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If you want to be the best powerlifter you can be, your nutrition absolutely matters. I've coached clients from their first ever powerlifting meet all the way to an elite total. I've coached them to top 50 rankings in the world as well as world records. So it's been really fun going all the way from somebody who's just learning how to do the lifts according to powerlifting standards all the all the way to the people who are setting the standard. And what I've found over the years is powerlifting is an example of a sport where people will start into hyper-analyzing the training and getting deeper and deeper and deeper into the training nuances before they even start to touch the basics of nutrition.
I also coach clients for aesthetic sports, which would be like bodybuilding, and there's a million categories of bodybuilding competitions. I don't even know if I know them all now. It's like fit model, bikini, wellness, figure, then women's bodybuilding, if that is still a category. I'm not sure anymore. Then for men, there's— well, I guess male and female, there's transformation.
Then there's men's physique, classic physique, bodybuilding, all of those things. There's a thousand categories in that sport. So I've worked with people who are IFBB pros and got them their pro card. And then also those who are natural. Now in that sport, their nutrition absolutely matters, like, and it's pretty obvious right away in the progression of that sport that nutrition matters.
So they tend to hyperanalyze nutrition along the way with hyperanalyzing their training. They tend to kind of go hand in hand. Now in that category, if they do take super supplements, they tend to go crazy and diagnose the super supplements before they even get into the nutrition and training. So they have their own mistakes they make in regards to what aspect of the process that they are hypervigilant on. When you think of strength athletes, they tend to get into the programming first and then they might look at recovery metrics.
You know, should they do cold plunge or sauna? Do they have a Theragun, floss bands, all these things? And nutrition is usually like a secondary, tertiary, or maybe someday focus. However, if you do want to be the best powerlifter you can be, if you want to be nationally ranked if you want to set some state records or even world records, you're going to 100% need to dial in your nutrition. Your genetics will only take you so far.
And this is something we also see in athletic sports. I help clients from high school to get D1 scholarships, and I've helped people from like D1 schools get into professional. So I've helped like Major League Baseball professionals, NFL professionals, I've helped Olympic-level athletes. And in that those sports or categories, you'll often see their genetics will take them— they were, they're freaking amazing and elite when they're among their peers, let's say for example in high school, even into like college. But then when they get around other more advanced genetic athletes, it tends to kind of level the playing field.
And then what they're doing outside of the genetics starts to matter. So that's when they start to look at nutrition for fueling performance, fueling recovery, and and whatnot. So this is something we see across like all types of performance sports and aesthetic sports. With powerlifters, as I said, it's something they kind of get into usually like a secondary thought, or once their training has seemingly maxed out, they start to have aches and pains, they start to have plateaus, they then start to look at, ah crap, you know, maybe nutrition is something I need to look into. The other thing that prompts them to tend to look into nutrition is more and more nowadays powerlifting is based on dots, which is essentially like a score powerlifters have that is— and I'm simplifying a lot here, but it's basically their strength to their body weight.
And your body weight will determine based on your strength how high of like a score you have as a powerlifter, how good of a powerlifter you would be able to say that you are. Now that becomes into play to where, okay, if my body weight is— let's say I have 40 pounds of excess fat and that fat isn't really helping my leverages, it's not really helping me move any weight, it's just kind of unnecessary weight. That's 40 pounds that's counting against your total, that's bringing your powerlifter score down. So you would want to maximize body composition in regards to what makes you feel the strongest. For some athletes, that's going to be 25% body fat, others 20%, others 15%.
You know, you're going to— it's more rare that you would see a powerlifter under 15% body fat, like true actual like DEXA scan or Bod Pod hydrostatic weighing, like actually measured 15% body fat. It's certainly the case, happens all the time, but it's way less common than, say, an athlete around, say, 20% body fat. And you will see some, you know, even higher than that who are exceptional and great. But that gives you context to the concept that leaner isn't always better. You're looking for an optimal body weight and body composition, and for some people that's a higher body fat percentage than others.
So this is actually something fun. Like, I started working with an Olympic-level female swimmer, and one of the things I helped her with nutrition-wise was to make sure she didn't get too lean, because the leaner she was, the more she would sink into the water, and that would actually hurt her performance. So it was kind of fun just a fun little side note is for her, we had to actually control her nutrition to make sure she wasn't losing body fat. And that way the body fat stayed in an optimal amount. So she had the right level of buoyancy in the water.
