, did I injure myself? I feel like I’m getting the hang of a lot of the form for the lifts that I’m working on currently.
What is kind of kicking my butt is like axle press stuff, but I don’t know, I’m getting further and further every week. It’s just like so many things, in the posterior chain going together, and I feel like maybe my upper body and my lower body aren’t speaking to each other right now as far as that’s concerned, but it’s good. I just feel actually excited to go to the gym again.
I feel like this is just gonna be so fulfilling and sort of helping round out my own lifting skills because in bodybuilding, you don’t really have to do any of the Olympic lifts, so I don’t know, it’s just sort of like the next level for me and I’m really, really stoked about it.
[Ben]That’s really cool. There’s so many different ways that you can approach strength training and building muscle and still keep it fun and interesting. And really, when you look at the people who are the most successful, it’s the people who are able to stay consistent and do it the longest.
So finding ways to keep your training fun and fresh and enjoyable is so important. And I think sometimes people get stuck in this trap of like, oh, well, this isn’t the best program or it’s not the most optimal thing to be doing, but then they forget that, hey, if you’re hating your training or just bored with it and you’re not really as passionate and fired up, then that’s probably gonna burn you out sooner. So it’s probably better to find something that, hey, you’re pushing yourself hard in your training, there’s no doubt about that.
And it’s fun to train for something new, to train for something where you get to display your strength. So I think that finding something like that, whether it’s powerlifting or Strong Woman or CrossFit or whatever it is that keeps you kind of staying lifting and enjoying lifting as a process, as a bodybuilder, you can stay as long as you’re staying healthy and not getting injured. That’s a great thing.
[Alice]For sure. I really hope that I’m not driving Brady crazy cause like, I think, thank you. As far as his coaching is concerned, the way he described it to me is like, I just do programming.
And so he doesn’t have like the whole system that’s the same as how we coach. And so my expectations are like, woo! And his are like programming and form checks.
And so I’m just like talking his ear off and I hope that I’m not driving him crazy, but I think he’s enjoying it for the most part. But oh, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
[Ben]Well, that would be fun to, after maybe a couple months, like half a year maybe of you prepping for your competitions and doing it, to have him on the podcast with you together to talk about what the experience has been like. I think that could be really cool.
[Alice]Absolutely. I think he would really enjoy that too.
[Ben]Awesome. So how often do you find yourself thinking about what you’re going to eat before your workout or after your workout or during your workout? I know during that podcast you did with Giacomo, you had talked about hydration being really important for you and that had been something that you’d really been putting an emphasis on.
And that’s included in the topic of today, which is Power Your Workout Nutrition. And for anyone listening, Power Your Workout just means around your workout. So that include before, after, and during.
And during is something that people often won’t even think about because it’s just, oh, I’ll just drink water. But there are actually some things that you can drink during your workout that might not be water, but can still be a benefit to you. So I would love to know currently how you’re approaching that maybe that’s within your training.
I know in the past, before your bodybuilding workouts, there’s been staple meals for you that you like to have. So I’d just love to know where you’re at personally with that and how often you’re thinking about that versus is it something that varies all the time? Is it something that stays pretty consistent?
What’s your process?
[Alice]Yeah, I have been thinking about it a lot more since starting Strong Woman Training. And that’s what has let me level up my hydration skills for sure. But as far as my pre-workout meal and my post-workout meal, that’s something that I have been very heavily planning and concerned about pretty much the entire time.
Staple pre-workout meal right now is like my tomato soup with vegetables and whatever kind of homemade seitan I have. So plenty of carbs, plenty of protein and not a really high fat meal. I will say in the past though, that one of the things that has served me very, very well is having super firm tofu as my protein for my pre-workout, which isn’t necessarily like absolutely ideal since there is some dietary fats in the tofu, but it’s something that has made me very, very, like just satiated, very satiated and very comfortable during my workouts.
I find it hard to find anything else that makes me feel more full than super firm tofu, but we can get into the macros and all that as we go on. I always like to dork out and talk about like why we’re making these recommendations and maybe talk about like catabolism a little bit. Do you think that would make sense?
[Ben]Well, I was gonna start just by saying, so a couple of points that you touched on there with your kind of pre-workout meal, talking about fats, I think something that’s important for people to know that they might not know is that fats slow your digestion. And that’s something that, hey, dietary fat has a couple different roles. It supports hormone production.
