Preworkout and Intraworkout Fu3ling

As an athlete, you’ve got a minimum of two “training meals” per day- your preworkout meal and your postworkout meal. During extended endurance efforts or sessions in the weight room, you can usually slip an intratraining meal into your diet.   Obviously, you should be eating before and after training, but intratraining isn’t always an option (you can’t do a Fran while drinking something, right?). There is a ton of applicable science on the topic, and prior to developing 3Fu3l, we spent a lot of time looking at the literature and trying to figure out what the ideal product for us, as athletes, would be…and we found a ton of interesting information.

For example, although everyone believes that protein needs to be consumed immediately after training, we found this study which concluded that there was no difference between a preworkout shake as compared to a postworkout one. But despite that conclusion, there was a clear trend for preworkout whey showing an increased uptake of aminos in the trained muscle, over the postworkout whey (as measured by phenylalanine).

This makes a lot of sense to us, and it’s enough of a difference to make us take 3Fu3l before training (minimally, because most of the time we have one afterwards also). Besides the increased uptake in aminos and recovery, ingesting whey protein prior to training will significantly increase fat loss via an increase in metabolism/resting energy expenditure (over a traditional carby drink before training).

As for intra, the coingestion of protein plus carbs during training has been found to enhance performance substantially over carbs alone in addition to lowering markers of exercise stress, such as heart rate, perceived exertion, and muscle damage. Finally, a recent study that examined a shake containing ~20g of whey protein hydrolysate plus an equal amount of carbs (sound familiar?) , showed that it not only helped increase muscular hypertrophy (bigger muscles!), but also increased tendon strength (better muscles!).