Pretty cool stuff. I love that type of stuff. So when we look at powerlifting, the concept I want to talk about today is protein and carbohydrate timing. And when we look at this, we're not looking at it through the lens of what can we do with these elements to make you as lean as possible. We're looking for what makes you at an optimal body weight, and that's going to allow us— basically, if we set up our protein and carbohydrates correctly, it's going to allow us to perform our best, recover our best, but not have insufficiencies or excesses.
And over time, that would create a body type that would be optimal for you. Let's say, for example, you started into the process of analyzing your protein and carbohydrate timing, and you had been taking 10 pounds overweight that was like not necessary weight, like wasn't useful, wasn't helpful. The more you focus on protein and carbohydrate timing, that 10 pounds will reduce. It might come down to only 5 pounds, 4 pounds, 3 pounds. You'll lose a little bit of fat.
Likewise, if you're underweight and you're, you're actually too lean, by focusing on protein and carbohydrate timing, you'll probably actually add some muscle tissue, maybe even add a little bit of body fat in the sense that it'll bring you up to an optimal performance and optimal recovery. This wouldn't make you fatter than you need to be. This would basically just correct undereating. That's essentially what we're looking for, is we want to do something that will correct overeating, something that would correct undereating, and just get you to optimal eating. And that's the intent for today's podcast.
Now, these are elements that I start to look for with every client I work with. I do not like working with a client if I can't control their nutrition. I I can't think of someone right now that I work with where I do— well, that's actually okay. I do help a few clients with training programming, recovering protocols, and I don't manage the nutrition because they already have a nutritionist on staff for wherever they are, a team sport or like an organization that they're a part of. So if they already have the dietitian support, I'm not gonna, you know, muddy the waters in there unless they ask me questions.
But I would say then, you know, outside of that circumstance, the rest of the clients I work with, I do manage their nutrition to some degree. And at any point in which the nutrition would start to hinder the progress we're going to make through the training, then we absolutely start discussing nutrition. So one of the clients I'm relatively new to working with, I think we have like 2 months in, he's a powerlifter getting ready for the Arnold Classic coming up in 2027. And he's been getting really good progress over the first couple programs. Like, we've eliminated some knee pain that he was having.
He's not feeling as much lower back fatigue, as much CNS fatigue. His lifts are feeling more explosive. He's feeling more confident. He's using heavier weights than he normally ever did in prep before. So we're already winning on a lot of fronts.
We're already making great progress. And in the recent program I just sent to him over this past weekend, I started mentioning, hey, let's start looking at protein timing, carbohydrate timing, because we're going to need to make sure that we're properly fueling performance so we don't have an unwanted or unnecessary recovery deficit post-workout. So that way we're not trying to like recover more than we need to leading into the next workout. So essentially what I'm looking to do with him is I'm trying to manage his post-workout recovery deficit so that way I can continue to push bigger weights, I can continue to push more accessories like loaded accessories. He's an explosive athlete.
And unfortunately, with explosive athletes, they accumulate a lot of wear and tear on their, on their main lifts and their accessories because they're kind of like an all-or-nothing. They just fire everything and they move it with, you know, come hell or high water, this thing's moving. And it can cause a lot of joint strain, joint pain, a lot of CNS fatigue. And if we don't properly manage their workout fueling, we end up ending the workout with a recovery deficit greater than what we need. And then I have to mitigate that.
If I can't do it through nutrition, I have to mitigate that by reducing the intensity and weight loads of their accessories. And that's a downside because I'm actually bringing the training down to match subpar nutrition, where we would rather have the training be as the best it can and increase the quality of the nutrition to support that. So I don't want to bring the training down to their recovery capacity. I want to increase their recovery capacity. So that's what we're doing with that client.
And it prompted the idea for today's podcast. So we look at protein timing. Really, the main concepts we're looking for is we want to have a good influx of protein right after the workout. And usually if we're looking at like everything I'm going to discuss today, by the way, is like perfect world scenario. So you might have to make modifications from this, and for certain clients in certain situations, I do make modifications.
Over half the clients we work with are personal trainers and coaches, and a lot of them, a significant portion, own their own business and are entrepreneurs. So there's a little more kind of gray area in how we implement this stuff. But let's go with a, you know, perfect world scenario, and then if you need individual help kind of modifying this, just reach out on the website, which is www.c3method.com, or put a comment or question in whatever platform you're watching or listening to this podcast on. So perfect world scenario, we're going to have an influx of protein post-workout, and usually it's going to be best to have really quick-digesting protein, which is going to be like a whey isolate. I prefer isolate because it digests better than a whey concentrate, and we want that because it gets into our system as quickly as we can.