There’s multiple vitamins and minerals that alongside fats are better absorbed, better bioavailability. So there’s lots of different functions that dietary fat has to play. And one of its properties is that it slows digestion, the lipids slow digestion.
So that’s something to keep in mind. If you’re eating close to your workout, you might wanna keep it lower in fat, which is kind of what Alice is saying. It’s also something that can be utilized if you are not going to be able to eat for like three or four hours prior to training, let’s say.
You might actually want a meal that is higher in fat because then it’s gonna be slower digesting. By the time it’s digested, you’re in your workout and you’re not super hungry. And that’s something that there has been research on is they will give people this kind of like orange sludge and they’ll mix it together and they have like a one that has calories in it and one that doesn’t have calories in it.
And they’ll kind of just like, you know, like match them the best that they can and see how people do during their workout. The research has mostly found that it’s more about having something in your stomach and more about being full. And there’s something about that that protects or is beneficial for training performance.
And so finding something that leaves you feeling satiated, but also not to the point where you’re stuffed and uncomfortable, it’s kind of this nice middle ground that you’re trying to find because if you’re uncomfortable during your training, you’re probably not gonna perform as well either. A lot of times I’ll say to people when they’re thinking about what to eat around their workout, especially pre-workout is you want to do something that’s going to sit well with you. If you’re not comfortable, like if you feel good, you’re going to perform good.
That’s something that I definitely believe in. So that’s something that I want to talk about different considerations for, but I think it could make sense to talk about kind of like the more basic science and goes into like why we’re recommending certain things at these meals. And I guess the place that I would start is just thinking about when we think about protein in general, we start by having our total protein target.
That’s like the thing that’s at the top of the pyramid or bottom of the pyramid that’s the most important. After that, we can consider things like meal timing, like spacing that protein out over the course of the day. And the rationale behind this is that when we eat protein, it spikes muscle protein synthesis.
And there’s kind of a period where it spikes and then it comes back down and it’s two or three hours, I think usually. And so people will say, all right, you want to try to like spread out your protein throughout the day. Now there’s kind of mixed results with these different studies, but generally like if you have at least three protein feedings throughout the day spread out, it’s pretty equivalent up to like five or six, like four might be slightly better than three, five might be slightly better than four, but it’s so marginal that it’s probably not going to, you know, make a huge difference and come out in the wash. There was even a study I think recently where they fed people like 100 grams of protein in one sitting versus two or three or something like that.
And it was pretty similar results. So the rationale is generally spreading your protein out throughout the day. So when we think about a pre-workout or a post-workout meal, it makes sense to have protein in those meals because those are protein feedings that contribute to our overall protein intake.
Did you want to kind of talk a little bit about what you were mentioning with like, you know, the breakdown between muscle protein synthesis and contabilism and kind of how that operates?
[Alice]Yeah, so I think that’s great. You’re talking about spreading out protein and I kind of want to expand on that a little bit maybe later on if we can, because I like to talk about it with, in regards to like a lot of the people that I train who are women who are trying to lose weight, specifically come to us for fat loss specifically, trying to preserve muscle, and they’re in a calorie deficit and they are having pretty low calories, all things considered, not as low as my fitness pal might assign them or anything, but it’s still difficult for them to get like that pre-workout meal and that post-workout meal in.
And so I liked that you talked about, I agree that the research that I have seen, like three is really kind of like the optimal, but there’ve been people that talking about like, yeah, spreading it out to more or even to two, like it’s marginally better to have three protein feedings, right? It’s not something that’s gonna move the needle a ton. So for like my ladies who are on these really low calorie diets, like I kind of try to get them to a point where they’re eating, like they kind of almost choose between a pre-workout and a post-workout and it depends on like when was their last meal, for example, like are they waking up and immediately going to work out?
And if that’s the case, like you gotta have a pre-workout meal. Like you said, there are some exceptions, but that’s what I’m gonna highly, highly recommend, right? Or if they’re having a workout that’s later, it’s like, huh, they might’ve just eaten two hours ago and it might be okay to wait and have their workout and then have that post-workout meal afterwards because it’s hard.
