Recovery Meals - The Key for Maximizing Muscle Gain

The importance of recovery meals is often overlooked, or misunderstood. The purpose of this blog is to show the principles and the science of applying proper recovery meals for maximizing strength and improving muscle regeneration.

Part One

How to take advantage of the post exercise peak potential of the muscle to assimilate nutrients, recuperate and regenerate.

Recovery is a term that describes recuperation from a physical trauma, caused by disease, injury or exercise. During recovery, the body spends a substantial amount of energy to clean inflammatory compounds, including dead cells and toxins, while mobilizing nutrients for the buildup of new cells and tissues.

It has been established that diets profoundly affect recovery. Any deficiency in essential nutrients such as amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals or hormonal supporting nutrients may delay recuperation, adversely affecting recovery.

Exercise when done intensely is a form of physical trauma. In order to recover from the traumatic and the catabolic destructive effect of exercise on muscle fibers, the body induces awesome compensating mechanisms that involve anabolic growth promoting stimulatory actions, to potentially enhance tissue rejuvenation. These compensating mechanisms have shown to improve insulin sensitivity, improve fuel utilization for energy and increase nutrients assimilation in the muscle. Nonetheless, as critical as this process is, it is only the beginning – the initial phase of recuperation. The final results of post exercise recuperation including strength gain and muscular development depend on the completion of the whole recovery process.

Window of opportunity

The fate of recovery lies in the beginning of the recuperation process, right after the workout. There is a post exercise period that lasts between 30 minutes and up to 4 hours and is known as an open window of opportunity. That's when the body's growth promoting hormones reach peak levels, that's when insulin reaches peak sensitivity, and that's precisely when recovery meals should be ingested. Timing is everything. The capacity of any meal to promote recuperation and muscular development, relates to the following formula:

Right nutrition at the right time equals maximum recuperation and maximum rejuvenation. In other words: "it's when you eat, that makes what you eat, matter".

To understand how recovery works, let's first examine what muscle hypertrophy is.

Muscle Hypertrophy

Muscle Hypertrophy is a process whereby the muscle gets larger and stronger. This anabolic process is the result of an increased protein synthesis and the incorporation of newly divided satellite cells mayoblasts into the muscle tissue.

This is how Muscle Hypertrophy occurs:

Intense exercise increases the levels of growth promoting agents in the muscle. The most notable among them is IGF1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor). IGF1 has the fastest and most profound immediate effect on muscle regeneration. The post exercise increased IGF1 levels in the muscle tissue promotes hypertrophy through increased protein synthesis and fusion of satellite cells into the muscle fibers. Intense exercise increases levels of other growth promoting agents, including androgens – the male steroid hormones. Nevertheless, as anabolic as androgens are, they generally induce a delayed action. Androgen's steroidal effect inherently depends on variables such as the overall nutritional state and hormonal balance. Inadequate diets, low thyroid and a high ratio of estrogen/testosterone may severely impair androgens' activity and thus the body's capacity to fully recuperate and regenerate muscle tissues. In conclusion: androgens have a delayed effect on muscle hypertrophy whereas IGF1 affects the muscle immediately.

How to increase post exercise IGF1 levels?

Recent studies on rats at the department of Kinesiology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, showed that administration of IGF1 together with resistance training increased muscle mass by 30%. Amazingly, researchers found that administering IGF1 alone with no resistance training decreased muscle catabolism during sedentary states by about 50 %. The question remains- how can one naturally increase post exercise IGF1 levels in the muscle? (Note that intravenous injection of IGF1 could be lethal). The answer to that is a bit tricky. IGF1 levels increase in muscle tissues during resistance exercise partly by virtue of increased muscle cellular synthesis of IGF1 and partly due to increased serum levels of growth hormones (GH), which promotes synthesis of IGF1.

Recent studies at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada demonstrated that GH responds to a high volume of intense exercise, rather than to endurance. In other words, sprint intervals, power punching intervals or incorporation of many sets of low rep resistance exercise with minimum rest between sets will most likely promote GH more than low intensity high rep sets or moderate aerobics. Another way to increase GH levels is to exercise on empty, in particular with minimum carbs ingested before exercise. Notice that carb meals and their related insulin spikes suppress GH secretion during the daily hours. Now here is the trick, even though insulin may initially suppresses GH secretion before exercise, it ironically plays a critical role in actually finalizing the actions of both GH and IGF1 after exercise. Therefore, post exercise insulin spike is necessary for effectively finalizing the actions of the already elevated levels of GH and IGF1. In other words, post exercise carb ingestion (with an optimum insulin spike) is necessary for effectively promoting IGF1 actions in the muscle.

