If you’ve been to the gym, you’ve seen those big guys lifting iron. They pump a few reps, and then some of them scramble desperately for their gym bags, sobbing inconsolably over ever second wasted, fumbling for their squeeze bottles which they then upend into their mouths like starving baby birds, gobbling down their protein shakes and recovery formulas as if their lives depended on it. How extreme is this, how smart, why do they work so hard to time their nutritional intake, and should you copy them? In today’s article we’re going to look at how you should time your meals, and whether there really is a dark and powerful secret that these body builders have keyed into and that you should be following.

The truth is that exercise stimulates your body to release human growth hormone amidst a number of other hormones and processes in order to begin healing the damage you have done to your muscles and system. Immediately after you work out your body kicks into gear, seeking to repair micro tears and whatnot, recruiting protein and other building blocks from your body, creating a window of opportunity within which whatever you eat will be optimally processed and used.

This window of opportunity, this sudden hunger on your body’s part is what galvanizes the fitness world into trying to time their meals, but here is the hard and boring truth: it doesn’t matter. Hard as it may be to believe, it doesn’t matter if you eat your protein bar before or after your workout, because it takes our bodies hours upon hours to digest food, so that if you eat before your workout you will still be digesting for many hours after your workout, and the same goes for if you eat after.

What does matter is that you eat something, and that you get a high quality source of protein and some carbs into the mixture. Whether it’s a protein bar, a protein shake, a recovery formula or whatever, you should strive to eat or drink something relatively quickly after you work out. You don’t, however, need to time it perfectly like the body builders. No need to panic people.