Strength Coach and Nutrition Specialist Dan Garner explains how to recover like a professional athlete

Dan Garner delivers Part 3 of his Recovery Series – “Recovery From Physical Activity.” Dan goes into detail in this segment and explains how to recover like a pro athlete! Want more Coach Garner?? Check him out online: www.hockeytraining.com www.createfreedom.com www.coachgarner.com

More in this episode:

The boys explore two case studies:
  1. How lean is too lean for a female?
  2. What causes a podcast host to store visceral fat???
Also in episode 39:
Rawdon declare the word of the day is Equilibrium, and the boys share client Josh’s secret recipe for Peanut Cream. Tune in!

Some takeaways from part 3 of Dan Garner’s Recovery series

Pre-workout nutriton

Dan likes to tell his clients and athletes that pre-workout nutrition starts when the last workout ends. Essentially, the quality of your next workout depends on how well or not you recovered from your previous workout.
The quality of your next workout depends on how well or not you recovered from your previous workout – Dan Garner

The three major things we can capitalise on by resistance training

Resistance training or intense conditioning increases three major things that we can optimise:
  • glycogen syntheses
  • insulin sensitivity
  • glut4 translocation
Also, the harder the workout, the greater the increase in all three of these things we are going to get.

The post workout window

When we get an elevation in these three processes, then we can get in a maximum amount of carbohydrates and put them in the post-workout area for four to six hours. We can distribute it across several meals to make sure that we’re optimising our post-workout nutrition. Athletes and heavy resistance trainees should be getting in adequate carbohydrates, if getting the greatest training quality, stimulus and gain is something that they are interested in doing.

How to optimise recovery

Protein synthesis is just the creation of protein on the muscle cell, so protein synthesis can be looked at as gain. Protein breakdown is catabolic – it’s the muscle tissue actually breaking down. So there are two curves that happen throughout the day. The first is the fractional synthetic rate – measuring the rate at which you build muscle mass. The second is the fractional breakdown rate which measures the rate at which you’re breaking tissue down. Since we know the fractional synthetic rate requires amino acids in order to build muscle mass, the way to optimise recovery is to have your best shot at twenty four hours of amino acid availability in the blood stream. This way we are preventing tissue breakdown and we are optimizing tissue growth.

Your body will steal from you

If you don’t supply the body with a steady supply of amino acids after your resistance training something that’s known as protein distribution occurs. Dan gives the scenario of performing a really hard squat workout, really demolishing the legs. If amino acids are not available in the blood stream then your body is going to prioritise. When this happens the body will take from other muscles in the body to maximise the recovery of your legs. So ultimately your gains in your legs will increase but your net protein balance will not.

Dan’s recommendations

When it comes to the recommendation per day, Dan suggests 1.8 to 2.2 grams per kilo of bodyweight. This range is based on body weight, he says. So somebody who is thirty percent body fat at two hundred pounds is going to require less protein than somebody who is five percent body fat at two hundred pounds. The guy who’s at a higher percentage of body fat is going to be more around the 1.8 gram mark and the guy that has a lower percent of body fat is going to be more on the 2.2 gram mark. Dan believes that 2.2 grams per kilo is a fantastic safety net. This way you are getting in more than you need, potentially, in order to optimise the body composition process.

Check out the rest of the podcast where Dan discusses:

  • The difference between how younger and older people synthesise protein
  • Various factors contributing to fatigue in athletes
  • Hydration and athletic performance
  • Creatine and beta-alanine supplementation
  • High GI for glycogen replenishment
  • Heat muscle temperature and the optimum temperature for performance benefits
  • Neuromuscular fatigue and electrolyte balance