You've just finished an awesome workout, and you're feeling pumped. You have plans with friends, so you move on to the locker room, hop in the shower, don your street clothes, and you are out the door thirty minutes later. You fight traffic for an additional thirty minutes, and finally meet up with your friends. Your window of opportunity has passed. You did not get the post workout muscle supplements that you needed to enhance muscle growth.
Muscles are in a constant state or activity. They are either breaking down, or building up, and what you are doing and consuming determines which process is going on at all times. Simply put, if muscle protein synthesis is not taking place, the muscles are breaking down.
This is where high protein muscle supplements can come in handy. If consumed immediately after a workout - within sixty minutes - you will be amazed at the benefits of these muscle supplements. When you are training with weights, there is an increase of amino acids and glucose through the muscles. This uptake continues for approximately sixty minutes after you stop working those muscles. By injecting more protein into that process, you are essentially ensuring that your muscles are quickly getting a nice dose of protein right away.
By using a muscle supplement right after a workout, you will not only be greatly enhancing the effects of your workout, with almost immediate results, but you will also be speeding up the muscle healing process that always takes place after a workout.
The best muscle supplement to use after your workout should be a high quality carbohydrate and protein mix. Many bodybuilders get this carb/protein mix with the use of a shake - because it is quick and easy. There are numerous high quality muscle supplement shakes on the market, and this is definitely an investment that you will want to make. Furthermore, we know that liquids work through your system much faster than solids.
The muscle supplement shake that you choose should have 30 to 40 grams of protein, with 25 to 30 grams of carbs. These can be purchased in liquid form, but it is generally cheaper to buy this in powder form, and mix it with water. Water is just as important as the carbs and protein, because water is the vehicle that actually moves nutrients through the muscles.
The use of post workout muscle supplements is one of the best kept secrets in the bodybuilding world. Those big muscles that you see are not due to steroids, as many people mistakenly assume. They are due to understanding how the body works, and making sure that the process of muscle building is enhanced as much as possible, through your own actions.
Those bodybuilders who do take advantage of this sixty minute window of opportunity following a workout usually notice a vast difference within a few hours - not only in how they look, but also in how they feel. Make sure that you include post workout muscle supplements to your regimen.