After you train what is your plan for nutrition? For some, they don't want to think about eating anything for a while. Their heart is still pumping. Their temperature is up a bit. And there may be a bead of sweat on their brow. All of these may result in the individual not having a huge appetite post-training. A recent study looked to see how exercise influences our nutritional choices. The timing of this study is interesting as with COVID more gyms are closed and therefore more of us are more sedentary and consequently have put on a few pounds as a result. For this study researchers had 41 individuals made up of 23 women and 18 men divided into one of two groups. The subjects ranged from 18-29 years and had an average BMI of 23.7. A BMI of 25 is considered overweight. One group would perform 45 minutes of exercise and the other group would rest. For the following visit the two groups would switch and do the other condition i.e. rest or exercise. Before the visit the participants would fill out questionnaires asking them how hungry or full they were, the preferred amount of food they would want to eat and how long they would wait until they ate. What they found is that exercise resulted in a greater amount of food to be eaten post-exercise, both immediately and 30 minutes post exercise. As well, after exercise there was an increased preference for immediate consumption of food. Takeaways from this study: None of the subjects were above 30 years. How closely would the results match for a study with subjects over 30?The exercise in the study was 45 minutes on a stationary bike at 60% of VO2max. Would the same results be expected for exercise of different duration,...

Have you ever heard something related to health and fitness that you just know to be true? I'm talking about the things every fitness professional and even a number of regular health nuts know as well. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself 'where did this information come from?' or 'how do I know this to be true?'. Because when we stop and think about it this way we can end up scratching our heads wondering how we did come to believe whatever it is that we believe. Consider for example the notion of the window for post-workout nutrition timing. This is the idea that to maximize your results in the gym you need to follow your training session with carbs and protein as soon after your last set as possible. Now before we get to the truth about post-workout nutrition let me tell you a story. This is one I'm stealing from nutritional expert Alan Aragon and it goes something like this. A family has a special recipe for pot roast. It is the family's special meal and all relatives and friends know about it and look forward to having it at gatherings. [caption id="attachment_3922" align="alignleft" width="222"] Sometimes info gets accepted because of tradition. Besides the specific cooking instructions there is one unique step involved in preparing this family's special meal. And that is that after all the seasoning and preparing but before cooking the pot roast you cut off one third. One family member asked her mom 'why do we cut off 1/3 of the roast?'. And the mother replied 'it's your grandmother's recipe so you'll have to ask her'. So the girl calls her grandmother and asks the same question. Her grandmother answers that many years ago when they started making pot roasts they didn't have a big...