To understand how insulin affects IGF1 let's examine their relationship.

IGF1 and insulin

IGF1 is almost a twin brother of insulin. Both are peptides with highly structural homology and similar anabolic properties. Both bind to tyrosine kinase receptors on the cell membrane, and most important, they profoundly enhance each other's actions. So close is the similarity between insulin and IGF1, that both generate their anabolic actions through the same growth signaling compound P13K (Phosphatidylinositol –3-kinase). IGF1, however, has a more profound anabolic effect, whereas insulin is believed to facilitate mostly an anti-catabolic effect.

Insulin and muscle hypertrophy

Recent studies on the effect of 100g of carb ingestion on muscle protein synthesis at the University of Texas, Galveston, Texas, reveal that ingestion of 100g of carbs post resistance exercise improves muscle net protein synthesis. However, researchers noted that the improvement was due to insulin's inhibiting effect on muscle protein breakdown. The researchers noted that post exercise muscle protein synthesis is also profoundly affected by post exercise amino acid protein ingestion. The researchers concluded that while amino acids increase protein uptake in the muscle, carbs actually help inhibit muscle protein breakdown. Note that the anti-catabolic effect of carbs lasts for three hours after the initial ingestion. The combination of protein and carbs is critically important to the viability of post exercise recovery meals. Nonetheless, carbs should be applied in the optimum amounts as to not over-spike insulin and cause blood sugar fluctuation, insulin resistance and fat gain.

Before addressing the practical application of all the above info, let's examine the actual effect of exercise on the anabolic steroid hormones androgens and whether it's possible to take advantage of this effect.

Androgens and muscle hypertrophy

Numerous studies have demonstrated the positive effect of exercise on increasing testosterone levels. Recent studies at the College of kinesiology, university of Saskatchewan, Canada, showed that only intense resistance training (not endurance) increases testosterone during exercise. However, after an initial post exercise increase, there was a significant, almost immediate decline in free and total testosterone during the recovery period – a few hours after exercise. That may look quite discouraging, however, before kissing Big T and Big muscles goodbye, here is the good news. Researchers found that DHT (dehydrotestoterone) the most potent androgen, increases during resistance exercise and remains elevated during the recovery period after exercise. DHT is a testosterone derivative with about ten times more potency than testosterone. And now, since androgens have somewhat delayed actions, its therefore imperative to incorporate meals that provide long term support to the actions of these anabolic hormones. What kind of meals, that's coming soon.

For simplicity sake, here is a brief sum up:

Intense exercise increases levels of androgens, GH and IGF1 in the muscle. The key to maximizing the beneficial effects of exercise is to enhance the effects of post exercise, growth promoting agents GH, IGF1 and androgens, and thereby promote muscle hypertrophy.

There is a post exercise window of opportunity upon which the body is in its highest potential to assimilate nutrients, recuperate and build muscle. This window of opportunity reaches a peak immediately after exercise, and gradually declines within 3-4 hours.

In order to fully complete the picture of recovery meals and the overall recuperation after exercise, we still need to examine what's the actual role of insulin during this window of opportunity.

The role of insulin

It has been established that post exercise is characterized by improved insulin sensitivity. Many studies showed that both endurance and resistance training increase insulin sensitivity. Nonetheless, intense resistance training has shown to help improve glucose transport in skeletal muscles more that endurance training.

Studies at East Carolina University, Greenville, East Carolina and Duke University medical Center, Durham, NC, reveal that vigorous intense activity, and resistance training improves insulin sensitivity more substantially than moderate activity. This is critically important in particular due to the prospect that taking advantage of increased insulin sensitivity may be one of the key elements in designing recovery meals after strenuous resistance training.

Coming Next: Part II - How to design recovery meals with maximum capacity to promote recuperation and muscular development

Related Product Link: Warrior Diet Super Recovery Kit