It’s hard to fit all your calories right around that workout when you’re so limited and it’s exciting. It’s exciting that the research is showing that this like the three-ish feedings is gonna be good. It doesn’t have to be so, so regimented like we were always taught, like must have that pre-workout meal like within an hour before and what was the after the post-workout meal within like 90 minutes?
So was he like OG?
[Ben]Yeah, something like that. Yeah, exactly.
[Alice]Yeah, yeah. So I mean, as far as like catabolism and stuff, so I guess I wanna change a little bit to the topic of carbohydrates and just talk about like the importance of carbohydrates. They are gonna be like the most protective thing when it comes to like preserving your muscle tissue around your workouts and as you’re in a fat loss phase, you know, specifically like glycogen and I talk a lot about glycogen to my clients.
So I’m sure they’re all like, oh God, here we go. But glycogen, the stored form of carbohydrates in your muscle, right? These carbohydrates are not really a bad thing but I think they cause a lot of people a lot of stress because they, you know, that’s a lot of what is to do with the scale kind of like going up and down all the time.
Of course, your water intake, your food digesting through your body, like that’s gonna have a role too but like your glycogen levels can just be what, like you literally step on the scale and some people just get so attached to that number and if their glycogen goes up, like your freaking scale weight can jump up, you know, four pounds and it’s like, what happened? What happened to my diet, right? So we love to hate glycogen, I think, I think.
But I think that glycogen is just really precious and something that is, you know, I like to talk about as far as its protective role. So obviously the carbs we eat are gonna slowly make their way into our muscle. I think, what was it, like 24 hours after eating carbohydrates, they can really be delivered into your glycogen stores.
Is that roughly?
[Ben]Something like that. Yeah, I think it can depend, there’s like so many factors that can influence it, right? Like how, like even your body fat percentage and how like insulin sensitive you are because insulin is like a transport hormone.
So people often, and people, when I start talking about insulin, people are gonna get scared, like, ooh, this is a bad thing. Like, I don’t wanna spike insulin. Like there’s some people who kind of fall into that, you know, ideology.
But the thing is, like insulin is a hormone in our body and it has purpose, it has a role. And that role is to help shuttle basically sugars in our blood and be stored. And that can be, it’s a storage hormone.
So it can be fat, it can be sugars and that can be a good thing or for some people it can be a bad thing. And that’s, again, I don’t wanna get too far into like physiology and diabetes and all of that. But insulin is actually like a, it’s an anabolic hormone.
And so like eating carbohydrates and raising your insulin, yes, it can have some detrimental effects, but having regular spikes and drops in insulin is fine. It’s normal. So, and it’s actually, it’s anti-catabolic is what it is.
It’s not actually directly like anabolic, but it’s anti-catabolic. And when we think about muscle protein, like creating muscle on our bodies, it’s this balance between protein synthesis and protein degradation. And we wanna be in a positive nitrogen balances is what it’s called.
So that’s, the role of carbohydrates is, partially like you’re mentioning being stored as glycogen in our muscles for every one gram of carbohydrates that we eat, we can store up to like three grams of glycogen as water. I’ve even seen some studies that can say you can store up to like nine or 10 grams as water, which is crazy. So you’re going to, your weight is going to increase when you eat more carbohydrates, but that’s not a bad thing.
Like you might actually look in the mirror and say, I look better. I look, you know, my muscles look fuller because they’re filling them out. They’re giving them this volume.
They’re pushing against the skin, especially if you’re lean, like we’re bodybuilders. We’ve gone through this process. There’s a reason why people are often talking about peak week as this magical thing, because you’ve been depleted all this time of glycogen.
You know, as you diet down, you have to reduce your carbohydrates. They’re not gonna be as high. Your training performance starts to suffer.
You get flat, meaning your muscles look deflated. That’s bodybuilding speak for muscles looking kind of deflated. And then you do this carb up, you eat a bunch of carbs.
They fill out, pushes against the skin, makes you look leaner. And it’s like, whoa, where did all this come from? So like you’re saying, it’s not the enemy.
Like just because your scale weight jumps up a few pounds when you eat more carbs, you know, that’s it. They have so many benefits. So I might’ve taken that on a tangent.
I’d love for you to kind of jump back in wherever you were.
[Alice]No, I love that. I love that. The, I think the public just like oversimplifies social media, you know, diet culture kind of oversimplifies.
