Name: Does Eating Right After Lifting Make a Difference?
Uploaded: 2025-09-26T02:55:25.000Z
Duration: 20 min 35 s
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At the end of the day, is the post-workout window dead?

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We've really just been saying that more protein when you don't have enough, and more calories when you don't have enough of them, is a really great thing.

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Timing took a big, big backseat, and that is really important that we found that out, because all this paranoia of making sure to get your post-workout shake, and if you miss by 15 minutes, you're just going to have no gains, turns out was almost entirely misplaced.

However, there are elements of the post-workout window that still matter.

Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength, and today we're going to try to solve a big mystery.

What happened to the workout window as far as nutrition was concerned, especially the post-workout meal?

Let me tell you guys a little bit of a story about this.

So back in the day, maybe 10 to 15 years ago, and before that for a number of years, there was this idea about nutrient timing being really, really important.

And we had a couple of studies that showed that when you supplied people with protein and carbs immediately after training, that led to very different results in muscle gain than if you had them just not eat anything after training for a few hours.

Very clear comparisons and very basic studies illustrated that you grew more muscle, and every correlate of that, higher levels of muscle growth, lower levels of muscle loss, so higher anabolism, lower catabolism, were evident in the groups of people that had high-quality protein and carbs post-workout, and at the same time were compared with people that didn't have that, drank water, there were very large differences seen.

And so what that kicked off with some of John Ivy's work in the book Nutrient Timing in the earlier 2000s was a whole way of thinking about the post-workout meal and the post-workout window as this really important time to get very precise amounts of proteins, very precise amounts of carbs, paired well together, and that was going to make a huge, huge difference.

But if you've been in the evidence-based fitness space for a while or even just perusing videos online, you realize that, well, in the last several years, we haven't heard much about the workout window.

And if you look at some of the great work done by folks like Eric Helms, folks like Brad Schoenfeld, really standout work from an explanatory and published empirical perspective by Alan Aragon, who's amazing and you should be following already, really pointed out something that these basic comparison studies were missing, and it's this.

First thing they pointed out was, yes, protein and carbs together have a certain synergy, but that synergy mostly affects protein breakdown and not protein accretion.

So if you have carbs with your protein after a workout, it lowers the amount of excess protein breakdown is already occurring from that workout, but it doesn't raise net growth a ton, just a little bit.

Just consuming more protein can basically give you 90% or 95% of that anabolic benefit and carbs don't need to be involved.

So all of a sudden, it broke our paradigm a little bit because we're like, okay, we thought it was protein and carbs.

Turns out the carbs aren't as big of a deal as long as the calories are there and as long as there's high protein, we're good to go.

It looks like some of those studies that were being done thought they were manipulating one variable, and really they were manipulating two, which means cause and effect can no longer be established.

The one variable they thought they were manipulating was, are people eating protein and carbs a nice meal in the post-workout window versus not?

But the variable they were manipulating in addition to that was the variable of total daily protein intake.

The vast majority of folks from those earlier studies, without a post-workout shake, they were consuming 120 grams of protein per day, for example, and many really were consuming roughly that much.

With a 40-gram post-workout shake, protein, and 60-gram carbs, those people were now consuming 160 versus 120 grams of protein per day and got an increase in calories, so they were now in a slight surplus because of those carbohydrates and the proteins contributing to calories.

So in reality, we're comparing not just protein timing in those studies, but overall protein and calorie intakes through the day.

When we started making studies and conducting studies that looked at protein timing with total protein being equal between groups and total daily calories, we noticed that all but about 5% of the difference between timing your protein one way versus another, between eating protein in the post-workout window versus some other time of the day, only about 5% of that difference remained, and that it looks like those earlier studies that were showing us the post-workout windows, this huge deal and it's causing tons of muscle growth, were really just showing that an extra 40 grams of protein per day when you don't eat enough protein can make an enormous difference.

And that, combined with the other literature we've seen on protein intakes really mattering over the course of a day, kind of was like, oh man, we've really just been saying that more protein when you don't have enough and more calories when you don't have enough of them is a really great thing.

Timing took a big, big backseat, and that is really important that we found that out because all this paranoia of making sure to get your post-workout shake and if you by 15 minutes, you're just going to have no gains, it turns out was almost entirely misplaced, and that if you manage to get enough carbohydrate, protein, and calories through the whole day of eating, how you split that up just doesn't matter nearly as much, and you're going to be good to go as long as you have enough protein, which is super big, which is why the kind of modern consensus is that if you hit your total daily protein intake and you distribute it relatively evenly through three to six meals, roughly evenly spaced with roughly the same amount of protein in each meal per day, that as long as your calories are good and your carbs are good, you're just doing most of the work there to power your workouts and to get all the hypertrophic stimulus from them that you need, and then you're good to go.

