Pre-Workout Nutrition

by Doug Jackson, M.Ed.,CSCS

I want to share with you one of the most often forgot about factors in many people’s workouts programs... pre-workout nutrition.

Here’s what it comes down to: To have a high performance workout, you need to have some fuel in your system; ideally some high-performance fuel.

Pre-workout nutrition can be defined in a few different ways, but for the scope of this article, we’ll focus on the last meal prior to your workout.

When I talk about “fuel”, I’m talking about energy (otherwise known as calories).

To be able to workout hard, you need to have some energy stores available for use. Those energy stores can come from three different sources:
1) Your body fat
2) Your glycogen (carbohydrate) stores in your muscle.
3) Your body’s cannibalization of its own muscle tissue and its conversion into glucose.

Which of the three sources you burn depends primarily on what type of workout you are doing, how your body is conditioned, what you had to eat prior to the workout, and how long it’s been since your last meal.

I don’t mean to make this complicated, but it is a little more complicated than seeing how many calories you burnt during your workout and assuming that those calories came from fat stores. There is a science to this.

For strength training, muscle building, and high intensity cardio workouts, you need to have plenty of glycogen (remember, that is stored carbohydrates), on hand to fuel your body.

If, during strength training, your glycogen stores become depleted, the body will tap into your existing muscle tissue and convert it into glucose for fuel. This is not what we want. We work out to build muscle and increase metabolism, not to lose muscle and decrease metabolism.

Further, during this process, you will have a much less effective workout than if your body had been properly fueled.

In fact, my main motivation for writing this article was seeing too many of my clients coming in for workouts, not being properly fueled, and then “crashing” during their workouts.

What do I mean by “crashing”?

I mean clients doing 8 reps on a weight that they normally do 15 reps with.

I mean clients running out of steam on the 9th or 10th set of exercise in a session when they aren’t even half way done with their workouts.

I mean clients getting twenty minutes into their workouts and feeling extremely light headed and having to discontinue the workout.

These symptoms can be caused by a variety of things including stress, lack of sleep, lack of hydration, and lack of calories.

And in the worst cases, several of these factors will contribute synergistically to drastically affect exercise performance.

But the biggest and easiest change people can make in improving their workouts and eliminating these symptoms is improving their pre-workout nutrition.

So what is ideal pre-workout nutrition?

It depends on the goal. Are you trying to build muscle or trying to lose fat?

If the goal is to build muscle, it’s ideal to have plenty of glycogen in the muscle and plenty of glucose and amino acids in the blood stream to promote the anabolic muscle building process.

The solution for this is easy. Make sure you eat within two hours of the workout. At two hours out, you may try a medium sized meal balanced with protein and carbs. If you haven’t had anything to eat, at an hour out, you may try a protein shake and 1-2 pieces of fruit depending on your tolerance. At fifteen to twenty minutes out or less, I like to see a piece of fruit (or carbohydrate-based sports drink) taken in with some anti-catabolic amino acids such as a few grams of BCAAs (branch-chain amino acids) and a few grams of glutamine (another key amino acid) to minimize the catabolic nature of an exercise session. For people not wanting to get into advanced sports nutrition, a light yogurt might work for a good combination of carbs and protein.

If the goal is to lose fat, the pre-workout meal becomes a little bit more complicated. Mostly, there’s some controversy about just how many carbohydrates you should consume prior to your workout if you want to burn fat. It’s a fact that the more carbs you consume prior to your workout, the more likely it is that you will burn carbs, rather than fat during your workout.

The previous scenario doesn’t sound too good to my clients that want to burn fat. But the catch is that if glycogen stores and blood sugar are too low, the person won’t be able to workout with any intensity. So there’s a bit of a tradeoff between fueling the body for an intense workout and the fat loss which occurs during a workout.

After much testing with my clients, my personal belief is that in most cases it is better to come into the workout fueled adequately with enough carbohydrates to workout hard, rather than cutting carbs and having a lackluster workout.

One of the things I will teach clients about is the ratios of carbs and protein in their pre-workout meals. For muscle building, I like to have a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of carbs:protein in my pre-workout meal. For fat loss, I like to reverse that and have a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio of carbs:protein in my pre-workout meal. The main function of this dietary manipulation is optimizing your insulin levels to help you reach your particular goals.

An entire book could be written on this, and indeed entire books have been dedicated to this. However, the main question to ask yourself is “Do I have enough fuel in my body to workout as hard as I’d like?”

If you feel depleted, you know it’s time to eat a bit more before your workout. And if you are trying to build muscle, it may be time to eat quite a bit more before your workout (within reason).

Let me know how it goes!!