Post-Workout Shakes and Better Fat Loss Results

This day in age, “Fitness” and how to look and feel the way you want can get a little confusing…

there are many different diets all claiming to be the best by the people who follow them…

there are more supplements than ever…

even the food industry has picked up on health buzzwords like protein and added it to everything from cereal to ice cream to try and get you to eat more…

and there seem to be new fitness studios or ways to exercise, popping up left and right (personally I actually enjoy this as it provides more people an opportunity to find something they love).

With all of that going on around you, in front of you on social media, and the conversations you have with your co-workers, friends, and family… it can be hard to realize what route to take for your fat loss journey.

Hard to pinpoint what will help you burn fat and earn the results you want … and what will not. Even figuring out what to eat can be tough.

So in this blog, I want to explain what will help you earn results so you don’t waste time, money, and flat out get frustrated by the lack of results… I’ve been there done that and want to help you avoid doing that yourself.

What’s most important for fat loss

If you get down to the basics, I think we can both agree that a good nutrition plan and working out are the two most key pieces of any fat loss plan! But today I want to talk about the next most important piece of your fat loss plan.

It’s a piece most people do wrong. Shoot, I know I was doing it wrong for a long time leading to less than desirable results.

Unfortunately, so many people who have a fat loss goal are shortchanging their results by failing to do the right things post-workout.

Therefore, today I want to fill you in on what exactly is happening to your body during resistance training and what you need to do after a workout to earn the fastest possible results when it comes to building quality muscle and burning fat.

This is not “new” information by any means; it is just highly overlooked when it comes to what truly works.

The impact of working out on your body

When done properly, post-workout supplementation will amplify your fat loss results and here is why… when you are doing any sort of resistance training (weight lifting, machines, Crossfit, bodyweight workouts, TRX, etc.) you are doing two things to your body:

• You are depleting your glycogen stores. (Glycogen is glucose that is stored in your muscle cells to be used as fuel during bouts of intense activity. Glucose is a simple sugar and type of carb)
• You are breaking down your muscle tissue and creating micro-traumas to your muscle fibers.

Proper post-workout nutrition will address both of these issues as your body has a set of order of operations it must go through to replenish, rebuild, and recover.

If you do this part right, you will recover faster, reduce soreness, and retain more lean muscle. By maintaining more lean muscle tissue, this will help keep your metabolism high while dieting, as well as help you earn the lean, toned, athletic look that many are working towards.

So let’s talk about what to eat after a workout.

What to eat after a workout

After your resistance training, your body will work very hard for 24-48 hours afterward to repair itself and will burn plenty of calories during that process. Muscle is your metabolic workhorse, meaning the more of it you have or the longer it stays active and the more calories you are going to burn every day… which leads to better results.

Your body is genetically built for survival and will always replenish your glycogen stores first and foremost. Your body thinks of it like this… having stored energy is essential for survival, whereas looking good on the beach is not. So before any repair to the muscle is done… glycogen stores need to be replenished. There is no way to get around it and no supplement on the face of the planet that can “re-program” your body or genetics to operate any other way.

See, your body is an incredible machine and no matter what you give your body post workout, it will recover. Most everything you eat post workout is going to be used first to refill glycogen stores in the muscles… then after that for repair of muscle tissue. So for example, if you’re like me for the first few years of my fitness journey… working hard to lose weight and just drinking or eating protein after my workouts… it’s really not as beneficial as you think.

When your body is starving for glycogen, there is a good chance that a large portion of the protein you eat or drink will start to be inefficiently broken down into sugars (carbs… more specifically, glucose) and stored as glycogen instead of being used for muscle recovery.

It doesn’t matter what type of protein or how expensive it is, if you are not eating or consuming it with glucose post-workout, you’re severely diminishing its effectiveness. What your body wants and needs to eat and drink is protein AND glucose, not one or the other.

