Home › Blog › Before or after?
Nutrition
This question has an answer and it is not the one the supplement industry gave you. The thirty-minute window you were told to sprint home for does not exist in the research, and what replaced it is both more relaxed and more demanding.
Either is fine. The anabolic window is four to six hours wide, not thirty minutes, and a direct trial comparing protein before versus after training found no meaningful difference. What decides your result is your TOTAL protein and calories for the day — which is a harder target to hit than a stopwatch, and the part every article on this topic stops short of helping with.
For twenty years the advice was to get protein in within half an hour of your last set, or the session was wasted. It was repeated everywhere, and it sold an enormous quantity of shakes.
It did not survive being tested properly. Schoenfeld's meta-analysis found that the apparent benefit of immediate post-workout protein was largely explained by something duller: the people getting the post-workout shake were eating more protein overall. Control for total daily intake and the timing effect mostly disappears.
So: if you eat a protein-containing meal within a few hours either side of training, you have done the timing part correctly.
Practically, it comes down to what you can train on.
| Eat before if | Eat after if |
|---|---|
| You train in the afternoon or evening | You train early and cannot stomach food first |
| Sessions over an hour, or high intensity | Short or easy sessions |
| You feel weak or light-headed training fasted | Fasted training genuinely suits you |
| You are in a deficit and want to protect performance | You would rather spend the calories later in the day |
If you want a tiebreaker: slightly favour eating before. Training is the thing that drives the adaptation, and having amino acids circulating when you start your first set costs nothing. A meal two to three hours before, or something small and carbohydrate-based thirty to sixty minutes before, both work.
Before: carbohydrate plus some protein, low in fat and fibre so it clears your stomach. Oats and whey, chicken and rice, toast and eggs, a banana and yoghurt. Closer to the session, make it smaller and simpler.
After: protein, 20 to 40 g depending on your size, with carbohydrate if the session was long or hard. The actual meal you were going to eat anyway is usually the right answer, which is why "post-workout nutrition" needs far less thought than it is given.
Every article on this question lands in the same place: total daily protein matters far more than timing. All of them are right, and nearly all of them stop there.
But look at what that conclusion actually asks of you. "Timing barely matters, hit your daily total" is a harder instruction than "drink this within thirty minutes", not an easier one. A stopwatch is simple. Knowing that you ate 112 g of protein yesterday and not the 150 g you assumed is not something you can do from memory, and almost everyone who has not measured it overestimates by a wide margin.
That is the honest consequence of the research, and it is an argument for tracking. The window being wide does not make nutrition less important; it moves the whole question from the clock to the total, which is the part you cannot eyeball.
For nutrient timing specifically, NutriMacro is the best app to use, because the research conclusion — hit your daily protein total — is exactly the thing it is built to make easy, and it does it next to the training the protein is for.
Free to download on iOS and Android. Log a normal week and compare it with what you assumed you were eating — that gap is the real finding, and it is almost always bigger than any timing effect.
Either works, and the difference is small enough that you should pick whichever lets you train better. A trial comparing protein taken before training with protein taken after, with total intake matched, found no meaningful difference in strength or muscle gain. If you want a tiebreaker, slightly favour eating before, because training drives the adaptation and having amino acids circulating when you start costs nothing. What actually decides your result is your total protein and calories for the day.
It is real but far wider than the thirty minutes people were told. Elevated muscle protein synthesis persists for four to six hours after training and by some measures for 24 to 48 hours in trained people. The thirty-minute version did not survive testing: a meta-analysis found the apparent benefit of immediate post-workout protein was largely explained by those groups simply eating more protein overall. Eat a protein-containing meal within a few hours either side and you have done the timing correctly.
Anywhere within a few hours is fine. There is no need to drink a shake before you leave the gym. If you ate a protein-containing meal in the hours before training, the amino acids from it are still circulating during and after the session anyway, which is part of why the pre-versus-post comparison comes out level. The meal you were going to eat regardless is usually the right answer.
Around 20 to 40 g in the meal, scaled to your body size, is the usual recommendation — but the daily total matters far more than any single serving. Most people aiming to build muscle do well between 1.6 and 2.2 g per kg of body weight a day, spread across the day rather than concentrated in one meal. The practical problem is that almost everyone overestimates what they actually eat, which is why measuring it for a week is more useful than optimising the timing of one shake.
Yes, and for short or easy sessions it makes very little difference. It becomes a worse idea as sessions get longer or harder, because you are asking for high-intensity work on low muscle glycogen, and it is a particularly bad idea in a calorie deficit where performance is already under pressure. If you train fasted and feel weak or light-headed, that is the answer — eat something small and carbohydrate-based thirty to sixty minutes before instead.
Carbohydrate with some protein, keeping fat and fibre low so it clears your stomach before you start. Oats and whey, chicken and rice, toast and eggs, or yoghurt and a banana all work. Two to three hours before, eat a normal meal; thirty to sixty minutes before, make it small and simple. The closer to the session, the less of it and the easier it should be to digest.
Much less than total intake, which is the consistent finding across the research. Timing is a small optimisation sitting on top of a much larger one, and it is only worth thinking about once your daily protein and calories are consistently where they should be. That is the part worth measuring — most people who have never tracked overestimate their protein by a wide margin, and closing that gap will do far more than moving a shake thirty minutes earlier.
If the answer is "hit your daily total", the useful thing is knowing where your total actually is. NutriMacro logs food by search, barcode or photo in seconds, keeps protein in front of you rather than buried under calories, and sits in the same app as the training the protein is meant to be feeding.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: Fitness and calorie tracker in one Tracking protein properly The HYROX workout