However, however, there are elements of the post-workout window that still matter.

If you look at all of the literature taken together and all the theoretical constraints, you find out a few things.

One is that while overall protein and calories matter, missing multiple hours in that post-workout window can still cost you a few gains, missing multiple hours of not having enough carbohydrate and enough protein coming in.

So it's one of these things where it might be a 5% difference, but think about how 5% can reflect itself over years of either missing it or of getting it.

After several years, it's a legit muscle gain that you're missing out on if you always work out and you skip two to three hours of eating anything after, and then finally when you feel like it, you get some food in you.

In a 12-week comparison study, often you can't even detect 5% gains.

Only the most intricate studies can detect things like that, but 12 weeks can't be extrapolated to a year for sure or definitely a lifetime of training.

So on theoretical grounds and direct experimental grounds, we're fairly certain that you should be getting a good bolus of protein and a probably good bolus of carbs.

That is more optional, but for sure protein and calories within three hours of having stopped your actual workout for hypertrophy.

One of the big reasons is that your hypertrophy is stimulated by direct detection of muscle tension and possibly some other factors, the actual working out, and that grows your muscle for days afterwards.

But the mTOR complex, the central regulator of muscle growth in your muscle cells, is also independently and synergistically stimulated by amino acid availability, which means protein that you have to eat.

There is absolutely a sensitive period of stimulation that lasts generously about six hours after workouts, but the first three, your body's the most sensitive to it.

In addition to that, the mTOR complex has an insulin-independent mechanism by which high levels of insulin caused by high increases in carbohydrates also stimulate that complex, probably not resulting in increase in synthesis of protein, but almost certainly resulting in a reduction of protein breakdown.

What you end up getting from this whole situation is if you consume lots of protein within that three hours after working out, plenty of carbohydrates, and obviously that combines to lots of calories, you get a slight increase in muscle protein synthesis, a slight decrease in muscle protein breakdown, and that over many, many workouts, many, many days of training and many weeks and even months of training, the difference is going to start to become notable.

But here's another reason why workout window nutrition is a good thing to pay attention to.

The first reason is that it does work on the margins over time.

The second reason is that as you become more advanced and muscle gains become sparser and sparser, things that just didn't matter much start to matter a lot.

For example, if you have a rickety biplane from World War II and you have a bolt sticking out of it one extra inch, how much drag does that bolt have on an airframe that goes 120 miles an hour as a max speed?

I mean, gee whiz, you can't even measure it.

So if someone's like, hey, before you take off in your regular biplane from World War I, just make sure all the bolts are sticking in like, well, is it coming apart?

No, no, but just for the drag, you would be like, that's crazy for sure.

But if you're flying the SR-71 Blackbird, America's best spy plane from back in the day that goes Mach 3, three times faster than the speed of sound, one bolt protruding can throw off airframe dynamics completely and literally kill you when you get to Mach 3 by ripping the wing off behind it.

Just the same way or much the same way, when you're in your first few years of training, dude, just eat food and lift weights and you're going to be golden.

After you train as an intermediate for a while, you'll notice that like, yeah, just eat food is not causing amazing gains anymore.

And for the Now, that has to be a situation where you look, okay, I'm eating, I'm going to eat four times a day, not just twice like I usually do.

I'm going to have high quality protein in each meal.

I'm going to make sure to get a really good amount of sleep.

When you become advanced training consistently for more than seven years, even things like nutrient timing can start to make the difference between not amazing gains and okay gains.

At that point, nutrient timing can make the difference between you're making gains versus you're basically not making gains at all.

Because at that point, 5%, that's all you're growing anyway.

And it could come entirely from the fact of, do you have a post-workout meal within three to six hours of training or do you not?

And that feeds into my last point about why the If someone told you, hey, this thing you can do is going to increase your bank account by 5% per year, you go, okay, what's the catch?

We just need to sign on this dotted line and the bank does some kind of trading with your money.

It's guaranteed we won't spend all your money, but you get 5% back.

You're like, you check with Chachapiti, you check with your accountant.

If you have an opportunity post-workout, you don't even need to bring your shake with you to the gym.

I do for that extra little extra bit of insanity.

If you just stop by the gas station on the way, grab yourself a muscle milk and a pop tart, or you go home and you make yourself a shake and you have a two bananas with it.

And that happens within several hours of your lifting.

You can get a free several percent growth just from that.

It requires the effort to eat a meal within three hours of training.

If you're going to eat at any point of the day, you're going to have two points of the day that are really important.

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Does Eating Right After Lifting Make a Difference?

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