Coconut Oil Benefits Bodybuilders Post Workout! – Part 1By Ed ClementsPlease feel free to replublish muscle-health-fitness.com articles. You MUST, however, include the the paragraph marked * at the bottom of this page. These two articles consider the potential benefits of adding coconut oil or coconut milk to your post workout meal. Adding coconut oil to your post workout shake will improve your ability to build muscle after lifting weights and will reduce the time you need to recover after working out. An extra benefit of using coconut milk is that your shake will taste delicious!
Despite the current consensus being that fat will reduce the effectiveness of your protein and carb post-workout drink, this is not the case. Fats do slightly reduce the rate of gastric emptying, but this doesn’t matter; fat doesn’t blunt insulin response to carbohydrate and protein, in fact certain fats increase insulin response to a meal; and the combination of fat and carbs eaten together doesn’t cause unwanted fat gain in the majority of people. Part 2 summary Having established that you can eat fat post-workout, Part 2 looks at why coconut oil benefits you the most out of all of the the healthy fats when used in this vital muscle building period. In many ways coconut oil is the fat equivalent of whey protein: Like whey, coconut oil benefits athletes as it is both quickly digested and absorbed. Both whey and coconut oil stimulate insulin secretion and both assist immune system function. Coconut oil benefits bodybuilders post workout by replenishing Intra muscular fatty acid (IMFA) stores. IMFAs are crucial for muscle building because they provide energy for the muscles, have a muscle-cell volumising effect which directly stimulates muscle cells to grow, and because they form part of muscle cell membranes. Keep up to date on the latest research on muscle gain, fat loss and hormone optimisation, subscribe to the 'Muscle-health-fitness Ezine newsletter’. Subscribe and immediately receive four excellent free eBooks containing high quality information on building muscle and burning fat! For more information on accessing my free eBook downloads page click here. Part 1: Should we avoid fat post workout?
Your body isn’t in a great state to digest food after a workout, especially a gruelling one.
After a session pumping iron, your in an excited sympathetic nervous system dominant state where the blood is rushing to your muscles and away from your stomach. The last thing you’ll want to do at this time is to eat a big meal… you’ll probably just want to lie down and go to sleep. But the positive effects of taking in nutrients shortly after working out are well documented. Having a post workout shake will help to prevent muscle catabolism, improve protein synthesis and reduce muscular recovery time. The answer that athletes have come up with to resolve this dilemma is to design post-workout meals that are both easily digested and rapidly absorbed. A typical, fashionable post workout meal would be a shake made from a mixture of whey protein and a high glycemic carbohydrate source like maltodextrin, waxy maize starch or even plain old glucose. Other supplements like creatine, glutamine and BCAAs are also added by many trainers. You’ll notice that the meal outlined above is extremely low in fat. There are various different arguments in favour of avoiding fat post-workout, most of which, in my view, are either incorrect or irrelevant for the vast majority of trainers: This argument goes that you shouldn’t eat anything that will slow the protein and carbohydrate you’ve eaten from reaching your muscles at this crucial time. Any delay, so the argument runs, will make the meal less effective for promoting muscle building and quick recovery from training. This camp claims that fat doesn’t cause an insulin spike, so why include it. Some believe that fat actually blunts the insulin response from eating carbohydrate so it should be avoided post workout. Recent research has, however, cast serious doubt over both of these claims(1). These people argue that it’s pretty well proven that carbs taken in post-workout help muscle recovery, so you should therefore make this meal high carb, low fat and should save your higher fat, lower carb meals for other times of the day. These arguments may sound convincing, but are they correct? Fat won’t hurt your recovery unless you train multiple times per day The assertion that fat delays gastric emptying is undoubtedly true, but does this slightly slowed rate of gastric emptying matter? The protein and carbs will still reach your muscles fairly quickly, especially given that your post-workout shake is a small meal that is fairly quickly digested with or without fat. Athletes who train again shortly after a weights session, for instance, doing an hour in the gym and then going for a 45 minute run, will gain some benefit from avoiding longer chain fats post-workout. This will make sure the protein and carbohydrate gets to their muscles almost immediately and that the fat won’t sit heavy in their stomachs whilst running. For most of us who do not often complete demanding training sessions back to back in a day, this slight delay will make no difference wahtsoever to how much muscle we build or how quickly we recover. In fact, as discussed below, adding fat in the form of coconut oil to your post-workout shake will actually aid muscle building and recovery.
Fat doesn’t blunt insulin response to a meal Those who argue that it isn’t ideal to eat fat post-workout because it blunts insulin response are wrong, in my view. Studies show that, fat (especially saturated fat) combined with starch causes a greater insulin spike and a slightly prolonged insulin response. Nutritionists are now abandoning the pretty flawed Glycemic Index (G.I.) in favour of the more relevant Insulinogenic Index (I.I.). The I.I. measures how quickly and how high insulin spikes after eating a meal whereas the G.I. measures the blood sugar response to a meal. The I.I. has illustrated to us that certain foods such as dairy products greatly spike insulin levels without affecting blood sugar levels much at all. Similarly it’s interesting to see that white rice doesn’t spike insulin more than brown rice and the same goes for white and brown pasta. We’ve also learned that, whilst fats lower the G.I. of a meal, they do not decrease the insulin response. These findings have led some sports nutritionists to suggest that you shouldn’t eat meals that contain both significant quantities of carbs and of fat if you want to get as lean as possible or if your want to bulk up whilst minimising fat gain. You can eat fats and carbs together Some people do find that they can eat more calories without increasing body fat by separating meals that contain fat from meals that contain carbs. An explanation made for this is that, if fats and carbs are eaten at the same time, insulin will shuttle both fat and carbs into your fat cells. This is incorrect, however, as insulin is not responsible for dietary fat being stored in fat cells. Most fats circulate in the lymphatic system and are transported across muscle and fat cell membranes by the carnitine transport system. This being said, you either burn mainly glucose or mainly fat after a meal depending on its composition. If you eat carbs your body will burn these first and will have less time between meals to burn off the fat you’ve just eaten as well as your body fat. My experience is that fat and carbs together will be more of a problem for fat gain if you follow a frequent eating meal plan i.e. 6 or more meals per day. On this type of plan there are only a couple of hours between meals and, if you eat carbs in these meals, your body will be burning glucose preferentially most of the time. There is less time left to burn dietary and body fat between meals. (However, fats are still needed for hormone manufacture, fat soluble vitamin absorption, healthy T levels etc.) If you leave longer between your meals, i.e. eat 3 evenly spaced out meals a day or even practise Intermittent Fasting, you have time to burn glucose off and burn dietary fat between meals. In this scenario it is likely that eating starch and fat together won’t make any difference to your waist circumference. Possibly experiment separating fats and carbs but if the difference is small or non existent, don’t hesitate to forget this rule. Many lean and muscular people eat meals that contain fats and carbs together. * Ed Clements, creator of muscle-health-fitness.com, is an independent health and fitness writer who specialises in dietary, supplementation and weights training advice for improving body composition and hormone balance.
John Berardi is an expert on post workout nutrition that I pay a lot of attention to. See John Berardi's website, Precision Nutrition, for high quality information on how to eat to build serious amounts of muscle whilst staying lean.
References and Footnotes: (1)http://joe.endocrinology journals.org/cgi/content/abstract/173/1/73 Other useful sites: Return from coconut oil benefits bodybuilders post workout 1 to nutrition articles |
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