What should I eat after a hard workout?

Eating a protein-rich meal as soon as possible after this hard workout hastens muscle recovery. Intelligently-increased workloads make an athlete stronger, and anything that helps you recover faster allows you to do more work. When you feel the burn during intense exercise, you are damaging your muscle fibers. The pain that you feel 8 to 24 hours after a hard workout is due to muscle damage. It is now fairly well established that your muscles recover faster if you eat protein as soon as possible after a hard workout or competition.

You’ll be happy to know that a study from Indiana University in Bloomington shows that chocolate milk helps athletes to recover faster from hard exercise than drinks that replaced only carbohydrates or fluid (International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, February 2006). Milk is full of protein, but so are, fish, shellfish, meat, chicken, whole grains and beans, and so forth. Eat any source of protein that tastes good to you.

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