Recovery Nutrition

Recovery from intense physical training and competition requires time and a diet that replenishes muscle glycogen, body water, and electrolytes, as well as stores of triglyceride in skeletal muscle. Proper nutrition during the recovery period is essential for rapid and effective adaptation to the stress of intense exercise.
It should be recognized that an intense soccer game or a hard interval training session, although not involving extraordinary levels of total energy expenditure, can be as exhausting as running a marathon because of the depletion of muscle glycogen that can occur with high-intensity exercise. The time to replenish muscle glycogen stores is one reason why athletes are encouraged to take an easy day of training between hard workouts.
For muscle glycogen recovery, it is recommended that people do the following:
Within 15 min after stopping exercise, eat 50-100 grams of rapidly absorbed carbohydrate along with 10-20 grams of protein.
Continue eating 50-100 grams of carbohydrate plus 10-20 grams of protein every 2 hours until your next complete meal.
For the day, eat 400-800 grams of carbohydrate, the exact amount depending upon the intensity and volume of your training (e.g., more exercise requires more total carbohydrate and more rapidly absorbed carbohydrate plus protein).
For body water and salt restoration, it should be recognized that complete rehydration requires sufficient sodium and potassium replacement and extra water intake above that which is lost in sweat and urine during exercise. The most important method for rehydration after exercise is to drink large volumes of fluids and eat meals that contain sufficient salt. When athletes drink without eating salty foods for the two hours after exercise, a significant portion (25-50%) of what they drink will be excreted as urine. When athletes drink after exercise, their bodies retain approximately the following percentages of the beverages they consume: caffeinated diet-cola = 50-60%; water = 60-70%; sport drink = 65-75%.
In the past, little attention has been given to the amount of dietary fat needed for an athlete to recover from exercise. This lack of attention probably stemmed from the idea that the energy content of adipose tissue stores is so large that dietary fat must be nonessential for recovery from exercise. However, it is now recognized that the increase in body fat oxidation characteristic of an endurance-trained athlete is derived almost exclusively from triglyceride fat stored within the skeletal muscle fibers (i.e., intramyocellular triglyceride or intramuscular triglyceride, IMTG). Therefore, it is now clear that in order to fully restore IMTG after exercise training, athletes should eat more fat than is obtained in an extremely low-fat diet. However, it is not known how much dietary fat is optimal for recovery from exercise, and it is not clear if diets aimed at IMTG loading or promoting fat adaptation significantly improve performance. Therefore, athletes are generally advised to eat 50-100 grams of 'healthy' fats each day (~1g fat/kg body weight).
An important premise of these general recommendations is that the optimal mixture of nutrients to speed recovery from hard training and competition can be obtained by eating wholesome foods and beverages, provided correct choices are made regarding food type, amount, and timing. The primary advantages of properly formulated products marketed for 'sports nutrition and recovery' are convenience and good taste.Edward F. Coyle, Ph.D.