We could pair that with some carbohydrates. I'm not overly nuanced on whether we do or don't. In my master's in nutrition, I did a 50-page paper, 200 peer-reviewed research articles, and a whole bunch of crazy stuff about the anabolic window. And it was specifically the 60 minutes post-workout. What is the right type and amount of protein?
Should it be paired with carbohydrates? What is the right type and amount of carbohydrates? And the general takeaway is get some protein in your face as fast as you can. The amount of carbohydrates you put with that, it makes a small amount of difference but not that big of a difference. So if you can pair some quick carbs with it, great.
Sometimes we'll do a carb powder, sometimes we'll do fruit, sometimes we'll do just, you know, like a cracker or bread, maybe a bagel, white bread, stuff like that. Cereal— cereal is great usually because it digests pretty quickly, like think of like Rice Krispies or something. But we would want a fast protein, fast carb. So an example of that could be a scoop of whey isolate with you can do cow's milk or you can do an almond milk if you want to bring the sugar down and then put it with cereal. And the reason why you might want to bring the sugar down from the milk is you get more cereal, by the way.
So if you, if you're not going to spend 13 grams of sugar in a cup of milk, you get to eat the 13 grams of sugar or carbohydrates basically from the cereal. So you get more cereal. So sometimes you might do a scoop of whey isolate and some almond milk, like unsweetened almond milk, and some type of cereal like Chex Mix Chex Mix or something like that, and that'll be great. So that's quick protein, quick carbs. It gets into the body and starts repairing things, recovering things as quickly as we can.
And then usually about an hour post-workout, like 1 to 2 hours, but about an hour, we'd want to have slower digesting carbohydrate and protein sources. The amount of carbohydrates depends on whether you train, you know, beginning of the day, midday, end of the day. I tend to modify the carbohydrates of that meal depending on what the energy demand is going to be for the rest of the day. If they're just going to be going to bed and they don't train the next day until the following evening, we don't need to carb load before bed, you know, for any kind of morning activity. So we just bring the carbs down quite a bit and we have a whole food protein and usually a very slow digesting protein right before bed.
So that might be, you know, red meat, some kind of fattier type of meat, and maybe pair that with some vegetables just for some volume. So think of like steak and asparagus, something like that, steak and eggs. Like that. Now, that would be as if that last meal, like the 1 hour or so post-workout, is your last meal of the day, then you're going to bed. If you work out in the morning, you have that quick protein, quick carbs post-workout about an hour later.
Then we're going to have a whole food protein that might digest a little bit faster because we do want to still be able to eat in another 4 to 5 hours or so whenever your next meal is. So you look for a leaner source of protein. That could be a leaner ground beef, that could be, you know, chicken breast, chicken thigh, depending on how fatty the chicken thigh is and how well you process that. It can be a whole bunch of things, you know, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, eggs, a million other types of meats if you want. And then we're going to pair that with a carbohydrate that's again a complex carbohydrate, so it digests, you know, slower than 15 minutes, but it digests quick enough by your next meal.
So an example of this might be like a white potato, white bread, white bagel, rice, pasta, I'm probably going to avoid things like quinoa or sweet potato because those are slower digesting. Sometimes that might make you too full and then you're not hungry for your next meal. However, if your next meal is not for 6 hours, maybe quinoa or sweet potato or some slower digesting carbohydrate, like even oats, might be a good option for you. So it depends on your meal timing. When is that following meal going to be and what amount of protein and carbs can I get in now that'll still allow me to be hungry enough to eat that next meal?
Now, the amount of protein that we would have in the immediate post-workout and then the roughly 1 hour later is going to be very high and whatever the person can kind of tolerate digestion-wise. And then if that last— if that second meal post-workout isn't your meal before bed, then that would be the other time we want to really prioritize high protein. So we want to have big influx of protein. I mean, like as much as you can get 40 in, 40 grams, 50 grams, 60 grams. I usually don't make people eat more than 60 grams at once because it usually just digests— digestive comfort.
