John Meadows (www.mountaindogdiet.com) has been preaching the need for nutrition DURING a workout, instead of waiting until afterwards to chase recovery and spur on muscle growth.
And since I’m a JM fan boy, I figured it was about time I saw what all the fuss was about and tried it for myself.
First, some reasoning for why he recommends this. Even though he believes you should annihilate the muscle with lots of weight and volume, he also says you should limit the amount of actual muscle damage done through proper nutrition while in the gym.
How do you do that? By raising insulin and free amino acid levels. Unfortunately, most things that accomplish those two tasks involve food and digestion, two things you want to avoid when you’re pushing yourself in the gym (unless you have a bucket on hand – and barfing is not going to help you win the favour of that hunny on the elliptical).
However, our buddy science (Yay, Science!) has created a number of lovely products that help us accomplish this while bypassing the stomach at the same time. Enter Highly Branched Cyclic Dextrins and Casein Hydrolysates. HBCD raise insulin without the sugar stomach ache, while casein hydrolysates are amino acids broken into their simplest form (Branched-Chain Amino Acids would work here too). They aren’t going to result in a failed drug test, either. These are made from natural ingredients you’d get from food sources anyway, just ‘scienced up’ to help you achieve improved performance.
A combination of both of the aforementioned supplements diluted in approximately 2 litres of water (you need lots of H2O here) has been my experimentation for the last few months. What I’ve noticed now that I’m really hammering intra workout nutrition, the next day soreness (i.e. DOMS) is nearly non-existent. My training intensity and endurance has improved, enough so to notice a big difference in recovery and strength. I’ve been at this for 10+ years and rarely has any supplement wow’ed me, but I’m a believer in this combo so far.
So how do you buy HBCD and casein hydrolysates? I’ve used Glycofuse from Gaspari Nutrition as my HBCD source thus far, but there are more cost effective options. At 2-3 servings per training session, a tub lasts me about a month at best. That’s $48.33 (CDN currency) from bodybuilding.com before shipping. Not a sustainable option for the cheapskate in me! If it wasn’t for the cost, this product gets a ringing endorsement from me in both taste and quality.
True Nutrition carries both HBCD and Casein Hydrolysates, so in the future I’ll likely bulk buy from there. You can alternatively use BCAA’s instead of CH, though you will have to supplement with a larger serving than you would with CH to get the same effects. The price might equal out in the end. Do the math first. Casein Hydrolysates can be found at TrueNutrition.com in a product called Pepto Pro. Use my discount code MCT777 at checkout.
Even if you’re not purely training for strength, and are looking for an athletic edge, ditch the gatorade and get on this gravy train. It’ll improve your performance, and that’s what we’re after, right?