Are you too skinny for your own good? Or perhaps you’re at a healthy weight but you’d like more muscle definition; you’d like to look and feel better. If so, you should consider taking a protein supplement to build muscle.
Protein shakes and bars work by delivering dense portions of protein directly to your muscles when they need it most. Most people don’t realize how important nutritional timing is to the entire bodybuilding process — they know they need lots of protein and plenty of exercise, but they don’t know how to join the two together to make for the quickest gains with the least effort.
The fact is, directly after an intense workout (particularly resistance or other strength training), your muscles are extremely receptive to protein absorption. This means that if you take a protein supplement like eating a protein bar or drinking a protein shake, you should do it right after working out if you can. In fact, that’s the main point of protein supplements in the first place, and where they excel: giving you an easy-to-use, fast way to take in plenty of protein when you need it most.
Buy a premixed shake or a protein powder to mix yourself and then drink right after working out. Do this for two weeks straight and you’ll start to see gains much faster than you were before. And guess what? Muscle mass actually help to burn fat, too, so if you have unsightly rolls here and there, loose skin or baby fat you’ll be able to re-shape and sculpt your body much more quickly once you put on some muscle mass. In other words, muscle gain can actually lead to weight loss.
But even if your goal is to simply put on weight (including muscle), taking protein supplements after working out will be a great way to get achieve that goal.