However, I've experimented with more and been fine with more, and so have other clients as well. But that's what we're looking for is, okay, can I have— if my goal for protein is 1 gram per pound of body weight, maybe you're at 1.2, but say roughly, like, let's just say you're between 0.8 and 1.2 grams per pound of body weight. In protein. I want to just make sure my protein is relatively spread out throughout the day, but ensure that I'm having protein immediately post-workout, 1 hour post-workout, and right before bed. Just make sure those times are accounted for.
And I would even lean into those as having higher, higher amounts if at other times, if I bring the protein down a little bit, that helps my digestion. So for example, before a workout, we don't really need to have a big influx of protein. You know, something as small as 20 to 40 grams of protein leading into a workout, like say an hour before a workout or so, is fine. That's plenty enough. It has enough amino acids then floating around your bloodstream while you're working out.
So you might only have 20 to 40 grams pre-workout, but maybe, maybe post-workout, between the immediate post-workout and then that 1 to 2 hours later, maybe end up having 100 grams total between those 2 meals. And then you have a big 60-gram meal before bed, and now all of a sudden you're looking at right there is about 180 to 200 grams of protein in a day. And it can just be that simple where you, you pull back a little bit pre-workout so that you have digestive comfort so you can really load the carbs. Because we're going to talk about that next, is when carbs are going to be maximally loaded. So the peak of protein should be post-workout before bed, and I can bring down protein at other times of the day.
I don't want to eliminate— I always want to have some amino acids floating around my system, but I can bring down the amount so that way I can tolerate higher amounts of carbs at those times. Now, the idea of protein in general is we want to peak it post-workout, before bed. Just don't miss those time frames. That's the biggest thing. Immediately post-workout, fast-digesting carbohydrates.
About an hour later than that, medium— I mean, I'm sorry, fast-digesting protein. And then about an hour after that, about medium-digesting protein. Then before bed, really slow-digesting protein. So it takes like, say, 6 to 8 hours while you're sleeping, it's kind of breaking down your system and becoming available for the body to do repairs. Then carbohydrate, it's kind of a little bit of the inverse, is we want to fuel the workout.
So protein is we're fueling the recovery, so that's post-workout. With carbohydrate, we're fueling the workout, so that's pre-workout. So the meal that I would have before training, whether that's— I don't like having a huge influx, say 15 to 20 minutes before training, I'm not going to try to have 100 grams of carbs. Chances are that's going to cause some digestive stress. We're going to be bloated.
You're just going to have a belly full of food. So even if you try to pick candy and like fruit juices or sports drinks, it's hard to get that much to process quickly enough leading into the workout. Now, thankfully, for most structures of powerlifting, it's not an aerobically demanding or very physically demanding style of training in the sense that You're not doing a bunch of jumps and crazy circuits and running around like crazy. It's usually going to be, you know, maybe a 30-second activity, 3-minute rest, 30-second activity, 3-minute rest. For a lot of the clients I work with, we do circuits to warm up the movements.
So we do some kind of movement prep with a circuit focusing on shoulder mobility, thoracic strength, core strength, hip mobility, and they do 2 to 3 exercises couple rounds, but again, relatively low intensity. Then maybe we have a little bit of an explosive or CNS excitatory activity. So maybe some heavy farmer's carries, some yoke carries. Maybe they're gonna do some explosive jumps, maybe even a little bit of sprint work, something like that. And again, that might be high intensity but for short bursts, and that's gonna be relatively okay for still trying to digest foods.
But I wouldn't really want to do any of that stuff if I have any digestive comfort— discomfort at all. So my carbs pre-workout, I like to kind of how we had post-workout for protein, we had the immediate protein right after, then about an hour later. We're gonna invert that for carbohydrates. So about 1 to 2 hours before the workout, I want to have some medium complexity carbohydrates. And then right before the workout, I can have some simple carbohydrates, whether it's candies, sugars, fruit juice, things like that.
Just to kind of like top off maybe what you couldn't have in that first meal, the 1 to 2 hours before the workout meal. Maybe you had the volume you could tolerate and digest well, and then right before the workout you just want to have a little extra to make sure you have a good workout. That would be fine to throw in at that time. So that's what we're looking to do, is kind of do carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, medium digesting carbohydrates, 2 hours, 1 to 2 hours before the workout. Then right before the workout, quick-digesting carbohydrates.
