When you’re demanding a lot from your body, you should fuel your muscles with a carbohydrate-rich sports diet prior to strenuous exercise and also refuel them afterwards. By making the effort to eat carbohydrates after rigorous training bouts and competitions, you’ll invest in your ability to both train and compete at your best. Otherwise, you’ll end up feeling chronically fatigued and jeopardize your performance.

Athletes who neglect their recovery diet include those who eat:

• too much protein, such as eating a post-competition banquet that focuses on steak rather than extra potato, rolls and other carbohydrate-rich foods
• too many greasy, fatty foods, such as “eat-and-run runners” who survive on whatever is convenient — often burgers and french fries, tuna sandwiches with extra mayonnaise, hot dogs, donuts, etc.
• too few carbohydrates, such as when you get too hungry to care about what you eat and ravenously devour potato chips, peanut butter, cheese chunks, ice cream, cookies, and other handy goodies
• too few total calories, such as weight-conscious athletes who mistakenly think that carbohydrates are fattening, and thereby diet on low fat cottage cheese, cans of tuna, sliced turkey and other lean proteins. Their supplemental foods (i.e., salad greens, broccoli, apples and rice cakes) generally offer too few carbs to replace depleted glycogen stores.

To integrate an optimal recovery diet into both your post-competition and daily training meals:

1. Focus your recovery meal on carbohydrate-rich foods since only carbohydrates are effectively stored as glycogen. For example: pancakes are far superior to omelettes (protein/fat) for a post-marathon breakfast, since your muscles don’t store the protein and fat in the omelette as glycogen.

2. Eat these carbohydrate-rich foods within one to four hours after a hard workout. That’s when your muscles are most receptive to replacing the glycogen. This recovery meal is particularly important if you’re doing double workouts during training or double events, such as at a swim meet.

3. Eat at least 200-400 calories of carbohydrates within two hours of the hard workout — 0.5 grams carbohydrate/pound body weight—such as two cups of orange juice and a banana, a bowl of cereal with fruit for breakfast; a dinner with double servings of rice and vegetables/single serving of chicken. If you have no appetite after a hard workout, juice is an excellent recovery food. The fruit sugars will replace the carbohydrates as well as quench your thirst. Repeat this “dose” two hours later.

4. Keep eating carbohydrate-rich foods for at least two days after exhaustive endurance exercise to adequately replace depleted glycogen stores. Your muscles need time to carbo-reload.

5. Rest your muscles, to allow them the opportunity to store (rather than burn) glycogen. Rest is an important part of both the training and recovery program. You aren’t “being lazy” if you take a day off. You’re investing in your future performance.

6. Eat wholesome fruits, vegetables and juices that contain potassium, a mineral (electrolyte) that you lose in sweat. Some excellent potassium-rich choices include oranges or orange juice, bananas, raisins, dried apricots, potatoes and winter squash.

7. If you crave salt, sprinkle a little on your food or select a salty food such as soup, pretzels or salted crackers. Although you lose a little bit of salt when you sweat, you are unlikely to totally deplete your body’s supply unless you’re working extremely hard under extremely hot conditions for an extremely long time. You can easily replace salt losses via a hearty recovery meal. Typically, American foods contain 6-12 times the amount of needed salt; typically, hungry athletes consume far more!

8. Drink enough fluids to quench your thirst—and then more. If you’ve become very dehydrated (as indicated by 6+ pounds of weight [sweat loss]), you may need 24-48 hours to totally replace this fluid. Since the thirst mechanism may inadequately indicate if you’ve had enough to drink, you should keep sipping fluids until your urine is clear-colored and of significant amount. Dark-colored urine is concentrated with metabolic wastes. It indicates that you’re not yet in water balance.

9. Drink natural juices more often than commercial sports drinks. Natural juices have far more potassium, vitamins and carbohydrates—all nutrients that enhance recovery—than fluid replacement drinks that are most dilute and intended for use during exercise. (One glass of orange juice contains 20 times more potassium than do many popular fluid replacers—plus more carbohydrates and vitamins.) After exercise, you want full-strength juices, or other nourishing carbohydrates plus water.

Nancy Clark, MS, RD; SportsMedicine Brookline, Brookline, MA 02167. Reprint permission granted with proper credit.