Like when we walk, when we exercise, when we run, you know, everyone’s thinking, oh, well, you know, I’m doing this to, you know, burn fat. And I think people think that that’s all we’re going to be burning, right? Is, oh, I do this exercise so that we burn fat.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth. We break down, you know, not only fats, but also carbohydrates and protein. And our bodies have ways of converting, you know, proteins into energy, fats into energy that we can burn, right?
And so it’s kind of, it’s interesting, and I love dorking out about this stuff, but like how long it takes, you know, the body to break down these different energy sources. What is the body’s preferred, you know, energy source? So the reality is our bodies are very, very slow to break down stored fat cells.
Also, like you mentioned earlier, it’s slow for us to break down fat and digest it from what we’re eating in our diet, right? But, you know, if we look at like a weightlifting session or most exercise, that’s going to be pretty taxing, right? The body is not able to utilize like proportionately that much stored fat, unfortunately.
Like this is bad news to a lot of people. Really, the general order, the general like preferred, like what the body’s able to dip into, like first going to like your most recent meal, right? Primarily what was available in carbs in your most recent meal, right?
And you did a great job talking about fats. If we have a lot of fats paired up with those carbohydrates, then it’s basically slowing your body’s ability to get that energy. So that’s why we say for your pre and post-workout meals, try to keep them low fat because that’s gonna be providing that energy that your body needs like as fast as possible, right?
That’s the theory. And then, I mean, the second thing after the carbohydrate, after the energy from the food that we’ve eaten is it’s gonna be going for our carbohydrates, right? So it’s gonna be going for like the glycogen.
And there’s a lot of really interesting research recently that’s been showing like weightlifters, bodybuilders can easily deplete all of their glycogen during one workout. Like for a long time, I think the general consensus was, you don’t really deplete all of your glycogen in one workout, but unless you’re a power lifter, doing CrossFit and just having these long, really intense workouts. But no, we now know that you can burn through all your glycogen.
And then the third thing after our glycogen, it’s gonna really be faster for us to start breaking down our proteins and our lean muscle tissue. And that all comes before it starts breaking down fat for the most part proportionately, right? So this is heartbreaking to a lot of people, but I think it’s important to understand this because that’s why we recommend like eating that pre-workout meal, sort of getting into the territory of like, you know, not training fasted, right?
If we have those carbohydrates, then literally it can protect a lot of the process of body breaking down muscle to fuel your workouts. I feel like that’s sort of shooting yourself in the foot. I know a lot of people online are talking about like, oh, well, don’t be so like black and white about like, you know, fasted training is bad.
But if you’re looking at the big picture, like the more muscle we have, the easier it’s gonna be for us to keep weight off, continue losing weight, because it’s going to, you know, muscle is going to increase like our resting metabolic rate. So I’ve talked for a while. Do you wanna add to any of this, Ben?
[Ben]Yeah, actually kind of one of the earlier things where you’re talking about, there’s a couple of things that you touched on. One was maybe we don’t need both a pre-workout and a post-workout meal. And that’s especially true if you’re having them in close proximity to your workout.
Let’s say you’re doing a 60 minute workout and you’re eating 30 minutes before and after. So you’re only eating like two hours apart. You might not even be hungry.
And really when we’re talking about a calorie deficit, the main thing is adherence. Like for myself, I find that after I train, I’m really not hungry for a little bit of time unless it’s been a while since I haven’t eaten. Sometimes, usually for me, it’s like an hour and a half, two hours when I’m eating my pre-workout meal and it might be like an hour or two after my post-workout meal.
So it’s totally okay to kind of spread them apart. We’re gonna have one in close proximity and then one kind of further away. They don’t need to be like, like I was just saying, you don’t need to rush.
It doesn’t need to be like right before and right after. It’s not a big deal. A lot of the time where people say like avoid fats in your post-workout meal is because we wanna resynthesize that glycogen as fast as possible.
But it’s really not a big deal unless you have like two workouts in your day. Like you’re, you know, maybe you’re a dual sport athlete or you’re a CrossFit athlete who goes into morning and evening sessions. It’s not a huge thing to worry about as long as you have, you know, four or five, six, seven hours till you’re next doing something.