What most people don’t realize, once again myself included, is that when you wrap up your workout with a sweaty selfie and leave the gym… your body doesn’t know you’re done with your workout. Therefore, it will continue to break down muscle tissue for the next 6… 8 hours or so.

Your body has no way of knowing that you stopped exercising or that it should begin the recovery process and rebuild your muscles. It’s your job to signal to your body to stop breaking down muscle tissue, get out of the catabolic state of breaking down muscle for fuel, and flip the switch to create a highly anabolic environment, preserving and rebuilding muscle tissue, in your body. This is done with insulin and by stimulating muscle protein synthesis.

How do you make the switch?

This is where Ignition helps facilitate quick and efficient recovery. Ignition is a pure dexanhydrous glucose.

What this means is that it is a mono-saccharide that assimilates rapidly (aka quick digesting carb that our bodies run off of) and requires little to no work on the part of your body to break it down and shuttle it into the muscle cell to replenish glycogen stores. The faster your glycogen stores are replenished the better and that’s why Ignition is so effective.

This makes it the most rapid assimilating carb available and it also provides your body one heck of an insulin spike. You might be thinking, isn’t spiking insulin a bad thing for fat loss?

It certainly can be unless it is post-workout. A spike in insulin will halt the catabolic process and open amino acid receptors in the damaged muscle tissue in order for the repair and recovery processes to begin. In basic terms, it stops the break down of your muscles and tells them to get ready to repair and recover.

Insulin is a nutrient delivery hormone that helps transport nutrients to where they need to go. It also tells the cells at those locations to accept and store the nutrients upon arrival. The thing about insulin is that it drastically inhibits lipolysis (fat loss). You cannot burn fat with high insulin levels, it’s physiologically impossible.

In very simple terms, insulin turns off your ability to burn fat (it’s a storage hormone). Therefore you are right in being a bit concerned about spiking insulin.. because if your goal is fat loss, you don’t want to spike insulin throughout the day.

Spiking your insulin levels post-workout though, and driving those nutrients into the muscle cell, is crucial for recovery and will increase your results. The faster you repair your muscle, the more muscle you will maintain while dieting, and the more calories you will burn each and every day. Plus you will feel more recovered and be able to train hard the next time you hit the gym!

What about protein post-workout?

Now that we have covered replenishing glycogen stores, it’s time to talk about recovering the micro-trauma tears to the muscle from exercising.

Your best option will be a low-temperature processed hydrolyzed whey protein isolate. Phormula-1 is a low-temperature processed hydrolyzed whey protein isolate whose protein peptides are 100% hydrolyzed. This will be much more efficient for recovery and your results than eating a bunch of protein.

When a protein is hydrolyzed, natural digestive enzymes are added to it during manufacturing that takes the long protein chains and split them down into smaller pieces.

This essentially pre-digests the protein so that when you drink it, your body doesn’t have to do much to it … and it can quickly get it where it is needed: Your muscles!

By using Phormula-1 with ignition immediately after your workout you take advantage of the digestion rate of both products as they work together to give your body exactly what it needs post-workout.

Best Post-Workout Stack


Ignition and Phormula-1 were designed to go hand in hand post-workout to give your body exactly what it needs after resistance training.Just drinking the Post-Workout shake will not directly make you lose more weight or have the fat falling off… it’s not magic, no supplement is.

But, because it will help your body recover properly and faster, you will retain more lean muscle tissue which will help you burn more calories and fat for longer which will help to speed up your fat loss results!

Plus, you will just feel a heck of a lot better after you drink Phormula-1 and Ignition post-workout since your body will actually have what it needs to recover!

If you have questions about your fat loss plan, please feel free to contact us here at 1st Phorm Head Quarters where one of our NASM Certified Personal Trainers and NASM Certified Fitness Nutrition Specialists can help you out… for FREE! You can email us HERE or give us a call at 1-800-409-9732 Monday thru Friday, 6 am to 10 pm CST.