Recover Quicker: The Best Workout Recovery Drinks

Drink Smart & Recover

No matter the goal of your workout routine, whether it’s fat loss or muscle gain, you should be thinking about how you can make your recovery go quicker.

We’re going to look at how recovery drinks can help especially after a hard workout but before we do a quick 101 on recovery…

Defining Recovery

During exercise and weight training, your body is put under a lot of stress and there’s a lot of wear and tear on your muscles and joints.  As the elite athletes know, how you deal with this wear and tear can play a big role in your overall fitness.

Take weight training. Every time you lift a weight, you’re essentially stretching and tearing muscle tissue. When this tissue repairs itself, it grows in size, which is how you build muscle mass over time. There’s also a lot of pressure put on your joints. But you can speed up the repair process and prevent muscle soreness by focusing more on recovery. In fact, you can even get bigger gains from your workouts by including a calculated post-workout recovery drink within 30 minutes of finishing your training session.

Let’s take a look at some of the best workout recovery drinks…

How to Improve Post-Workout Recovery

All of these recovery drinks follow a few basic rules. First, you need some protein after a long hard workout to repair stretched and torn muscles. But even more importantly, you also need some carbohydrates – about 2 or 3 times the number of carbs compared to protein. The carbs help give your body a steady source of energy to recover, and to repair muscle tissue.

Gold Award: Protein Shakes

Protein shakes are probably the most complete choice for expediting post-workout recovery. By adding a protein supplement to a shake or smoothie, you are not only supplying your muscles with the essential amino acids that they require but also a number of other minerals and vitamins that you couldn’t get without having to eat a large amount of natural foods.  That is why calorie for calorie it is the golden standard.