If you are a supplement user and you’re not getting the results from your supplements that you may have thought you should it may not necessarily be what’s coming out of the bottles, but it’s what you’re mixing it with.
A pre-workout supplement, a post-workout supplement, and the one that most people seem to forget or overlook, and we think is just as important as these two, is our overnight recovery supplement.
Pre-workout
We’re talking about pre-workout, for us, the clear choice is water. Why? Because we want to hydrate pre-workout. We want to make sure that we are not dehydrated at any point in the workout, especially if your preworkout has caffeine in it. We want to make sure that we are providing adequate dehydration. So, we do have other options here for hydration, but if we move to the far end of the spectrum, milk is not going to be that great of a choice. Sure, you can do it, I said, but I don’t know if you guys are mixing most pre-workout supplements with milk. They taste like crap. It’s not really meant to be there. It should be more in a watery consistency. That’s why we go with water.
Whole milk? Actually, it’s a no-no. Why? Because when we add the fat in from whole milk, we’re going to get a slow emptying of the pre-workout into your system. So, that’s going to actually delay the effects that you are trying to get from the supplement in the first place. And it’s also going to interfere with blood flow to your muscles when you need that the most during your workout. So, even if you are a hardgainer, whole milk? NOT the time for your pre-workout. As far as juice goes, you have to be careful here because with juice you can actually overload carbohydrates, actually interfere with the release of the carbohydrates to your muscles. Sort of the way we try to do with Excite is to stagger them, to give you the carbohydrates in both slow and then more rapidly digestible form so that you can get a more sustained energy release.
If you overload on your carbohydrates in your pre-workout, you can overload and overdo that, interfere with that effect and also give yourself cramps or some gastric discomfort. So, NOT what you are looking for especially if you are heading out to competition.
Post-Workout
We’re going to go to the post-workout category, and we think this is the most interesting because one thing that everybody always talks about is, You gotta load up on your carbs after your workout. And we actually disagree with that advice. When we are looking at our post-workout, we want to make sure that we have one thing primarily and that’s PROTEIN. See, when we get finished working out, we actually have an increase in insulin sensitivity.
And, also, if you’re a guy who’s actually looking to burn some fat, if you take in your glucose or your high sugar carb after your workout, you’re actually going to interfere with the normal fat oxidation that was going on after your workout. You actually turn that process off. So, it’s better to limit the amount of carbohydrates that you ingest after your workout if you are going to try to get the most muscle-building, and simultaneously fat-burning effort.
So, for me, we look at this category now. We say No, which is shocking to some, but we say No. We say No again to the fat in the whole milk because we don’t want to delay the absorption again in this post-workout window, which leaves us with 2 options here. We have water or skim milk. I made 2 notes here guys. Yes, if it’s late within your post-workout window for water. Or, yes if it’s soon after for skim milk. Why is that? Skim milk actually can conglomerate with the whey protein in your post-workout. So, that will actually slow down the digestion of your whey protein in the absorption. So, if it’s early in the post-workout window, so you just finished your workout and you want to get the best benefits of your whey protein, it’s ok if it’s slowed down a little bit with the mixing of the milk because you still have that window time frame to be able to absorb that.
Overnight recovery
Overnight is when you repair muscle and experience regrowth because of what you are putting into your body that sets the stage of recovery. Three options for mixing, generally. We have milk, it can be non-fat or whole milk, juice, or water.
It’s going to slow the digestion, again, which was the reason why we didn’t use it earlier, overnight so you’re going to get a prolonged release of what you put in your body. So that helps. Now, the other thing it does is, it actually has a protein sparing effect, so that we can preferably use the triglycerides in the fat for energy, a preferred source of fuel as we’re breaking down overnight to allow the protein to be used more for synthesis and regrowth. So, in that sense, it works. It’s actually why, in RX3, we include medium-chain triglycerides, for that very reason, to try to allow for those benefits.
Now, if you look at the other options here – water. Water is great, and especially at nighttime if you’re trying to lose weight, again, if you’re trying to stay lean, because it’s non-caloric. But, for me, I prefer the skim milk because I like the added benefit. And here’s a great tip, too. If you’re a guy that is taking a pure whey protein, which means you’re not taking RX3, and that’s totally fine, as I said before, RX3 has both casein protein and whey protein in it. If you’re just taking a whey protein, and you mix it, that with milk, you’re going to get the benefits of some casein as well. So you’re getting a little bit of the benefit of the combined protein. And again, I like that dual 1-2 punch because you’re getting the more immediate effects of the whey protein and you’re getting the more delayed effects from the casein protein.
We don’t really have to talk about juice too much here guys. All that sugar prior to bed when you don’t need any of it, when you’re going to be doing nothing but laying down, ya’ know, doing nothing but dreaming, you don’t need all that and it’s going to help you to just get fat. So, what we don’t want to do is use juice.
