Rider, your post-workout meal after riding or racing your dirt bike is directly related to your recovery and your further performance. And not only are you wronged by eating unhealthy food after a physical effort, but also if you don’t eat at all.
In this post, we will show you how to do an effective post-workout meal in order for you to feed smarter after riding or racing.
You already know that a rider’s regular nutrition habits are key for their conditioning.
That’s why you must care to keep some certain nutritional habits, to allow your body to be as efficient as possible.
If you care enough about that, what to eat after riding your bike or after a race will just be one more step to achieve a more healthy lifestyle focused on improving on the bike.
But don’t fool yourself. If your daily eating habits are unhealthy, the post-workout meal or sports supplementation is not going to help. You won’t improve your performance unless you optimize your nutrition as a whole.
Reasons to do a post-workout meal after racing or riding your dirt bike
At the end of a race, your body has given its all. It has undergone a lot of stress, your adrenaline has skyrocketed and it has used a great part of its energy deposits. Furthermore, your muscle cells have gone through a great tension and the fatigue takes over your whole body.
Plus, the destruction of protein increases with demanding physical effort and you must revoke it by restoring your amino acids. That way you’ll promote muscle regeneration.
That will be the right time for your endocrine system to begin the recovery of those damaged cells and replenish your energy storages. But to be able to do it efficiently, it will need nutrients.
There is no need to take the post-workout meal right after finishing your race or your bike training since studies haven’t found great differences in your recovery between eating right at the end of the physical effort or 3 hours after.
Anyways, we recommend you to eat as soon as possible. That way your body will stop consuming it’s storage energy and will use the post-workout meal to start regenerating tissues, muscles, and joints.
The ideal is not waiting longer than 2 hours since the end of the race or moto training to do your post-workout meal.
Which nutrients do you need to recover from your race or training?
Your body needs to regenerate the muscle fibers damaged during the physical effort and also needs to replenish the glycogen reserves that have been emptied to provide energy while riding your bike.
We know for a fact that the combo of carbohydrates + proteins after a physical effort speeds up the replenishing of glycogen reserves and mitigates muscular damage.
You will obtain this replenishing by having high-quality carbohydrates and proteins in your post-workout meal.
And don’t forget about hydration, it’s also key after a great effort. Why? Because during the race or the moto training your body temperature has been raised and many fluids have been lost as a consequence.
What kind of foods should you have after racing or riding with your bike?
In general, always choose real food over any kind of chemical product. Your evolutive adaptations have made it easier for you to digest this kind of food and so you’ll optimize the energy it provides you with.
But when looking to improve your recovery and further performance on the bike towards upcoming races, the post-workout meal we recommend is the real-food-rule breaker.
In this case, you’ll profit from adding some sports supplementation product to your post-workout after racing or riding your dirt bike.
But be careful with the products you choose, because you’ll find real sugary junk on the market. Always try to reach for the best quality and choose products as natural as possible.
This are the essential post-workout proteins and carbohydrates we recommend to all our riders:
Post-workout Proteins
In order to make your post-workout recovery more efficient, we recommend you to introduce whey protein.
Why?
Because whey protein helps with the concentration of plasma amino acids. And this is essential to favor the creation of muscle proteins found at the base of all muscle recovery processes.
(Antonio, 2003, BØrsheim et al., 2002, Tipton et al., 2004, Tipton and Wolf, 2001, Wolfe, 2002, Rasmussen and M.,2003)
Plus it’s important that the whey protein you choose is filled with BCAA’s, since these optimize the recovery and replenishing of glycogen and proteins in your body.
These are some good and affordable options to buy:
Post-workout carbohydrates
It has come as a fact that the most effective blend for your post-workout carbohydrates is the combination of fructose (the sugar from the fruit) and glucose (maltodextrin). This is due to these being rapid absorption carbs.
Why maltodextrin?
It is the most used carbohydrate in sports nutrition supplementation. It comes from wheat and high concentrations of maltose are found in it, with a relatively high glycemic index.
That makes it a great choice to be consumed in the hours following a physical effort, to increase glycogen replenishing,
(Burke, 2001)
Plus, maltodextrin does not cause high insulin peaks but distributes the energy rather gradually. This means that you won’t feel great variations in your hunger (the demand for energy your body is making you) when consuming maltodextrin as a post-workout.
How much should you have?
The right protein and carbohydrate quantities for your post-workout meal will vary depending on:
- Your weight
- The kind of effort you are trying to recover from
- Your fitness level
- Your goals
- Other physical and genetic factors.
Our recommendation is to combine proteins and carbs in a proportion of 3 to 1. So three times more carbs than proteins.
To calculate the exact dose of proteins to have for your post-workout meal, take this reference: have 0.4 grams of protein for each kg you weight.
The result will be the amount of protein you should take in your post-workout meal.
Then take this number and multiply by three. That will be the amount of carbohydrates you must ingest in your post-workout.
For example, for a 70kg male, this is the math:
0.4 x 70kg = 28g protein; 28 x 3 = 84g de carbs.
Take into account that glucogen is fully restored after 24h. You must watch out what you feed your body the same day of the physical effort. Make sure to eat foods with high nutritional quality.
Our recommendation for a post-workout meal for riders
This is what we recommend a 70kg rider to eat as a post-workout or post-race meal:
- 2 bananas, representing approximatelly 42gr of fructose carbohydrate.
- 28gr of whey protein high in BCAA’s blended in 500ml water. We recommend this option or this other due to price-quality.
- 42gr of maltodextrin (around 2 scoops). We suggest this option or this other due to price-quality.
Take this as a starting point, but remember that the post-workout meal must vary depending on the person’s particular features. There are no universal magic formulas that work for everyone.
You must give it a couple tries to find the recipe that suits you best or have a team of professional coaches take care of your conditioning for the bike.
So, what do usually have as post-workout meal? Forget about eat pasta, go fasta because now you know that to be a good athlete and a better rider you need to take care of your nutrition.
Send this post to your bike buds that eat literally anything after riding or racing, and see if we can all make them more conscious about the benefits of caring for their nutrition!
