7 WORST Things to do After Lifting Weights

These common muscle-building mistakes not only delay growth but can also cause injury. After lifting weights it's very important that you eat the right things and start the recovery process. This video will break through the biggest fitness myths and it'll help you avoid mistakes that will hold you back.

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When you lift weights you break down muscle tissue and that muscle tissue needs to be repaired after the workout in order for it to heal and grow back stronger. Without taking the right steps post workout your muscles are not going to recover properly potentially leading to a loss of mass, a reduction in power output, and a heightened chance of injury. The things that you do during the hours of the day after lifting are truly as important as the workout itself for building muscle and burning fat.
For example one of the worst things you can do after lifting weights is not eating or drinking any kind of nutrients for an extended period of time and this is something that is becoming more common ever since the anabolic window myth was debunked. For a long time, everyone was under the impression that the anabolic window was a sacred short time period after your workout where you needed to take in nutrients immediately, or else you wouldn't get the gains or benefits from that workout. So people would bring protein powder with them to the gym and then rush to have a protein shake right after their workout out of fear of potentially losing muscle gains. But now that we know that the anabolic window is a myth the pendulum has swung back in the opposite direction, where people think that it doesn't matter if you don't eat protein or take a protein shake for hours and hours after you lift weights.

Well, research shows that it actually does matter and that there is a benefit to consuming protein sometime soon after your workout, specifically within the first hour. (15) We can draw from a study published in the journal of strength and conditioning research that found evidence that consuming protein shortly after a workout can help improve strength and muscle growth EVEN if you're already consuming enough protein throughout the rest of the day.(15) This is because after your workout your muscles are left broken down, and that can lead to a negative nitrogen balance. If you want to build muscle you want to spend more time throughout the day maintaining a positive nitrogen balance so your body always has a pool of amino acids readily available to draw from to repair and build muscle tissue. That's why you want to have either a high-protein meal or a protein shake as soon as you reasonably can after a workout. Specifically, you want to do this at most, within the first hour after you're finished lifting weights. This will provide your body the nutrients it needs to boost protein synthesis rates and shift right back over into a positive protein turnover rate. This is especially true if you didn't eat anything before your workout, by having something soon afterward your body can go from muscle breakdown to muscle growth allowing you to get more benefits from your training session. 

Another thing that you want to be really careful with especially after a heavy leg or back lifting session is moving a lot of heavy furniture, Awkward objects, or doing another intense physical activity directly afterward. Again this is especially true when you're doing heavy sets of exercises like deadlifts or squats during your workout. Even if you perform these exercises with perfect form, if you're pushing yourself and lifting heavy weight you will exhaust the stabilizer muscles around your core and lower back. If you immediately go on to lift heavy awkward objects, you can be much more susceptible to an injury. And it's not only heavy objects it can be any kind of intense physical activity immediately after a heavy deadlift or leg session. For example, I completely destroyed my back a few years ago, by tearing up and replacing the turf at my gym after a heavy deadlifting session. (**) Just by bending down over and over again to rip up and lay down new turf my back was wrecked for weeks. So if you're planning on moving out, or if you have some really difficult physical tasks that you need to get done, make sure you're not doing it on a day and time that you're going all out at the gym directly beforehand. It's much better to choose to take one day off, take it a little easier at the gym, or adjust your workout schedule so that you can have adequate rest, rather than be forced to take weeks off because of a nasty lower back injury. 

Now another common mistake with nutrition instead of not eating for hours after your workout is overeating or eating the wrong things afterward. Lifting weights and working out, in general, can make some people feel hungry. This is because exercise