Guides › Recovery
What to eat after training
Plenty of athletes stress about the famous 30-minute window when their training pattern makes it almost irrelevant — and neglect the parts of recovery that genuinely move the needle.
If you're training hard again within about 24 hours, refilling glycogen promptly genuinely helps and the first hour is the most efficient time. If your next hard session is two or three days away, what you eat across the whole day matters much more than what you eat in the first thirty minutes.
When the window actually matters
The "anabolic window" became gospel partly because it's easy to sell. The underlying science is real but narrower than the marketing: glycogen resynthesis is fastest in the first hour or so after exercise, when the muscle is most receptive to taking glucose up.
That speed advantage only matters if you need the glycogen back quickly. Concretely:
- Two hard sessions in a day, or back-to-back days of hard training — the window matters. Eat promptly, prioritise carbs.
- A stage race, tournament or multi-day event — it matters a great deal. This is the situation the research was built around.
- One hard session, with the next one two or three days away — it barely matters. You have 48 hours to refill stores that take a few hours' worth of normal eating to restore. Total daily intake is the variable that counts.
For most recreational athletes training three or four times a week, the third case is the one they're in — and the anxious dash for a shake in the changing room is doing very little.
Carbs and protein together
Carbohydrate refills glycogen; protein supports repair and adaptation. Roughly 20–25g of protein alongside your carbs is the usual guidance. What delivers it is not important:
- A recovery shake, if that's convenient.
- Chocolate milk — carbs and protein in roughly the right ratio, and cheaper than anything marketed for the purpose.
- Greek yoghurt with fruit and honey.
- Eggs on toast, a chicken and rice bowl, a tuna sandwich — or simply your next proper meal, if it's soon.
There is nothing magic about powders. They're convenient and they travel well, which is a real advantage after a race when you're nowhere near a kitchen. That's the whole of their edge.
How much carbohydrate?
When rapid refuelling genuinely matters, guidance lands around 1–1.2g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body mass per hour for the first few hours. For a 70kg athlete that's roughly 70–85g an hour — a substantial meal plus a drink, not a snack. When it doesn't matter, eat normally and generously across the day and you'll get there comfortably.
Rehydration takes more than you lost
Drinking isn't perfectly efficient — some of what you drink passes straight through rather than being retained. Replacing around 1.25 to 1.5 times what you lost, spread over a few hours rather than all at once, restores you properly.
The part people miss is sodium. Including sodium in what you drink afterwards helps you retain the fluid rather than passing it. Plain water after a very sweaty session leaves you needing the toilet and still short. This is why a salty meal alongside your drinks does more for rehydration than a large glass of water on its own, and why recovery drinks aimed at endurance athletes contain sodium rather than just carbs and protein.
If you weighed yourself before and after the session, you have the number you need: each kilogram lost is about a litre of sweat, so a 1.5kg loss means roughly 1.9–2.3 litres to drink back over the following hours.
Alcohol, briefly
A beer after a race is not going to undo your training. But alcohol in meaningful quantity does blunt glycogen resynthesis and protein synthesis, and it works against rehydration. If you have another hard session tomorrow, that's worth knowing. If your next one is Thursday, enjoy it.
The overlooked part
Sleep does more for recovery than any supplement. Nutrition supports recovery; it doesn't replace it. An athlete eating imperfectly and sleeping eight hours recovers better than one with a meticulous post-session protocol and six broken hours. It's the least marketable advice in the sport, which is probably why it gets the least attention.
A simple default
If you want one rule rather than a decision tree: after a hard or long session, have a mixed meal containing carbohydrate and around 20–25g of protein within a couple of hours, drink about 1.5 times what you lost across the rest of the day, include some salt, and get to bed at a sensible hour. Tighten the timing only when you're training again inside 24 hours.
Get recovery targets for the session you just did
My Fuel Plan works out what you used and what to replace — carbohydrate, protein, fluid and sodium — based on your actual session rather than a general rule.
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General information for healthy adults, not individual medical or dietary advice.