The cartoon might seem outdated and outlandish, but research now shows that the concept might not be that far fetch. According to research compiled by Examine.com, nitrates, a powerful compound found in green vegetables can provide many of the benefits oftentimes reserved for pricey supplements.

While it doesn’t work like magic (and you have to eat a lot of spinach to see benefits), there’s more substance than you might think to a natural energy boost. Here are a few natural food resources, based on research from Examine.com and their Stack guides, which can help improve your workout without any chemical compounds or stimulants.

The Surprising Cardio and Weight-Training Spark

The research behind nitrates might be some of the best support yet why vegetarians and vegans can still be effective performance athletes. Nitrates are a compound found in most leafy green vegetables and beetroot. Nitrates break down into nitrites, which circulate in the body and are turned into nitric oxide (NO) as needed, according to research reviews conducted to Examine.com.

Elevated NO levels during exercise provide a variety of benefits. Nitrate supplementation has been shown to improve anaerobic and aerobic endurance, blood flow, and work output, resulting in increased muscle recovery between bouts of exercise.

Nitrates improve the body’s ability to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from the food you eat. ATP is responsible for the energy transfer that powers your muscles. High levels of circulating nitrite help the mitochondria in cells produce ATP more efficiently.

Ready to go out and buy the best nitrate supplement? You might feel like you’re searching for Waldo in a sea of American flags.

Selling a nitrate supplement with a dose high enough to cause the positive performance-enhancing effects is not legal. This is due to the regulation surrounding sodium nitrate, a food additive frequently added to meat products, says Examine.com.

How to Achieve Your Boost

Nitrates are best supplemented through food products like leafy greens or beets, 60 to 120 minutes before exercise. You’ll want these window not only for digestive purposes, but also for stomach comfort. Consuming these foods in a liquid form, such as through a shake, juice, or puree, will increase the rate of nitrate absorption, since solid food particles take longer to digest.

The optimal nitrate dose is in the range of 6.4 – 12.8 mg per kilogram of bodyweight. This corresponds to approximately:

• 440 – 870 mg for a 150-pound person
• 580 – 1,160 mg for a 200-pound person
• 730 – 1,450 mg for a 250-pound person

What does it all mean? Well, get ready for a trip to the farmer’s market. Consuming 500 g (a little over a pound—yes a pound) of beets, radishes, or any leafy green vegetable, including lettuce, rocket, spinach, crown daisy, and swiss chard will provide enough nitrates for you to enjoy the benefits during your next workout. Yeah, it’s a lot of greens, but not that far from what you’ll find in many greens juices.

If you take the blood thinner warfarin should consult with their doctor before consuming high levels of some leafy greens, due to the vitamin K content.

Carb Fueling is Not Carb Loading

Carbs make us fat, right? If you eat too may of them and don’t exercise, then yes, pounding down bread, pasta, and even fruits can add up to a few extra pounds to your waistline. But that does not mean that carbs are inherently bad or even make you fat. In fact, carbs are a necessary source of energy and filled with healthy nutrients. (Don’t forget, almost all vegetables are a source of carbohydrates.)

If you like exercise or are looking to become stronger, faster, improve endurance, or even boost fat loss, than carbohydrates are an essential ingredient in your workout plan.

Carbohydrates help you perform at your best. Much like creatine, the very effective, safe, and highly researched performance enhancer, carbs provide energy for your muscles. In fact, studies have found 50 to 75 grams of carbohydrates provides a benefit similar to supplementing 5 g of creatine.

Carbohydrates, specifically sugars, are quickly absorbed by the body and cause an increase in insulin levels, an important hormone in the body that influences both muscle gain, fat loss, and physical performance. Insulin, which is released after carbohydrate consumption, improves the effects of nitric oxide and provides benefits for blood flow, much like those mentioned for nitrates.

Both of these effects contribute to peak physical performance. This is why you will oftentimes see athletes sipping on a sugary drink during their workout.

But keep in mind that carbohydrates during exercise are not for everyone. The fewer carbohydrates you consume in your regular diet, the more effective this performance enhancing effect will be.

So if you carb binge all day long, then loading up on carbs before a workout won’t have the same impact, and could even lead to fat storage simply because you’re taking in more carbs than your body needs.

In terms of types of activities, carbs are beneficial during high intensity acute training (think lifting weights) and long endurance events (such as marathon training). However, mild intensity and duration exercise can be sufficiently fueled by a small carbohydrate containing whole meal a few hours before the workout, according to research compiled by Examine.com.