Right after the workout, quick-digesting protein. About 1 to 2 hours post-workout, moderate-digesting protein. So you can see how we kind of like have a spectrum where we load carbs from slow to quick into the workout, and then we come out of the workout with quick to slow proteins to quote-unquote load recovery. That's going to be the biggest thing. And then for carbohydrates, outside of the pre-workout meals, the 1 to 2 hours before workout, then immediately before the workout, I modify the volume to where we said you can pair a little bit of carbohydrates with that quick-digesting protein right after the workout, assuming you have calorie totals and carbohydrates are fine there.
And then outside of that, I taper the carbs to control the person's total daily calories and match their daily activity. If they work out at the beginning of the day, well, then we're definitely gonna have carbohydrates in that whole food protein meal that was 2 hours post-workout. We're gonna have carbs then because they're still up and active and moving around and doing things. If that was the last meal of the day, I'm not gonna have carbs if they don't have a next morning activity because they just don't need them. We don't need to be loading up the glycogen.
Let's go to bed with the glycogen kind of midway or a little depleted, get a little bit of body fat control, and then we wake up the next day and we start loading glycogen, loading carbs leading into the workout. So I would have carbohydrates right before bed if the person works out in the morning, because we do want to wake up with some type of energy available for the body. We don't want to wake up fully depleted and try to replenish that immediately upon waking right before a workout. So you can carb load a morning activity the night before with some moderate to slow digesting carbohydrates. So that way your glycogen stores, your carbohydrates stored in the muscle is at like, say, a medium, like middle to 3/4 full, and then you're just looking to top that off right before the morning activity.
So we said that if you're looking at front-loading carbohydrates to the, to the workout, we have that first meal 1 to 2 hours beforehand and then carbohydrates right before the workout. So if your workout is right when you wake up, that 1 to 2 hours before the workout, that's not gonna happen because you're still sleeping. So you would actually have those carbs the night before. And then really slow-digesting carbohydrates. And you might even pair that with some fats to even slow that down even more.
And then that way it's slowly trickling and breaking down and building into the muscles, like glycogen is being formed and created within the muscles as you're sleeping. Then you wake up, you just top that off with a little bit of quick carbs, and then boom, right into the workout. So timing your protein, timing your carbohydrates is going to maximize your performance, which maximizes your stimulus. And then by timing our protein correctly, it maximizes our body's ability to adapt and meet the demands of that stimulus. So we need both of these components to be in place.
We want to maximize our performance to maximize what's possible progress-wise, and then we time our protein correctly so we can have the realization of that possibility and actually give our body what it needs to make the adaptations and changes that we're hoping to actually make. So there you go. So this is something that I go through with all my powerlifting clients, maybe not like true beginners. If we're just trying to like get them into lifting, well, I might just say like, hey, you know, if your, if your food's good enough, let's just eat like that. Let's focus on the lifts.
Let's focus on getting you consistent with training. And then we'll come in and get nutrition, you know, afterwards. However, let's say their eating is crap. And I can already tell, I'm like, man, they're not gonna like their workouts because they're coming into the workouts underfed. They're under-recovered.
They're just going to feel like crap. They're going to recover like crap. So we'll address food right away. It's really a case-by-case basis when we address food. But I would definitely say that I address food for powerlifters way sooner than what they would on their own.
And that's an important thing I want to get across in today's podcast is if you are a powerlifter and you're not tracking calories, you're not really paying attention to carbohydrate and protein timing to the complexity that I'm explaining right now in today's podcast, you're 100% not getting the best results. You are not your best self. You're just not, and you're never going to be. So if you want to be your best, if you want to see what your body's truly capable of, if you want to see the full fullness of your work, all the work you're putting in, what can it really create? What can it— what can the outcome be?
You've got to, got to, got to get into protein and carbohydrate timing. And that is secondary to making sure you just have enough calories and enough protein during the day. And then we even throw in things like hydration. This is stuff that I would cover before I even get into carbohydrate timing and protein timing, is just making sure we're eating consistently and enough per day for calories, or eating consistently and enough for protein, or rehydrating ourselves. And then once those things are met, then we actually start looking into carbohydrate timing, protein timing, and today's podcast explains a little bit about how we would do that.
Cool. Okay, hopefully this was helpful. If you have any questions, let me know. Just put the question on whatever platform you're on, or you can reach out on our website, www.c3method.com. The 3 is spelled out T-H-R-E-E, so it's c3method.com.
Cool. That's it. Okay, if you need anything, let me know. Um, that's all. So I hope this was helpful, and thank you for watching, and thank you for listening.