June 12, 2025

What to Eat Around Your Workouts (Without Overcomplicating It)

Workout nutrition is one of the most overcomplicated topics in fitness. Supplement companies and content creators have financial incentives to make it seem more complex than it is. Here is what the research actually supports.

The most important thing by far

Your total daily food intake - calories and protein across the whole day - matters far more than the timing of any individual meal. If you are eating enough protein and your overall diet supports your goal, you are doing 90% of the work.

Pre and post workout nutrition tweaks the remaining 10%. Worth understanding, but not worth obsessing over if the basics are not in place.

Before training

Training on a completely empty stomach is suboptimal for most people. Low blood sugar during training can reduce performance and make sessions feel harder than they need to be.

A meal 2 to 3 hours before training is ideal. It does not need to be elaborate - rice and protein, oats with some protein, a sandwich. Something that digests comfortably and gives you steady energy.

If you train early in the morning and cannot eat a full meal first, a small snack 30 to 60 minutes before - a banana, some yoghurt, a piece of toast - is enough to top up glycogen without feeling heavy during training.

After training

The anabolic window - the idea that you must consume protein within 30 minutes of finishing your session or gains will be lost - has been significantly overstated. Research suggests the window is more like several hours.

That said, eating a protein-containing meal within a couple of hours of training is sensible and easy to achieve. Aim for 20 to 40 grams of protein in that meal. The source does not matter much - chicken, fish, eggs, Greek yoghurt, a protein shake if convenient.

Protein across the day

This matters more than timing. For muscle building, most research points to 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day as the effective range.

Spreading this across 3 to 5 meals tends to work better than consuming it all at once, because there is a ceiling to how much protein the body can use for muscle protein synthesis in a single sitting - roughly 20 to 40 grams for most people.

What you can safely ignore

Intra-workout carbohydrates are useful for endurance athletes and people training multiple hours per day. For someone doing a 60 minute strength session, they are unnecessary.

Most performance supplements have weak evidence behind them. Creatine monohydrate is the exception - it is one of the most researched supplements in sports science and has a real, modest effect on strength and power output. Everything else is optional at best.

The practical summary

Eat a real meal a few hours before training. Eat protein after training within a couple of hours. Hit your daily protein target. Sleep enough. The rest is noise.