How to Achieve Your Boost

Start drinking your pre-workout shake or juice about an hour before you arrive at the gym. Ideally, you’ll leave yourself half of your drink to sip on during the rest of the workout.

Your carbohydrate drink should consist of mostly glucose with a bit of fructose, but a glucose and fructose mix will also work (some people find even that mixture too sweet, and should mix in maltodextrin or another fast digesting carb).

Aim for 50 to 75 grams total, though you may need more if your workout lasts longer than 90 minutes.

A sports drink is an effective way to get these carbohydrates, and usually preferred over options like soda which, due to carbonation and acidity, which may cause your stomach to become pissed off during exercise.

Athletes should be careful to not overdo their carbohydrate consumption, particularly before a game or competition. Too many carbohydrates at once could cause temporary refractory hypoglycemia, which is characterized by a short period of low blood sugar and could hurt sports performance.

Too many carbohydrates in too little water can also cause gastrointestinal discomfort. It’s also very important to try new supplements and preworkout drinks during practice before bringing them to the big game. You don’t want to find out you’d be more comfortable with a lower dose when you’re about to step onto the field.

Remember, the benefits of carbohydrates depend a lot on your regular diet. People with high carbohydrate diets will not see as much improvement in their workout from a carbohydrate drink.

Similarly, eating a high carbohydrate meal before exercise will render a workout drink unnecessary. People that eat a low carbohydrate diet, however, will experience significant benefits.

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post The No-Caffeine Pre-Workout Boost appeared first on Born Fitness.

At the time, I was living in my parent’s house (I was still a teenager) and I would train in our basement. My workouts were absolute crap. A combination of bench presses, more bench presses, and curls. For good measure, I’d throw in some lunges and calf raises. To no one’s surprise, I was a solid 130 pounds.

If you would have told me back then that I’d be coaching people, I would have laughed at myself.

The specific timing of your post-workout meal ultimately depends on when you eat prior to training.

But my weird habit wasn’t the workout; it was my post-workout routine. After I’d finish I’d rush upstairs, grab the jar of protein powder I’d stashed in my room (I didn’t want my parents to know I was taking protein powders), and I’d mix up the following shake and down immediately:

• 1 scoop of chocolate protein
• 1 cup of milk
• 3-4 cubes of ice
• Peanut butter (more than necessary)
• Banana
• Honey (not really necessary)
• Frosted Flakes (lots of them…I believe I got this from Muscle Media)

If I were to do the macros, I’d say I easily surpassed 100 grams of sugar in this shake. In some ways it’s shocking I didn’t become heavier, but at the time I wasn’t really eating much, and I certainly qualified as skinny-fat, soft, non-muscular. Feel free to add in whatever adjective you want. One hundred and thirty pounds is not a lot of weight.

While it’s funny to think back about that shake now (which was probably the best-tasting protein shake I’ve ever had in my life), there was reasoning (albeit faulty) to my culinary madness.

I’d read enough bodybuilding magazines that I “knew” had about 30 minutes to take advantage of my “anabolic window.” I need carbs–lots of them–to replenish the glycogen lost during my workout, and there was no need to fear the sugar.

Fast forward 20 years and while I laugh at my drink, the “science” of post-workout nutrition has changed dramatically–but the behaviors of most have not.

Many still believe that you need to down a shake within 30 to 60 minutes after your workout or else your body might go catabolic. Or there’s the prevailing belief that your workouts are so carb depleting that you must refill your carb stores…and then some.

Is there really an “anabolic window” after your workout? That’s the question Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld recently asked in a thorough review (a meta-analysis) of the research published on post-workout meals and the perceived benefits. In all honesty, I knew about this paper going way back, and it was a big motivation for us launching The Muscle Lab.

I spoke with Alan and Brad about post-workout nutrition, their study, and what you really should be eating (and when) after you finish training.

Why We Thought Nutrient Timing Was Important

AB: Your study was a pretty big deal, but probably needs more attention in the mainstream. To catch people up to speed, can you tell me: What was the established “truth” that we thought we knew about protein timing? In other words, why did we think the timing was important and what benefit did we believe was accomplished by eating within the “anabolic window.”

Alan: The conventional wisdom was that there was a quick closing “anabolic window of opportunity” after the training bout. This had its origins in research in the late 1980s showing that a delay in carbohydrate consumption resulted in less glycogen resynthesis in the few hours following the bout. In light of this, fast-acting carbs ingested ASAP became the popular mantra.