So for the vast majority of people, it’s not something that you have to overly stress about. Of course, I think there’s a psychological component to feel like you’re doing the best job that you can and like ticking these boxes and like, okay, I’m getting my protein in, I’m getting my carbs in for my pre and post-workout meal. But if you’re not as hungry during those times, it’s okay to focus.
I think I like to focus more on the pre-workout meal than the post-workout meal and just make sure that you have some energy going into your workout because your training is the most important thing that you can do for preserving and for building your muscle mass. So I think this is a good segue into talking about like fasted training or if you train first thing in the morning and some recommendations that we could give there. So if you are waking up and you’re basically training first thing, the ultimate level of this is you have a home gym and you just like walk downstairs and start training.
If that’s the case, you know, you might not, like maybe eating a pre-workout meal, even if it’s just like a banana and a protein shake, like that’s a very basic light pre-workout meal that I recommend somebody on their drive to the gym that they have. But if it’s like they’re pretty much training immediately, something that they could consider is an intra-workout drink. And that’s something that I have for my workouts regardless.
And for certain people, I’ll put them in their workouts regardless of when their workouts are, if they have really long workouts or if it’s a while since their last meal and it just fits their schedule. But basically that intra-workout drink for me is it’s some form of easily digesting carbohydrate. So you could use like a fruit juice and just dilute it, but basically like a Gatorade powder, something that’s really cheap, it’s maybe got some electrolytes in there as well, and then some essential amino acids.
So usually in like a two to one or four to one ratio in favor of the carbohydrates is how I like to conceptualize or think about for people. So it could be as simple as a serving of Gatorade powder, which I think is like 20 grams of carbs and like, I don’t know, five grams of EAS, essential amino acids. You dilute that with some water, you can even add some like additional electrolytes in there to give it some flavor because it’s not gonna taste like much.
And that’s something that you can sip on during your workout if you don’t have a pre-workout meal. It’s gonna kind of give you the fuel to get through that workout and then you can go and have your post-workout meal, whether that’s an hour afterwards, two hours afterwards. If you don’t have a pre-workout meal, I would say it’s probably not a great idea to go a ton, like a lot of time before having a post-workout meal.
I would recommend probably having that post-workout meal. You don’t have to rush, but like, don’t wait and push it off if you haven’t had a pre-workout meal. Also, if you’re training first thing in the morning, that last meal the night before, that might be something that you consider biasing more of your carbohydrates towards that because that meal then becomes essentially your pre-workout meal that you’re going to be taking in with you the next day.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or how you generally deal with this with your clients.
[Alice]Yeah, so very rarely do I specifically recommend people do like in the middle of workout, you know, sort of eating and drinking, but really it only comes up, I’d say, and I’ve had a few clients that just really, really, even when they have their pre-workout meal as recommended, they just feel very low energy throughout the workout. And in that case, I’m usually, you know, recommending that, I mean, they can just even have sugar water if they wanted, making sure they have, I don’t know, it depends on how long the workout is, but maybe 20, 30 grams of carbs in that water. You know, you can easily figure that out on with your MyFitnessPal, your chronometer, and making sure you’re just sipping on that as you go, especially if you don’t want to actually be eating food in the gym.
I know I’m kind of funny about that just because gym is not a very sanitary place. We talk about electrolytes if clients definitely have trouble with cramps. And sometimes if they have a problem with like dizziness and such, things like that.
But for the most part, I’d say I focus more on the pre and post-workout meals. Me, you know, my workouts are so intense now that I really, really focus on the electrolytes. So not only am I using Ultima for the drink that I carry around in the gym, which has Stevia, so it doesn’t really have any carbs in it, zero calorie, but it has, you know, pretty much all the important electrolytes except for your sodium, right?
And I also carry around literally the Morton Light Salt. And the only time that I have the Morton Light Salt is when I’m at the gym, because I feel that it just really, really like hydrates me. I’m one of those people who tend to just easily become dehydrated.
Even if I drink a lot of water, it just kind of like goes through me. And I don’t really like feel like it’s moving the needle a lot. So having this Morton Light, it’s potassium and sodium in here.
So I’ll literally carry around, I now have one of these ridiculous like bro water bottle thing. And I’ll pour out, you know, a cup, maybe a cup and a half of water, and I have a little measuring thing to pour to dose out my potassium salt. And that helps me so, so much as far as being able to stay hydrated during my workouts.
