“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you have fed him for life.”
I’ve been having a twitter-dance battle with @shawndross over the question of what recovery products to use after a work out. 140 characters may be enough to propose to your future spouse or prove to the world that you can still xpress a thot usin cre8ive txt, but it isn’t enough to get a straight answer out on the subject of exercise and nutrition.
This post is for perspective. I want to show you that I think on the “forest level” first. If you know how to think through health information, you can reduce the confusion that so often overwhelms people (me included)!
I start by elucidating what I know about myself. For when I understand what I want and need, I can avoid the things that don’t help me get there, and embrace the things that do help. Putting exercise into the bigger context of your life is what you have to understand before you can make good use of the information that’s out there! Said another way, if we understand why we are exercising, we can see what we need to do and what we need to avoid. Then we can make the details of our workout support those goals and avoid those pitfalls.
So here’s the way I think we should approach things. First, Why are you exercising?
In my life, exercise is something that I do to help me compete in athletic things (tennis, running races, and triathlons), to reduce the effect of my own personal diseases/health risks, and (let’s just be honest here) because I like how I look when I’m in shape and I’m hoping some cute, smart lass will agree. In addition, I like where I am in terms of body mass, muscle mass, and weight, so weight loss is not a major goal for me.
Second, what are the limits of my knowledge? My experience in medicine shows me that the general public has a skewed sense of exercise and food. Stuff like, carbohydrates and fat are bad, and exercise is punishment. Thank you, Mr. Klein, with your awkwardly short PE shorts and uber-tight shirt/whistle combo, for punishing our tomfoolery with laps around the school yard. It takes years to get over the concept that exercise isn’t meant as punishment. How does that play into the nutrition aspect? Well, if exercise is punishment and it burns calories, then putting calories back into your body mitigates (erases) the punishment. We can’t have that, now can we? But since I’m using myself as an example, I have education, experience, and access to resources to help me meet my goals. But I also have to ask for help from trainers and nutritionists. I encourage you to do the same when you get to the details if you think you need the help!
Knowing this is what exercise means to me, how do I plan to achieve this? To reduce my health risks and get better at the sports I enjoy, I have to workout consistently and for long periods of time (long runs, etc.); and I have to do it throughout my life. I have to be able to build up my work load safely and then keep it up. This is a life long plan!
I have my goals, I see what it means for my exercise regimen, so now what? Well, now I have to understand what can cause me to fail to meet my goals. From experience and my career, I can tell you briefly that injuries, burnout, and giving up are the major set-backs that I have suffered and which prevent me from meeting my goals. For me personally, it takes a long time to recover physically and emotionally from these things.
At this point, I’ve done the majority of the work. I know what I want to do, I know the limits of my knowledge to make it happen and have access to help if I need it. I also know how exercise fits into my long term goals, and I know what I have to avoid. Now we’re talking! Using this framework, all the information and resources out there can be used or dismissed based on how it conforms to my medically sound scheme.
Phew! That’s good because there’s a lot out there! Instead of asking myself, “What nutrition do I use after exercise?” an incredibly difficult and broad question, I now ask myself, “What nutrition will help me recover physically and emotionally, not change my weight, and be ready for the next cardio work out?”
A narrow question that I can use to sift through all of the nutritional stuff that’s out there:
Basically, I need post-exercise nutrition that will re-energize me for the next cardio workout. I need the essential elements required to restore the things my body consumed in the work out so that they’ll be there next time. I need the building blocks of my body to repair the normal “damage” or break down of my body that exercise creates. And I need enough of these in a timely fashion to avoid weight changes and stay emotionally/psychologically happy. I want something I can consume right away because if not I’ll feel exhausted which will make me start to doubt myself and the ability to come back and do it again the next day.
For me that’s a product like Endurox R4, which is a blend of carbohydrates and protein, with a reasonable amount of calories to replace what it is that I consumed. I drink it immediately after, and then I don’t go too long before I sit down and get some real food.
Why do I use a powder instead of just eating? Like many a man (immature as I may be, at this point I qualify), I don’t feel like eating after a workout. There are little chemicals (ghrelins, insulin, etc.) that exercise affects. For me, it leads to not feeling very hungry. But if I’m going to keep doing this day in and day out, and avoid all the pitfalls that can set me back, I know I need to get something into my system. For me, that is this powder blend.
Hopefully this gives you a sense of how one can approach resources like nutrition in such a way that they enhance your ability to keep meeting your goals for exercise and lifestyle. I’m not endorsing a product, I’m endorsing a way of rational reflection that will “teach to you fish” your way through these resources. This is the way to long term success in health and fitness.
Why agree with me? Well, in the end you’re going to put in the energy either way. Generally speaking the other approach leads to starts and stops and failures with energy consumed in recovery, frustration, and maybe even dealing with preventable disease. This way energy expended up front creates a sustainable plan that then gets tweaked with experience and brings you more good days and more joy. Tweaked with experience? Yep, you have to go and try to learn a lot of these things. Much of what I learned about my own body, exercise, and nutrition came from doing, not medical school (though that helped)!
But wait, you didn’t answer any specific questions!!! I know, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you go through this process, a lot of those specific questions won’t be necessary anymore. In fact, until you’ve done this, all those questions are distracting and confusing, even when I give specific answers!
Give it a shot, then ask me questions @DrMarcusLehman on Twitter!
“Give a man some fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.” It’s something like that, right?