However, subsequent research showed that complete glycogen resynthesis after depletion occurred within the same day (regardless of adjacent macronutrient variation, as long as total carbs were matched), so the applicability of the quickie-carb tactic turns out to be limited to a fringe population of athletes who must compete with the same glycogen-depleted muscles multiple times in the same day.

Subsequent research included protein and/or amino acids to the peri-workout period and found beneficial effects on muscle protein synthesis. However, this research shared similar limitations as the carb research in the sense that it only looked at the short-term, and it examined effects in over-night-fasted subjects, minus a pre-workout meal (let alone a protein-rich pre-workout meal).

Hence, the “anabolic window” concept gained momentum. However, this momentum ran into several snags as chronic (long-term) trials examining timing effects on hypertrophy and/or strength failed to consistently corroborate the promise seen in the acute (short-term) studies.

What We Know About Post-Workout Nutrient Timing

AB: What did you actually find in your study?

Brad: This was a complex analysis. We first performed a basic meta-analysis where the effects of protein timing on strength and hypertrophy were compared without adjusting for any confounding issues. The results showed that timing had no effect on strength, but a relatively small yet significant effect was found for hypertrophy.

This initially led us to believe that we had confirmed the presence of a narrow “anabolic window of opportunity.” We then proceeded to perform a sophisticated statistical technique called regression, where we analyzed different variables (i.e. covariates) in isolation to see if they affected the outcome. This produced the most interesting finding of all: the quantity of protein consumed explained virtually all the variance in results!

Specifically, a majority of studies did not match protein intake between groups: the experimental group consumed substantially more protein than the controls. Thus, the average protein consumption in the control groups was well below what is deemed necessary to maximize protein synthesis associated with resistance training.

Only a few studies actually endeavored to match intake. We did a sub-analysis of these studies. No effects were found on protein timing (and this was in spite of having to toss out a study that showed no effect because we weren’t able to obtain sufficient data for analysis).

Why There is No Extreme Urgency for Your Post Workout Meal

AB: Why isn’t timing as important as we thought? How was this thought perpetuated for so long?

Alan: Timing is still important, but indeed the strong urgency of timing implied by the earlier research has not been substantiated. While acute response provides interesting clues and hypotheses, it’s the chronic adaptations that ultimately matter. And thus far, chronic trials have collectively failed to strongly support the idea that muscular adaptations are compromised if there is a short delay in providing protein in the immediate period surrounding the training bout.

Furthermore, recent research has also repeatedly failed to show an enhancement of the anabolic response to training when carbohydrate (even substantial amounts of fast-acting, high-glycemic carbs) is co-ingested with sufficient protein, compared to protein alone.

In answering the question of how this dogma has been perpetuated so long, I’d say there are two main reasons. The first one is that people by nature are resistant to modifying, let alone completely overhauling their beliefs – especially when they have been preaching them as a matter of their careers.

True scientists do not hesitate to change their long-held stance on any given topic if the weight of the evidence warrants it. Unfortunately, this is just not the case with most people, including those in the academic sphere. The second reason for the perpetuation of the traditional wisdom is that the tide-shifting research is relatively new.

The New Rules of Nutrient Timing

AB: Based on the meta-analysis, is there any benefit to timing meals around your workouts?  

Alan: It’s intuitively implicit that timing nutrition around training is a good idea from both a fueling for performance and a recovery standpoint. However, our analysis did not detect any significant benefit of timing protein within the “magic hour” either pre- and/or post-exercise. It’s apparent that there is more leeway than this for optimizing gains in size and strength – which is a welcome finding from the standpoint of flexibility, practicality, and convenience.

AB: From your research, what are the most important takeaways? What can someone who trains use from this to apply to their goals? And does it differ based on muscle building vs. fat loss?

Brad: The primary takeaway from the research is that you don’t need to worry about slamming a protein shake the moment you finish training. It’s okay to chill out for a bit, do what you need to do, and then consume your nutrients.

We estimate that there is approximately a 4 to 6-hour window in and around the workout. The specific timing ultimately depends on when you have a meal prior to training.

Thus, the closer your meal to the training bout, the longer the window following the session. Now there certainly is nothing wrong with consuming nutrients immediately after training. And the limitations of current research leave open the possibility that there may be a small but significant that could be meaningful if your goal is absolute maximization of muscle mass.

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post The Truth About Nutrient Timing appeared first on Born Fitness.