Protein Shake Before Or After Workout
Protein is essential for building bigger and stronger muscles, but the timing of your protein shake intake depends on your nutritional needs. While you can take your protein before and after a workout, it’s important to pick one time that suits your needs.
Most people think post-workout protein is the most important piece of the workout nutrition puzzle. However, some studies have recently suggested that drinking proteins and amino acids before a workout can be better.
People drink protein shakes for multiple reasons, such as muscle gain, weight rows, and injury recovery. It doesn’t matter whether you drink a protein shake before or after your workout.
Instead, your total daily protein intake matters. Make sure you get enough proteins throughout the day to meet your goals. This article weighs the pros and cons of pre-workout and post-workout protein shakes.
What’s The Purpose of a Protein Shake?
There are many reasons athletes consume protein shakes. Walk into any supplement store, and you’ll see tons of supplements for different things. They are a popular high-quality source of proteins that promotes muscle gain and improve performance and recovery.
They also prevent muscle loss and help increase muscle mass during your weight loss workout. The supplement is important when you don’t have high-quality protein sources. It suits people who struggle to reach their daily protein needs through food.
There are many benefits of drinking protein shakes before or after a workout. The major advantage is that they bring recovery and muscle-building aspects.
Athletes drink protein shakes to increase their muscle mass improve their performance. A combination of protein shakes with resistance training promotes muscle growth and enhances physical performance and recovery.
When performing an intense exercise, you may experience micro-tears within the muscle tissues. These micro-tears allow amino acids to build and maintain muscle mass.
Therefore, drinking protein is critical to rebuilding and maintaining muscle quality after intense exercise.
Physical training stimulates protein synthesis, similar to an increased high-quality protein intake. It allows you to rebuild post-exercise muscles again after a workout.
However, make sure you use the right protein shakes to boost your body. Most of the protein shakes supplements are available from animal or plant-based sources.
They come in many forms, such as proud as cop shows. You can find ready-to-drink protein shakes in liquid form or purchase the supplements in powder form.
How Protein Shakes Can Help You Lose Weight
People take protein shakes when working out to promote weight loss. The supplements provide amino acids that are easily absorbed into the body to facilitate muscle protein synthesis.
As you drink the product, it increases amino acid levels in the bloodstream, which has a more significant response to muscle synthesis.
Combining a high protein diet with strength training helps lose weight through fat burning. Studies have shown that drinking protein supplements help lose more fat when done with strength and cardio training.
Therefore, protein shakes can help you achieve your fitness goals, including losing fat and gaining muscle.
They can help you lose hunger pangs. A protein shake can make you feel full, thus preventing you from overeating. High-protein diets increase the hunger-reducing hormone after a meal, which helps control appetite.
The hormones will lead to an increased feeling of fullness by delaying the emptying of your stomach contents.
Consuming protein shakes can also boost your metabolism and increase energy expenditure. The body burns more calories by metabolizing proteins through diet-induced thermogenesis.
A protein shake index induces high-quality proteins that help burn extra calories. If you want to meet your daily protein intake, consider having regular servings of protein every 3 to 5 hours throughout the day.
The best quality protein powders contain all nine essential amino acids. When making a protein shake, you can use grass-fed whey protein or pea protein powder without added sugars or additives.
Buy the protein powder with carbohydrates from foods to help muscle recovery. However, protein shakes are not the panacea for weight loss. Therefore, you cannot replace meals with protein shakes to lose weight.
Instead, you can use the supplements to reduce your daily calories, which can help you lose weight.
Protein Shake Before Workout
Proteins play an important role in repairing and rebuilding your muscles. Pre-workout supplements are widely popular.
The idea of taking protein shakes before a workout is to give you an energy boost, enhance muscle contraction, and vasodilate your muscles to allow for more blood flow.
There is no ideal carb to protein ratio for your pre-workout protein shake. Some people may not need any carbohydrates before their workout. Here are some pros and cons of taking a protein shake before your workout.
Pros
- Drinking a protein shake before a workout can help ramp up the muscle-building process if you haven’t eaten in 3 to 4 hours.
- When you drink the branched-chain amino acids before a workout, it will help fuel your muscles. Your liver doesn’t need to process the branched-chain amino acids. Once you consume the protein shake, it heads directly to your bloodstream to be picked up by your muscles.
- Since any workout exercise causes the breakdown and oxidation of branched-chain amino acids, taking them before a workout prevents the need for your body to catabolize the working muscle itself.
- The protein can help curb hunger if you’re feeling a brief rumble in your tummy before a workout
- A protein shake before your workout can help meet your total daily protein intake. The drink increases amino acid delivery and uptake by muscles during training
Cons
The primary concern when drinking a protein shake before a workout is a risk of making you feel too full. Drinking a protein shake beforehand can mess with your workout and reduce your performance as you may feel heavy from the drink.
This is because proteins digest slowly in the body. If you have a sensitive stomach and can’t digest protein powder well, you may struggle to complete the workout.
The protein shake could cause an upset stomach if you’re doing any jumping or bounding. Therefore, it may not work if you are prone to gut issues. Some supplements may leave you itchy and jittery.
Proteins Shake After a Workout
Waiting until you finish your workout before taking a protein shake can provide all the muscle-boosting powers. You will give your body the amino acids needed to repair and rebuild muscles when you consume an adequate amount of protein after a workout.
Most branched-chain amino acids work as post-workout recovery drinks. They increase protein synthesis, reduce protein breakdown, and prevent fatigue. If you want to drink a protein shake after your workout, there are several pros and cons.
Pros
- Drinking a protein shake after a workout fastens your muscle recovery process. Proteins provide muscle endurance and more time before getting tired. However, it works best when you consume the protein within 30 minutes to two hours after a workout.
- Protein shakes improve muscular strength and speed up recovery from training. The protein will repair and rebuild muscle tissues that broke down during your workout. After you drink a protein shake, it kicks off your recovery sooner rather than later.
- Protein shakes are also good as a post-workout drink because they’re easier to digest than having a full-blown meal. Sometimes you may lack an appetite or time to make a full-blown meal after exercising. Athletes should get a protein shake right after a workout because they may forget to eat or not get hungry for several hours.
- Drinking a protein shake after a workout can help replenish any lost fluids from sweating
- If you consume protein shakes anytime up to 2 hours after your workout, you can help build muscle mass.
Cons
There are a few disadvantages of drinking a protein shake after a workout. However, some people may experience side effects such as a tingling of the skin.
Taking higher doses of the protein shake may also result in nausea and stomach pain, diarrhea, or muscle cramps. Therefore, make sure you take the right dosage of the protein shake for optimum performance. The optimal carbs-to-protein ratio in a post-workout protein shake is 3:1.
Verdict
It doesn’t matter whether you drink a protein shake before or after a workout. There are advantages and disadvantages to drinking protein shakes before or after a workout. Your choice depends on what you want to achieve after the exercise.
The most important thing is to consume protein throughout the day and give your body the proper nutrients needed to rebuild your muscles and strengthen them. However, the type of protein powder you choose to drink with your shake plays an important role.
Consider choosing protein from milk such as Whey, Casein, or milk protein concentrate and isolate over other proteins in the market because they are high quality. These proteins contain all nine essential amino acids that benefit the body.
Dedication to proper nutrition before and after workouts helps you move well and make them effective.
Resources:
