What to eat before and after training when you are not an athlete

Almost everything written about eating around training was written for people whose job is training. If you lift for forty minutes twice a week between work and dinner, most of it does not apply to you, and following it anyway adds anxiety without adding results.

The short version

• Do not train completely empty if you can help it, and do not train stuffed.
• Get protein at most meals, rather than engineering a window around the session.
• Total daily food matters far more than the timing of any single meal.
• Drink water. Most people do not need a sports drink for a forty minute session.

Before training

The purpose of a pre-training meal is modest: to stop you feeling faint, distracted or heavy. A normal meal one to three hours beforehand does that. Something small thirty to sixty minutes before also works if that is how your day falls: a banana, a yoghurt, a slice of toast.

If you train first thing and eating early makes you feel sick, training with only water in you is fine for a session of this length. What you eat afterwards, and across the rest of the day, is doing the real work.

After training

The anxious version of this question comes from the idea of a narrow window that closes shortly after your last set. For someone training a few times a week and eating regular meals, that window is much wider than the folklore suggests. Eating a normal meal containing protein within a couple of hours of finishing covers it.

The one situation where timing gets more useful is when sessions are close together, for example training on consecutive days. Then getting food in soon after finishing simply gives you more hours to recover before the next one. That is logistics, not magic.

Protein, in plain numbers

Most people returning to training are eating less protein than they think. A practical approach that does not require a spreadsheet: aim for a palm-sized portion of a protein food at each main meal, and check that at least one of them is not an afterthought. If you eat three meals, that is three opportunities, and hitting two of them well is already a change.

Protein supports the repair that follows training, but it does not override the total. If you are eating far less than your body needs overall, adding a protein shake changes very little.

Why the numbers on your app might be wrong

Here is the part most food trackers do not tell you. Food composition data is country-specific, and the differences are not trivial. Minced beef is the clearest example: products sold under similar names in Sweden and the United States are commonly sold at different fat percentages, so the same weight of what looks like the same ingredient carries a materially different calorie figure depending on which database you looked it up in.^{Source 1,2}

Amble uses Livsmedelsverket, the Swedish Food Agency database, for foods bought in Sweden and USDA FoodData Central elsewhere, because quietly using the wrong country's numbers corrupts every daily total in a way you would never notice.^{Source 1,2}

Things you can stop worrying about

• Whether your post-session meal was thirty or ninety minutes after the last set.
• Whether you had carbohydrates with your protein.
• Whether a shake beats chicken. It is more convenient, that is all.
• Whether eating after eight in the evening does something particular. It does not.

Things worth a little attention

Eating enough on training days, because appetite often lags the new demand by a couple of days. Getting some carbohydrate into the day if your sessions feel unusually flat. Drinking water, especially if you are someone who arrives at the gym already thirsty. And eating in a way you could repeat next month, because guidance on adaptation assumes training and eating continue over time rather than in bursts.^{Source 3}

Amble writes food alongside training and supplements as one plan rather than three, and adjusts the rest of the week when a day goes differently than planned. It is in development, and the beta opens soon.

This is general information, not dietary advice for a medical condition. If you are managing diabetes, kidney disease, an eating disorder or anything else affected by how you eat, work with a clinician.