What to Eat After a Workout: Snacks and Meals to Help You Recover

After a workout, aim to combine protein, to help your muscles recover, with carbohydrates, to restore your energy, and drink water. A meal with 20 to 40 g of protein, like rice, beans and chicken, or a snack like yogurt with a banana and oats, does the job for most people.

Below you’ll find how much protein to eat, snack and meal ideas with the calories of each from Brazil’s official food composition table, TACO, from the University of Campinas, and the most common questions: the anabolic window, whey, evening workouts and when muscles grow.

What to eat after a workout, in short

• Protein: 20 to 40 g in the meal after your workout. Chicken, eggs, fish, lean meat, yogurt or fresh cheese.
• Carbohydrates: rice, sweet potato, whole wheat bread, oats or fruit, to restore your energy.
• Water: replace what you lost in sweat.
• No rush: eating within two hours is enough for most people.

How much protein to eat after a workout

The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) position stand on nutrient timing recommends:

• 20 to 40 g of protein per meal (0.25 to 0.40 g per kg of body weight), every 3 or 4 hours through the day;
• high-quality protein right after your workout or up to 2 hours later, which strongly stimulates muscle building;
• and, above all, reaching your total protein for the day, split across evenly spaced meals.

For a 70 kg (154 lb) person, that’s about 18 to 28 g of protein per meal. A 100 g grilled chicken breast has 32 g.

Is the anabolic window real?

Not in the way many people think. A meta-analysis on protein timing, covering 23 studies on muscle growth, concluded that eating protein close to your workout isn’t decisive for gaining strength or muscle, and that total daily protein was the strongest factor in muscle growth.

So you don’t need to rush to eat the minute your workout ends. If you had a meal 1 to 2 hours before training, you can eat calmly afterwards. What matters is not falling short on protein over the day.

Carbohydrates to restore your energy

A workout uses up glycogen, your muscles’ energy store, and carbohydrates afterwards help refill it. If you train once a day, a normal meal with rice, potatoes or bread is enough. The ISSN recommends fast refueling, with 1.2 g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight per hour, only for people who need their energy back in less than 4 hours, like athletes who train twice in a day.

Quick snacks for after a workout

Snack	Calories	Protein	Carbs
Plain yogurt (170 g), 1 banana and 2 tablespoons of oats	278 kcal	12 g	43 g
2 boiled eggs and 2 slices of whole wheat bread (50 g)	258 kcal	17 g	26 g
Whole wheat sandwich (50 g of bread) with tuna (60 g)	226 kcal	20 g	25 g
Coconut water (200 ml)	44 kcal	0 g	11 g

Calories and nutrients: TACO, 4th edition (University of Campinas, 2011). The tuna is canned in oil, drained.

Meals for after a workout

If your workout is close to lunch or dinner, that meal is your post-workout meal:

Meal	Calories	Protein	Carbs
Rice (100 g), beans (100 g) and grilled chicken breast (100 g)	363 kcal	39 g	42 g
Boiled sweet potato (150 g) and grilled chicken breast (100 g)	275 kcal	33 g	28 g

Brazil’s everyday plate of rice, beans and meat makes a great post-workout meal: it has carbohydrates, protein and fiber, and it’s easy to put together every day.

Do I need whey protein after a workout?

No. Whey is just convenient protein, ready in seconds. If you can reach your daily protein with food, like eggs, chicken, fish, yogurt and beans, you don’t need it. It helps when you’re short on time to eat or find it hard to reach your daily total.

What to eat after an evening workout

Have a normal dinner, with protein and carbohydrates, and don’t skip it because it’s late. If your last meal is close to bedtime, the ISSN notes that 30 to 40 g of casein, the main protein in milk, before sleep increases muscle building overnight. In practice, a yogurt or a glass of milk before bed already helps.

What time do muscles grow?

There’s no set time: muscles grow during recovery, in the hours and days after a workout. For that, they need three things: training with effort, enough protein through the day, and rest, including a good night’s sleep.

What to eat after a workout to lose weight

To lose weight, your post-workout food is part of your whole day: what matters is burning more calories than you eat. Don’t use your workout as an excuse to eat more. A 250-calorie snack after a 30-minute walk, which burns about 140 calories for a 70 kg person, gives back everything you burned and a bit more. When you want to lose weight, the best post-workout food is your day’s next meal, with plenty of protein. My guide to how many calories are in everyday foods has the numbers.

Drink water after a workout

Replace the water you lost in sweat. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) suggests weighing yourself before and after a workout to see how much you lose, and avoiding losing more than 2% of your body weight during exercise. The difference on the scale is almost all water.

Before your workout

Before a workout, the focus is energy: carbohydrates, a little protein and not much fat. Read my guide on what to eat before a workout.

No time to work out? Start with your day

If the problem isn’t what to eat, but finding time to work out, you’re not alone: in Brazil’s 2019 National Health Survey, IBGE, the national statistics institute, classified 40.3% of adults as insufficiently active.

That’s why I built MovePoints. You choose the exercises and how many reps you can do, and the app sends short sets, under a minute each, throughout your day:

• If you work remotely, it connects to your calendar and only nudges you when you’re not in a meeting.
• If you don’t work remotely, just set your reminders for before or after work.

MovePoints doesn’t replace the gym: it adds to it. Movement spread across your day burns more calories than a whole day sitting down, and that helps you reach the body you want sooner. It’s in open testing on Android, so you can get MovePoints on Google Play. The iPhone version is coming soon.

The amounts in this guide are examples for healthy adults and don’t replace advice from a registered dietitian, especially if you have kidney disease, diabetes or another health condition.