Performance Enhancing Meals

If you haven’t eaten protein in the 3 to 4 hours preceding your workout, then it’s a good idea to eat 30 to 40 grams or so before you train. If you have eaten protein in the last few hours, though, then you don’t need to eat more. You can just eat after your workout. If you want to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, then you want to eat around 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day, and break it up into 4 to 6 separate servings timed a few (3 to 4) hours apart.

It contains clinically effective doses of 6 of the most effective performance-enhancing ingredients or pre-workout nutrition available:

• Caffeine. Caffeine is good for more than the energy boost. It also increases muscle endurance and strength.
• Beta-Alanine. Beta-alanine is a naturally occurring amino acid that reduces exercise-induce fatigue, improves anaerobic exercise capacity, and can accelerate muscle growth.
• Citrulline Maleate. Citrulline is an amino acid that improves muscle endurance, relieves muscle soreness, and improves aerobic performance.
• Betaine. Betaine is a compound found in plants like beets that improves muscle endurance, increases strength, and increases human growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor 1 production in response to acute exercise.
• Ornithine. Ornithine is an amino acid found in high amounts in dairy and meat that reduces fatigue in prolonged exercise and promotes lipid oxidation (the burning of fat for energy as opposed to carbohydrate or glycogen).
• Theanine. Theanine is an amino acid found primarily in tea that reduces the effects of mental and physical stress, increases the production of nitric oxide, which improves blood flow, and improves alertness, focus, attention, memory, mental task performance, and mood.

To construct the best pre-workout nutrition possible, we need to understand the rate of digestion of different foods to determine meal timing.

In general, dietary fat takes around 6-8 hours to digest, protein 3-4 hours, and carbs 2-3 hours (depending on the source). In this context, digestion is the amount of time it takes for food to move from the stomach to the small intestine. Of course, the food is still not totally digested, because from the small intestine food makes its way toward the large intestine for further digestion and absorption of water. Total elimination of food residue can take anywhere from 24 hours to several days.

Before getting into specifics, the good news is that your meal does not have to be “fully” digested to have a great, energy filled workout.

Dietary Fat – Because fat takes the longest to digest, the pre-workout meal should be relatively low in fat, so stay away from fatty meats and oils.

Protein – A moderate amount of a meat (4-8 ounces) or dairy sources that are low in fat can work. A major benefit of meat or dairy is they contain Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA), which can help increase the rate of protein synthesis and decrease protein breakdown during and after your workout.