Fitness Nutrition: Optimize Workout Results With the Proper Supplemenation

The corner-stone to any well-designed fitness regimen is a solid, well-designed nutritional approach. While there is much debate over the relative roles that diet or training actually have in achieving your goals, there need not be. While anybody can make decent strides in the first few weeks of their training program, even those with the best, most dynamic training programs will fall short of their potential given a haphazard nutritional approach. The nuts-and bolts of a solid nutritional foundation is beyond the scope of this article (look for this in future articles), however suffice it to say that it is extremely important. So much so, that there should be no debate over the importance of training vs. diet in achieving optimal results....they are both needed and of equal importance. Given the importance of a good diet, this should be the highest priority in any new training program. Once this is solid, adding supplementation at specific times will take a great thing and make it better.
Before we move on, it is VERY important to realize that supplements are just that, SUPPLEMENTS....they can take a good diet and make it much more effective, but the diet must be solid in the first place. That being said, utilizing a post-workout supplement plan can help you recover faster from your workouts, and can promote gains in muscularity and strength while maximizing bodyfat loss. Certain supplements post-workout are extremely valuable in certain situations, especially when the goal of your training program is to lose bodyfat while gaining -or maintaining muscle. Our bodies have been designed to survive the harshest of conditions, readily storing bodyfat during times when food is plentiful and shedding it (along with muscle-tissue) when food is scarce. While this metabolic situation kept us alive through the ice-ages, it makes things really difficult for building a lean-muscular physique (that is if you are not busy running from saber-tooth tigers and fighting rival tribes). The right post-workout supplementation can "trick" the body into thinking it has what it needs so that muscle is preserved. What happens during intense training is that our bodies, along with burning glycogen and bodyfat, are also very efficient at breaking down muscle tissue. This metabolic adaptation helps to preserve energy stores at the expense of metabolically costly muscle-tissue; if you are starving the more muscle you have the quicker you will die (good for us back in the cave-man days, but bad for us now!). Our muscles are constantly being broken down and built back up from hard training, and if we could shift the balance just slightly away from degradation (catabolism) and toward accumulation (anabolism), this would have a huge effect on the effectiveness of our training. One way to do this is to consume a huge amount of calories, but this will cause us to gain bodyfat along any increases in muscle mass. The other way is to take the right supplements; the body is "tricked" into thinking it has what it needs (from broken-down muscle tissue) and will tear-down less muscle, especially on a reduced calorie diet (and we all know that to shed bodyfat those calories need to be slightly reduced!).
Below I have included a list of supplements important for post-workout nutrition. Part II of this article will explain how they work and how to take them.

* glutamine (free-form or peptides)
* branched chain amino acids (BCAAS)
* protein, specifically more "anabolic proteins such as whey isolate (more on the distinction between "anabolic" and "anticatabolic" proteins in a later article
* creatine
* carbs *depending on the trainng goals these may-or may not be present*

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