Should you eat protein or carbohydrates before exercising? Experts reveal that eating this way has recovered quickly after exercise

 8:40am, 7 June 2025

In order to achieve sports goals, it is very important to supplement your body's energy properly before running. On the one hand, it can improve performance and speed up the recovery process, but should you consider carbohydrates or protein first?

What should I eat before running?

Experts point out that carbohydrates are the first choice. When we eat carbohydrates, they break down into glucose and are stored in the muscles and liver as liver. Muscle liver sugar is used to promote muscle contraction, and liver sugar can help maintain blood sugar and provide energy to the brain and muscles.

It is important to ensure that these energy is sufficiently prepared before any form of movement, so that people can have continuous energy so that they can effectively exercise without feeling tired.

Generally speaking, the best practice is to take 1 to 2 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram about one to two hours before running, which means a 68 kilogram person needs at least 68 grams of carbohydrates before running.

If you are someone who usually chooses to exercise immediately after getting up, they can eat about 30 grams of carbohydrates, such as bananas or dried mangoes a few minutes in advance.

If you want to engage in high-strength sports in the middle, it is especially important to take carbohydrates before running. Because during low strength exercise, muscles rely mainly on fat to gain energy. However, more intense exercise requires higher energy, and the body can only be obtained from carbohydrates.

Foods that help recover after exercise

In fact, taking appropriate nutrition after exercise is as important as what to eat before exercise. It is recommended to eat carbohydrates and protein after exercise to replenish muscles to promote improvement and strengthen muscle.

Specifically, eating a high-carb snack within 30 minutes of exercise is an ideal choice, helping to replenish energy and preventing hypoglycemia. Within a few hours after exercise, adults should also take about 20 to 40 grams of protein to help strengthen muscle and repair tissues. This also enables the recovery process, allowing you to prepare for the next movement faster.

In addition to protein and carbohydrates, replenishing moisture is also an important part of body recovery.

Although there is a rough estimate of how many grams of protein and carbohydrates a person should take before and after exercise, they are only rough numbers and require some degree of repeated trials because each person has a different degree of demand for constant nutrient components.

In order to find a method that suits you, pay attention to energy levels during the exercise and recovery time after exercise, both are useful threads to understand whether your diet is sufficient to support your exercise goals.

It is also important that diets outside of exercise can also have an impact on the overall performance. Taking enough heat, carbohydrates, protein and fat every day helps provide effective energy to the brain and muscles both inside and outside the training ground.