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.
1 Not eating or drinking any kind of nutrients for an extended period of time
For example one of the worst things you can do after lifting weights is not eat or drink 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. 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. 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.
2 moving a lot of heavy furniture, Awkward objects or doing another intense physical activity directly afterward
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.
3 overeating or eating the wrong things
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 costs calories it breaks down muscle tissue and depletes your body's glycogen stores, your metabolism also has to stay elevated after exercise because your body still has to repair all the exercise-induced damage and it has to return to homeostasis. all this can stimulate your appetite although it is important to mention that very intense exercise like sprinting has been known to potentially decrease appetite, weightlifting is typically considered a low to moderate-intensity activity.
If you feel really hungry after your workout and you think that since you worked out you have an excuse to eat whatever you want you should know that that's obviously not true and you could wind up getting plenty of fat rather than muscle. For example, if you have some snacks and sweets that don't have much protein you're not going to be stimulating much protein synthesis instead you can easily overeat these high-calorie foods obviously causing you to gain body fat.
The solution, if you're constantly feeling hungry after lifting weights, is to have a high-protein meal already prepped beforehand so you can easily heat it up and eat it soon after your workout to get those hunger pangs under control.
4 staying up all night
Another thing that you should avoid doing after your workout is staying up all night even though we're told over and over again that muscles don't grow in the gym, but instead they grow while you rest. Most people don't prioritize rest and sleep at all let alone as high as they prioritize lifting weights and eating right. Without getting enough sleep and rest your body won't recover properly you'll experience more muscle fatigue and decreased performance levels during your workout sessions, and you'll increase the chances of getting an injury, if you think you can skip out on sleep and still get great results by just training harder you need to realize that the majority of muscle repair and muscle growth occurs while you sleep. This is when your body exclusively releases certain hormones that are essential for recovery and muscle growth.
For example, within the first two hours that you're asleep, there's a huge release of human growth hormone, HGH plays a very important role in repairing damaged cells throughout your body, helping you maintain better body composition in general, and if you skip out on adequate sleep you won't get the same Big Boost in HGH.
Muscle glycogen is also replenished while you sleep, which is another reason why skipping out on sleep can decrease performance and make you feel weaker the next day we also have studies that show that an inadequate sleep schedule is very harmful to your testosterone. for example research shows a 60 reduction in testosterone among men who slept four hours per night instead of eight hours so do your best to try to get at least eight hours of sleep each night and try to go to sleep and wake up on a consistent schedule, it really can hugely improve your results from lifting weights.
5 doing excessive amounts of cardio right after lifting weights
Another thing you should avoid is doing excessive amounts of cardio right after lifting weights, especially if that cardio targets the same body parts that you used during your weightlifting workout, so for example, hitting the heavy bag after performing an upper body workout or running on a treadmill directly after a lower body workout. We can refer to a study that divided men into two groups. One performed cardio immediately after strength training and another did cardio at least 24 hours after the strength training. And researchers found that although strength gains were similar between both groups. The group that waited 24 hours before performing cardio had experienced significantly greater muscle growth, a 12 percent increase versus only a five percent with the other group.
This is due to something known as the interference effect which we could see at play in many other studies like a meta-analysis where scientists found that adding cardio to a resistance training routine reduced muscle growth effect size by 39 percent. the reason for this essentially boils down to the fact that cardio and strength training both try to make your body adapt into two opposite directions, cardio also, in general, reduces the activity of mtor which is a crucial enzyme for muscle growth and it does this while simultaneously raising ampk an enzyme that slows muscle growth. so if your main goal is to build muscle, then you'll want to minimize the interference effect by spreading your weight training and cardio sessions out as much as possible preferably on alternative days.
if you can't do that, a good strategy is to at least not hit the same body part so you'll most likely be better off running on a treadmill after doing a chest and back weightlifting workout, rather than a leg weightlifting workout.
6 Alcohol
alcohol is obviously not good for muscle growth or fat loss and it's especially bad after a workout, for example in a small study one group of men was given whey protein after their workout, meanwhile another group was given protein in in combination with alcohol and the results showed that there was a 24 reduction in muscle protein synthesis for the alcohol group. there are many other studies that also show that alcohol has a negative effect on muscle growth and testosterone levels. after you lift weights there's an increased amount of blood flow to your muscles that carries with the important nutrients as well as protein carbs and fats to start repairing those broken down muscle tissues.
if you drink alcohol soon after workout byproducts of that alcohol will be delivered to those broken down muscles that need nutrients for repair. so rather than helping your muscles grow drinking alcohol after a workout will only lead to negative side effects. also if your goal is to burn fat even if there's no sugar added as is the case with unflavored vodka you still get seven calories per gram of alcohol. if you have mixed drinks you'll most likely be taking in hundreds of extra calories on top of the alcohol calories. on top of all that your liver will prioritize getting the alcohol out of your system over breaking down fat which will further slow fat loss.
7 Gym adequate
make sure that you don't leave your weights lying around after your workout. many people leave dumbbells on the floor barbells fully loaded with 45 pound plates and some people leave greasy sweat marks all over the bench.you definitely don't want to leave weights on the floor or else someone can easily trip and get injured. I've seen it happen even if that doesn't happen it's an inconvenience for everyone especially for the trainers that work at the gym, that will have to clean up after you at the end of the day. and at the end of the day in a large gym there's sometimes thousands of pounds for these trainers to lift and put away I know because I've been there, so don't contribute to the mess because when someone sees a messy gym they're just more likely to add to the mess rather than clean up after themselves.so it becomes a vicious cycle.