And really the biggest reason is like for recovery. A recovery has been such a challenge with this new programming. So yeah, absolutely.
If you’re having very intense workouts, like it’s very appropriate to be starting to think about these things. But yeah, you don’t have to just do the Gatorade powder, you can do that for convenience. So you can do, you know, some form of sugar, maple syrup in your water, whatever it is.
[Ben]I think touching on hydration is really important because especially if you’re getting out of bed first thing in the morning, you probably are a little dehydrated. You haven’t drank water a lot of times. So starting your day off by drinking some water, getting hydrated, that’s probably gonna do as much for you as eating.
So that’s something that is really important to keep in mind. If you’re somebody who sweats a lot or you urinate a lot, it could be worth considering having some more salt in that pre-workout meal. Or if you’re somebody, here’s another one, if you’re somebody who you get really cold really easily, you find it harder to get kind of like the blood flow going.
Also, again, considering maybe a meal that’s higher in sodium for your pre-workout meal. Of course, there’s pros and cons of sodium. So, you know, know yourself, know your blood work.
Like if you have high blood pressure, that’s a con that you have to consider, just weighing the trade-off. But if you’re somebody who, you know, you have blood pressure in the normal or low range, and you’re somebody who could benefit from having some sodium in that pre-workout meal, you know, it will increase blood flow to areas. And so it can help with vascularity, getting a pump in the gym, just like, you know, getting the blood moving a little bit more.
And some people find that to be beneficial. Also just like retaining water can be a good thing when you need it for certain circumstances and not, you know, not getting dehydrated in the gym, which can definitely impact performance. There’s a lot of studies on performance and dehydration.
And it does take quite a lot of losing, you know, fluids before you start to really see a performance impact, but sometimes it can be psychological as well. So that’s something to consider is just making sure that you are hydrated, you’re drinking your water. If you’re somebody who needs maybe a little sodium to get to that optimal level of hydration, considering that we’ve touched on kind of the role of the different macronutrients in the pre and post-workout meal, generally, you know, keeping in mind where fats are going to be best placed based on how far your training is away from that pre-workout meal, you know, the role of protein and why we want to consume that and carbohydrates. So I’m curious, you know, from like the practical side of things, do you find that this is a conversation that you have pretty often with folks, or does it kind of tend to come up like once? I know for me, focusing on peri-workout nutrition is one of, I would say, the last things that I focus on with somebody.
If I find that they have been like kind of ticking all the boxes otherwise, then we’ll talk about it. Or if they’ve been having issues with their workouts, if they haven’t been performing as well, or they’re asking me questions, of course. But I would say usually it’s reserved for folks who are really doing, you know, a lot of, you know, they’re hitting their protein, they’re hitting their calories every day, they’re doing the right things.
Like if somebody is focused so much on peri-workout nutrition that they are then, you know, they’re not adhering to the targets that we set out for them at the end of the day, again, kind of going back to that pyramid and like what’s the most important, then that would probably be something that I would address with them first and say, hey, you know what, this stuff’s important, but I think we need to kind of focus on dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s first. So I’d be curious to know if you’ve kind of found the same thing.
Like I think there are different archetypes of people and different psychologies. And there are some people who really like to major in the minors and really like to focus on all these kind of like small details before they’ve nailed the big picture things. Is that something that you ever run into?
[Alice]Yeah, I mean, I think that we, there was a time when I sort of went over pre and post-workout meals with clients sort of very, very early on. But the more that I’ve worked with, like I said, women who are trying to be in a calorie deficit and trying to build muscle at the same time, I’ve sort of shifted towards, let’s just focus on making sure that you are eating something close to your workouts. Let’s make sure that you know about spreading out your protein throughout the day.
And what else? Let’s make sure that you’re not like hoarding all your carbohydrates in just the morning or just the evening trying to spread out your carbohydrates, which I think is very important. And this is something that I really, really learned like during competition prep is like the more we sort of like hoard those carbohydrates, the more like our glycogen can get, you know, get depleted and kind of stay depleted.
And that can actually end up really like hurting your look in that process. So I know that most people aren’t gonna be too, too worried about that, but probably more of like the men that are listening to this, to this podcast. Yeah, keeping your, having regular doses of carbohydrates, having them around your workout, having carb cycling days, very important as well when we’re in a calorie deficit so that we are able to not just live on empty glycogen stores the whole time, can really, really help us like have a more productive cut, can really help us sort of stay fuller longer, can really help our hormones, can really help stop some of the early plateauing that we see. Do you wanna talk about refeed days at all?
