A Beginner’s Guide to Peri-Workout Nutrition
by Zach Trowbridge on April 28, 2025For someone new to training, the most important place to start nutritionally is with the basics:
- Ensuring adequate calorie intake
- Getting at least 1g of protein for every pound of bodyweight (or if you’re carrying a lot of bodyfat, at least 1g of protein for every pound of lean bodyweight)
- Consuming a balance of fats and carbohydrates to fuel your training
- Consuming primarily whole foods (typically at a minimum an 80/20 split between whole foods and processed foods)
- Eating a consistent number of meals each day, usually every 2-4 hours, and not missing meals
This creates a solid foundation to build on – without this base layer of habits, it’s unlikely that you can predict consistent muscle growth and strength development.
But once you’ve nailed those key points and progress begins to stall, what should you do next? One of the simplest and most effective next steps is to develop a strategy around your peri-workout nutrition, or the meals consumed before, during, and after your workouts.
What is Peri-Workout Nutrition?
If you’ve read and watched a lot of John’s content over the years, you know he was a huge fan of intra-workout supplementation, and made it one of the core products in the Granite Supplements line. The Granite product Recovery is designed to do just that – help you recover more quickly so you can train harder and more frequently without being limited by soreness.
But are you taking advantage of the entire peri-workout period? This includes both the pre-workout, intra-workout, and post-workout meals, and is one of the first places to start leveraging when you get stuck. This is a case where nutrient timing can be beneficial, assuming you’re already taking in an appropriate amount of calories, and while it’s not a magic bullet, it can get things moving when you’re stuck.
Pre-Workout Nutrition
The pre-workout meal is the meal typically eaten anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours before you train. If you currently don’t eat before you train, there is a good likelihood that you’re leaving some progress on the table, especially if your focus is on muscle growth.
A few rules for this meal:
- It should contain a normal dose of protein (usually 30-50g for men, 20-40g for women). Choose sources that digest easily for you, whether it’s solid food or a shake – you don’t want food to still be digesting when you’re training.
- There should be some fat, but not a huge amount. Usually around 8-15g works well – enough to slow down the release of the carbohydrates in the pre-workout meal but not enough to bog down digestion.
- Carbohydrate intake at this meal will typically be higher than other meals, and you should choose easy-digesting options.
I typically will have clients take in as much as 60% of their carbs in their peri-workout meals. For example, if I had a 200lb male taking in 300g of carbs per day, I might do something like:
Pre-workout (30-60 minutes before training):
- 30-50g protein
- 8-10g fat
- 70-100g carbs
In this meal I might split the carbs roughly 70%/30% between starchy carbs (rice, Cream of Rice, oats, etc.) and fruit or honey. If you aren’t familiar with the famous John Meadows Concoction Bowl, this is a great example of the above structure.
Intra-Workout Nutrition
This includes anything that you consume from the time you walk into the gym to the time you finish your last set. In the past, this might have included old-school strategies such as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or a bottle of Gatorade, but in the 90’s and 2000’s bodybuilders such as Milos Sarcev started exploring combinations of amino acids and carbohydrates – those of you who have been doing this for a long time may recall experimenting with things like branched chain amino acids (BCAA’s), PeptoPro, and waxy maize. Over time, the most effective combination of protein and carbohydrates to use during a training session uses essential amino acids (EAA’s) and highly branched cyclic dextrin (HBCD). These sources of protein and carbs are pre-digested, allowing them to be absorbed and utilized without adding gastric stress.
Over the last few years it’s become common to use a blend of cyclic dextrin (often in the form of the patented Cluster Dextrin) and another carbohydrate source such as ribose, dextrose, or Palatinose – usually combined to provide a mix of fast-releasing and slow-releasing carbohydrates to sustain energy throughout a training session.
For most people, there isn’t much need for more than 8g of essential amino acids (maybe 10-12g if you’re a heavyweight) and 20-40g of carbohydrates. If your training sessions routinely go past 60-90 minutes then you may benefit from more carbohydrates, but likely won’t need to add more EAA’s.
Typically, you’d want to sip a drink with this mix steadily throughout your workout – starting when you begin your warmup and finishing by your last set of the session.
It’s not uncommon to see other additives such as an electrolyte complex (magnesium, potassium and sodium), glutamine, creatine, or ashwaganda added to many commercial intra-workout products. Some of them (like electrolytes and ashwaganda) benefit from being consumed during training, and others (like creatine) simply make it easy to kill two birds with one stone and stack them together even though they don’t directly benefit you at the time you’re consuming them.
Intra-workout:
- 20-40g carbohydrates
- 6-8g essential amino acids
Post-Workout Nutrition
Post-workout nutrition is the meal that you consume within 1-2 hours of the end of your workout. If you’ve read about post-workout nutrition recommendations over the years, you may have heard of the “anabolic window”, purported to be the time where you have to get food into your system to maximize muscle growth. Certain parts of the industry have advocated for getting food into your system as quickly as 30 minutes after your workout ends, with some even beginning to drink a post-workout shake in the locker room before leaving the gym.
While you don’t want to wait hours to get your post-workout meal in, aiming for 60-90 minutes after the end of your workout is a solid aim. Especially if you’ve been using intra-workout nutrition, the carbohydrates and amino acids consumed during that time buys you a little bit of time to drive home and get your food ready.
However, if you’re dieting, you’re most likely desperate to get that meal in immediately as you probably left the gym already starving, and I have absolutely at times had my post-workout meal in a cooler in my car to start eating during the drive home.
A few rules for this meal:
- It should contain a normal dose of protein (usually 30-50g for men, 20-40g for women). If you’re in a calorie deficit, you’ll want to use solid food sources and not a shake, as a shake will go through your system far too quickly.
- Fats should be kept as low as possible – just trace fats from your protein and carbs. This means that protein sources should be very lean – chicken breast, turkey breast, white fish, egg whites, or seafood like shrimp are your best choices here.
- Carb choices should be very low-fiber – white rice, white potatoes, Cream of Rice, even things like pancakes made with applesauce as a binder instead of eggs and oil can work.
With the same 200lb male referenced earlier, it might look like this:
Post-workout:
- 30-50g protein
- As little fat as possible
- 70-100g carbs
The pre-workout and post-workout meals aren’t that dissimilar to each other, with the biggest difference being a very low fat intake (typically just trace fats) to take advantage of the fact that your muscles are extremely sensitive to carbs at this time, and we want them to hit your system as quickly as possible to limit protein breakdown and trigger protein synthesis.
This is a great trick to try if you have your carbs fairly evenly spread out throughout the day, but it’s resulting in more bodyfat gain than muscle. If you usually eat 6 times per day (fairly standard for many bodybuilders), instead of 50g per meal over 6 meals and your intra-workout, this setup would have you getting anywhere between 160-230g over two meals and your intra-workout, leaving 70-140g to spread over the remaining 4 meals.
The benefit here is that you still have a few lower-carb or no-carb meals in the day, which can be great for maintaining insulin sensitivity. Carbs stay at their highest near your training, and should get lower the further away from your workout you get.
In addition, often it can result in a performance boost and limit fatigue during training, which likely will increase overall output, doing even more to favor more growth.
If you haven’t been paying attention to your peri-workout nutrition, take the time to format a plan and stick with it. It’s not going to change things overnight, but it can help to maximize the effort you’re putting in elsewhere to build the best physique you can.
Zach is the co-owner and head strength coach of All Strength Training, a personal training center specializing in busy professionals located in Chicago, IL. He is also a competitive physique athlete, having earned his pro card in the WBFF in 2016, and currently competes in the NPC classic physique division.
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