That window is critical, because if you don’t replenish glycogen while it’s open, it becomes much harder to do so, and your overall recovery will be impeded. This GLUT4 translocation is furiously increased in the 30-60 minutes after exercise for a duration of 30-60 minutes (Jentjens 2003), and represents the first stage of rapidly replenishing your muscle glycogen. Just like your gut cells move GLUT4 receptors to their gut-facing surface in order to absorb more glucose during exercise, your muscles use the same trick to grab more glucose when glycogen levels drop during exercise. Having replenished muscle glycogen gives your muscles the energy to enhance and accelerate the entire recovery process compared to not having enough glycogen, which slows the process. Your intense, long-duration exercise has already set the wheels in motion for repair and recovery, and soon the wave of molecular signaling throughout your body will take over and control glucose for those processes rather than for replenishing muscle glycogen. The importance of getting carbohydrates into your muscles as soon as possible after exercise is finished cannot be reinforced enough. Recommendations are entrenched, universally-agreed, and should be standard practice for exercise over two hours in duration, even if you have been fueling and staying hydrated throughout the exercise event. How do your muscles keep up with all this enormous extra energy demand?Ī very large amount of human research on post-exercise glycogen repletion has been published, and the results show that – done properly – rapid muscle glycogen replenishment improves recovery and makes your next exercise bout easier with less diminution of performance, if any. Both processes pull from the same pool of resources: the carbs you feed yourself. And on top of that heavy demand, your muscle glycogen needs to be repleted ASAP – evolutionarily-speaking, your body never knows if and when you need to keep going, so it defaults to filling up muscle glycogen as fast as possible. FEEL your muscles screaming for energy to replace the depleted glycogen they used to get you to the finish.Īs soon as exercise stops, there is a very short lull of about an hour before the rapidly increasing, dramatic energy needs for the DOMS/EIMD recovery process (detailed in another blog post ) start signaling a massive renovation, repair, and rebuild requiring all the energy you can get to muscles. OK, for a sec, BE your exhausted muscles at the end of a grueling exercise bout. KICKSTARTING THE CHO WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY If you do post-exercise glycogen repletion right, you can restore muscle glycogen levels to normal in 24 hours. The trick is to replenish your muscles’ glycogen levels, re-upping the supply of fuel that you burned up during exercise. It can forestall a steady decline in performance and recovery and prevent overtraining. Taking advantage of this nutritional window is extra-critical for repeated days of strenuous exercise. Immediately!Īlthough you are fatigued mentally and physically, your muscles are just beginning to get the internal signals to start the Pain-For-Gain process of DOMS/EIMD for recovery – but for that to be successful, your body still needs energy first and foremost.īefore the post-exercise antioxidant/signaling storm gets cranked up there is a narrow window of opportunity to start the process right so you can shorten the recovery cycle. That means recovery starts immediately after exercise stops. CARBS AND RECOVERYĪfter a very long, grueling endurance workout, race, or event, you need to bounce back as quickly as possible to keep your exercise capacity at full strength. They’ll also install some signposts and guardrails along the way to indicate what you should – and shouldn’t – do in order to recover faster and realize bigger gains from your efforts. Bucci and Jeff Feliciano explain the post-exercise process of getting enough carbohydrates into your body to restore muscle and liver glycogen as quickly as possible. But our carb need doesn’t end when the workout does, because when the tank is empty, the only way to fill it up is to, well, fill it up. Luke Bucci & Jeff Feliciano The post-exercise glycogen two-step can help you bounce back overnight.Ĭarbs are fuel, and fuel drives the machine that is the human body.
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