[Ben]Yeah, I think it’s important to say that getting flat and having depleted glycogen stores, like in a way it is necessary for it to liberate a body fat. So it is a part of the process. You are gonna have times where you’re not super high in glycogen or you’re in a deficit.
So it’s kind of this period of this, this pushing and pulling, it’s this dance that we play where we want to deplete our glycogen stores so that we can lose body fat, but we don’t wanna have them so depleted that we start to impair our training performance and lose muscle. So one way that we can often do this is by periodizing it. And so we might have, oftentimes five days during the week where we’re taking a lower calorie range and still keeping the protein pretty high.
And then we have two days out of the week where we’re primarily increasing the carbohydrates that we have in our diet. Maybe our fats are coming up a little bit too, but it’s mostly coming from carbohydrates. And that allows us to then refill our glycogen stores, come in fresh to the next week.
And ultimately that is going to kind of refuel that gas tank so that we can go again. Because if you’re always running on empty, you can only do that for so long before you start to see detriment. So it’s kind of this push and pull where we want to, if we’re in a deficit, we want to liberate body fat, but we also want to be able to protect your training performance.
And so there’s lots of different ways that you can set this up. You can alternate between high and low days. You can have back-to-back high days and a bunch of low days.
You can basically set it up however you want. And it’s really about the average calorie deficit at the end of the day. But there are certain strategies that people have found to be helpful for adherence.
Like oftentimes having higher calories on the weekends, just because the weekends are when people tend to have more social occasions and being able to fit those things in is really helpful. So that’s usually how I find myself setting them up with people that I work with is, okay, let’s pick the days of the week where you think that you might have some more social eating occasions, give you a little bit more wiggle room, try to keep the carbs higher on those days. If we’re going for meals out, maybe picking options that aren’t super high in added oils or fats, seeing what you can do with that can be hard with eating out.
But yeah, that’s usually how I’m thinking about that. What about you?
[Alice]Yeah, no, I think that was very well said. Thank you. Glycogen, being protective, making sure you’re having your refeed days, and Ben gave some awesome options there.
I don’t know. I feel like we covered a lot. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on?
[Ben]We did. Not really. That was most of the things that I had on my mind.
I think, again, I just kind of want to bring it back to the big picture, and this is something that’s important. It certainly is, because our workouts and our training is what drives the body composition changes. Obviously, diet does as well, to an extent.
But especially if we’re in a build and our goal is to build muscle, we really want to make sure that our training is on point. And when we’re in a deficit, we want to protect that too. Even if we’re not gaining strength as much or as quickly, we still want to try to have our training performance be as good as it can be.
So just keeping in mind that, the totals at the end of the day when it comes to nutrition and your macros and all of that are the most important, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t or that you shouldn’t focus on these other factors as well.
[Alice]Absolutely. I think that it’s a good detail to focus on if you, in particular, struggle with energy during your workout. If you struggle with muscle cramps or any kind of dizziness, it’s always good to think about electrolytes and the calories that you’re having for your workouts.
And if you’re a person also that has to work out early in the morning, obviously, definitely carefully consider, who can have a meal beforehand. I know there are a lot of people who really suffer with a nausea when they first wake up. That’s probably the one thing we could talk about before we wrap up.
If you just are really, really nauseated, really, really uncomfortable and having some kind of food is literally just going to like pull the rug out from underneath your workouts. And that’s probably when I would say like, yeah, let’s go ahead and skip the pre-workout meal. And like Ben suggested, try and have a heavy meal before you go to bed as far as carbohydrates is concerned to try and set you up for success in the morning.
But we wanna try to preserve our muscle mass as much as possible. We don’t want to get to a point where catabolism starts and we’re breaking down our lean tissue in order to fuel our workouts. I feel like that’s definitely shooting us in the foot, at least a percentage of it.
It’s not gonna completely destroy your muscle building journey, but it’s just something to be very, very cognizant of.
[Ben]Okay, Alice, I think we’ve done this topic justice. So I’m gonna close this out here and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. I’ve been Ben, I’m with Alice here.
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