Is Meat a Good Idea After a Strength Workout?

Well-trained muscles aren't just about looking good — they also strengthen your immune system and can help prevent conditions like osteoporosis, high blood pressure and diabetes. Strong back muscles can also take the strain off your spine, easing back pain in the long run. Every kind of physical exertion, whether strength or endurance sport, triggers adaptation processes in your body. These depend heavily on the stimulus you set. Muscle building only happens when the right stimulus for it is applied. For muscle-building training, strong stimuli above the threshold are especially important, while training below that threshold leads to adaptations in tendons, ligaments and bones, which is just as important for a balanced training programme.

Give your body time
Muscle building doesn't happen during training, but in the time after it (12 to 36 hours). That means how you structure your rest days ('not training') is just as important as the training itself. Before you set the next training stimulus, your body needs time to recover. You should also train regularly and stick with it long-term. It's more sensible, and far more effective, to train for one hour three times a week than for one session of 3 hours. As with weight loss, nutrition plays an important role in strength training. Protein plays a key part here. Its job isn't to supply energy — protein's main role in the body is as a 'building material' for cells, organs, blood and muscles. Since your body can only synthesise a limited amount of protein itself, you need a daily supply from food. Adults need around 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight a day, while strength and endurance athletes need between 1.2 and 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. Besides an adequate protein intake, it's also crucial to supply your body with enough energy in the form of carbohydrates and fats — otherwise it won't use the protein as a building block but burn it as fuel instead. For recreational athletes who want to build muscle, it's recommended to aim for a daily calorie ratio of 40 percent protein and carbohydrates and 20 percent fat. Meat and fish are high in protein. Eggs, quark and cottage cheese are also good options for covering your daily protein needs.

Straight after training
Protein shakes have proven especially useful straight after training, since protein absorption speeds up in the first hour afterwards. The training itself, though, remains the key factor for muscle building. Various studies have shown that an extra intake of around 20 grams of protein per meal supplies the body with the ideal amount of amino acids for building muscle. Higher protein doses don't give muscle building any extra boost. This means your daily protein intake is best spread across several meals. It's worth knowing that muscle synthesis is most effective during the day and that hardly any protein is processed at night. Taking in uncontrolled amounts of protein is therefore a thing of the past in strength sport too. Any protein consumed in excess is oxidised and ultimately burned off and excreted as an expensive source of energy.

Sources: Dr. Pierre Hofer