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What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout

Plus: diet science's techniques to boost willpower and self-control

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The 10almonds Team
December 17, 2023

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

In the winter, it’s easy to forget: we need sunlight and water.

Even clouded sunlight is better than only artificial light, and we need good hydration even when the weather isn’t hot.

Without sunlight and water, we fare about as well as houseplants without those things.

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⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • If you’d like a little more get-up-and-go before your workout, there are some things you can do/eat/take beforehand to increase your performance (healthily!)

    • These things include proper meal timing, good hydration (not just drinking water, necessarily), creatine, caffeine, BCAAs, and commercially-blended multinutrient made-for-purpose pre-workout supplements.

  • Being unable to easily participate in spoken conversations is not just an inconvenience; it’s also a [causal, fixable] risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.

    • Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

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👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Diet Science: Techniques to Boost Your Willpower and Self-Control (5:51)

Dr. Sylvia Tara explains:

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

💪 MAIN FEATURE

What to eat, take, and do before a workout

We’ve previously written about how to recover quickly after a workout:

Today we’ll look at the flipside: how to prepare for exercise.

Pre-workout nutrition

As per what we wrote (and referenced) above, a good dictum is “protein whenever; carbs after”. See also:

It’s recommended to have a light, balanced meal a few hours before exercising, though there are nuances:

Hydration

You will not perform well unless you are well-hydrated:

However, you also don’t want to just be sloshing around when exercising because you took care to get in your two litres before hitting the gym.

For this reason, quality can be more important than quantity, and sodium and other electrolytes can be important and useful, but will not be so for everyone in all circumstances.

Here’s what we wrote previously about that:

Pre-workout supplements

We previously wrote about the use of creatine specifically:

Caffeine is also a surprisingly effective pre-workout supplement:

Depending on the rate at which you metabolize caffeine (there are genes for this), the effects will come/go earlier/later, but as a general rule of thumb, caffeine should work within about 20 minutes, and will peak in effect 1–2 hours after consumption:

Branched Chain Amino Acids, or BCAAs, are commonly enjoyed as pre-workout supplement to help reduce creatine kinase and muscle soreness, but won’t accelerate recovery:

…but will help boost muscle-growth (or maintenance, depending on your exercise and diet) in the long run:

Where can I get those?

We don’t sell them, but here’s an example product on Amazon, for your convenience 😎

There are also many multi-nutrient pre-workout supplements on the market (like the secondary product offered with the BCAA above). We’d need a lot more room to go into all of those (maybe we’ll include some in our Monday Research Review editions), but meanwhile, here’s some further reading:

(it’s more of a “we ranked these commercial products” article than a science article, but it’s a good starting place for understanding about what’s on offer)

Enjoy!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Hearing So Clear It Has No Peers

Have you heard the good news? A team of top German engineers has just unveiled the world’s very first hearing aids with dual processing, and the results are clear... Literally.

Why is this so special? Thanks to this cutting-edge German technology, these tiny devices capture speech and noise separately, resulting in groundbreaking levels of noise reduction and speech clarity.

Hear.com is so confident you’ll love their product, all devices come with a 45-day no-risk trial. They’ve already got 385,000 happy customers—and counting—and their award-winning customer service will help with anything you need.

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

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🌏 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success – by Liz Moody

Sometimes we crave changing things up, just to feel something new. This can result in anything from bad haircut decisions or impulsive purchases, to crashing and burning-out of a job, project, or relationship. It doesn't have to be that way, though!

This book brings us (as the title suggest) 100 evidence-based ways of changing things up in a good way—small things that can make a big difference in many areas of life.

In terms of format, these are presented in 100 tiny chapters, each approximately 2 pages long (obviously it depends on the edition, but you get the idea). Great to read in any of at least three ways:

  1. Cover-to-cover

  2. One per day for 100 days

  3. Look up what you need on an ad hoc basis

Bottom line: even if you already do half of these things, the other half will each compound your health happiness one-by-one as you add them. This is a very enjoyable and practical book!

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Wishing you a happy and healthy weekend,

The 10almonds Team