When Nutrition Timing Actually Matters

When you’re working out and aiming for a particular goal,  it’s smart to pull the big levers first. Getting enough food, enough sleep, and enough training time will have the biggest impact on your results. But once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to learn how to properly time your nutrition throughout the day.

What you need to figure out before you start messing with timing

As a refresher, one of the most important things in nutrition is eating the right amount of food, which we usually measure in terms of calories. Eat less than you burn to lose weight, more than you burn to gain weight (useful if you are trying to gain muscle), or if you don’t want to do either, simply hold your calories at whatever level keeps your weight stable. If changing your body size isn’t a priority, you don’t need to track this exactly; just make sure you’re not accidentally undereating when you don’t mean to.

Next up is protein. If you’re gaining muscle, it’s an important building block. If you’re losing weight, eating protein (and strength training!) helps your body to retain as much muscle as possible so that most of the weight lost is fat. And if you’re doing any amount of strength training or endurance training (like running), protein helps you to maintain the muscle that helps you do all of that.

Once you’re consistently getting enough calories and protein, you have a lot more leeway to adjust your diet to your liking. We should all get some amount of fat—0.5 grams per pound of bodyweight or more. And carbs may not be essential for life (as low-carb dieters like to point out) but people who eat a lot of carbs have a much better time in the gym than those who don’t. Carbs provide energy for activity, and they prevent your body from turning to muscle tissue for extra energy.

Finally, the rest of the nutrient content of your food matters, too. Fiber is important. Vitamins are important. Fruits and vegetables should be a big part of everyone’s diet. These things support health even if they aren’t the macros you might be tracking.

I mention all this because what you eat is more important than when you eat it. If you aren’t getting enough protein or enough vegetables, fixing that situation is more important than getting everything timed properly. But if you’ve got the basics down, let’s talk timing.

Carbs before workouts

When we’re resting, our body fat provides most of the fuel our body needs. The body is constantly using fat for energy, which is why “fat burning” workouts or supplements are just silly. Fat is like a bank account: the amount is determined by how the deposits balance out the withdrawals, not by looking at withdrawals alone.

When we exercise, it’s hard for the slow and steady pace of our fat burning to keep up with what we’re asking our body to do. If we have carbs available, in the form of blood sugar or muscle glycogen, we use those as a source of fuel. If we don’t have enough carbs available, we can feel tired or sluggish. We might still be able to get the workout done, but workouts will often feel better if we’ve managed to get some carbs before or even during the workout.

So if you’re feeling sluggish during your workouts, consider having some carbs beforehand. Also consider this timing if your workouts start out well but you get unusually fatigued by the end, or if you’re in the habit of training before breakfast and want to test out whether nutrition timing could give you an extra boost you didn’t even know you were missing.

“Carbs” refers to anything with sugar, or anything that breaks down quickly into sugar, which mainly means starches. If you can eat a meal shortly before your workout, try classics like:

Proteins and fats can slow down digestion, so you don’t want too much of them in a meal you have right before your workout. That’s why you’d want to go with the lower fat dairy options, or keep the peanut butter on your toast to a thin layer. But if you’re eating breakfast a few hours before your workout, feel free to go for the slower digesting versions with full-fat dairy, or even throw some protein powder into your smoothie.

Sugar during a workout

When workouts go longer than an hour or so, you may need more than just a pre-workout snack. This is why marathon runners will suck down packets of gel while they run, and why powerlifters pass around bags of candy between sets.

If you’re having carbs during a workout, you’ll want something that digests quickly. This means you want something that is more or less pure sugar. Yes, you should arguably avoid sugar in general in a healthy diet, but in the middle of a workout sugar serves a very specific purpose. It becomes available to your body very quickly, the better to fuel you in the moment. If you’re in the middle of an endurance event, like a long run or bike ride, you may want to consume 30 to 60 grams of carbs per hour. Examples would be:

Many of us don’t work out long enough or hard enough to have to worry about this. But if you’re training for a marathon or a half and you find yourself dragging toward the end of your long runs, or if your lifting sessions can extend well past an hour and you find yourself resting longer and longer between sets toward the end, try a gel or a snack mid-workout and see if you feel a difference.

Carbs after workouts, if you have another workout coming up soon

Let’s take another look at muscle glycogen, one of those carb sources we use during exercise. After a workout, glycogen will be depleted. Over the course of the next 24 hours or so, we’ll eat carbs as part of our meals, and those glycogen stores will get filled back up.

Eating a diet high in carbs helps to fill those glycogen stores throughout the day and keep them full. (You may not get as much replenishment if you follow a low-carb diet like keto.) If you finish a workout and aren’t likely to have another workout until tomorrow or the day after, you don’t really need to worry about this; just eat normally.

But if you do two hard workouts a day, or if you just did a workout in the evening but you also want to be at your best for a run the next morning, you may want to replenish your glycogen more quickly. After a hard workout, your muscles are ready to store carbs as glycogen if they can get them, so consider a high-carb meal after your workout.

Protein in small amounts throughout the day

The most important factor in eating protein is the amount, as we discussed above. To meet the recommended daily allowance (the bare minimum that everybody should get, athlete or not) you want 0.36 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. That would be 54 grams for a 150-pound person.

But if you’re trying to build muscle, or if you’re trying to maintain muscle as you train for an endurance sport or as you lose weight, you want more—anywhere between 0.63 to 0.82 grams per pound of bodyweight depending on how intense your needs are. That would be 95 to 123 grams for that same 150-pound person. Going over that amount is usually okay for your health (talk to your doctor if you have kidney issues) but not necessary.

So what about timing? Well, it turns out that your body makes the best use of protein if you can get it in multiple doses throughout the day. There’s a myth that your body can only use a small amount of protein in one sitting, leading some people to believe that the extra protein is “wasted.” That’s not exactly true, but you probably will give your body stronger signals to build muscle if you can spread your protein out over four or five meals rather than eating low-protein foods all day and then having a giant steak for dinner.

A good way to follow this rule of thumb is to track your total protein, and to make sure you have several times during the day that you’re eating at least 20 grams of protein or more. That could be breakfast, lunch, a protein bar as a snack, dinner, and then a simple shake with protein powder in the evening.

Protein, fats, and fiber when you want to feel full or slow digestion

We’ve talked about quick-digesting carbs (sugar, plain starches), but the flip side is that other nutrients digest more slowly. You don’t want that when you’re in the middle of a workout, but it can be useful at other times.

For example, oatmeal tends to make you feel full longer than something like white bread because it’s got a lot of soluble fiber. Proteins make you feel full because your stomach holds onto protein-containing foods longer than other foods. (The stomach is just one of many parts of your digestive system, but it’s the one where proteins take some time to be broken down before being sent to the next stage.) Fats tend to also make people feel full, although this can vary from person to person.

So if you’re eating a breakfast before a long morning of work and you know it will be a while before you get to lunch, oats (fiber) with almond butter (fat) and a side of scrambled egg whites (protein) will keep you full a lot longer than some toast with jam. Save the toast for later, when you want to have a pre-workout snack.

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