Fuel Your Exercise with Juice
Exercise is crucial to leading a healthy life, and it helps to keep our bodies in order. However, carrying out physical activity is only half of what is required to benefit from exercise. It is also important to make smart nutrition choices that aid your workout goals. Those at the top level will be familiar with this concept, but the average gym goer often isn’t as dedicated.
How Can Juice Help?
For most of us, changing eating habits to accommodate correct exercise is a little over the top. However, juice is a great substitute for nutritious meals and can sometimes be even more beneficial to your workout. One big advantage of juicing is that it allows very quick access to a range of different nutrients. Since it contains no fibre, juice requires barely any energy to digest. Therefore, not only are you gaining energy and vitamins from consuming it, but you also save energy from digestion. That energy can instead be used elsewhere and depending on the time you consume the juice it can either fuel your exercises or revitalise you after them.
Key Nutrients
If you’re smart with what you put in a juice, then you can easily access a huge range of nutrients. Some of these are more useful in workout terms than others though. A few key nutrients you’ll want to ensure your juice contains are:
- Vitamin B - This is a key chemical in the body for converting proteins and carbohydrates into energy. Often if you feel too weak to run the last mile or finish the last set, then you need to get more Vitamin B in your diet.
- Vitamin C - Vitamin C is great for promoting repair in your body, and it has also been linked with improved lung performance.
- Iron - Iron is crucial for producing red blood cells since it is a key chemical in the make-up of haemoglobin. The more iron you have, the more blood cells you have, and that allows for a stronger oxygen supply around the body.
- Calcium - Calcium is good for bones. Most of us grow up knowing that from milk and yoghurt adverts, but it’s genuinely true and consuming more of it reduces the risk of a fracture or break.
- Magnesium - Magnesium is an important component in many bodily enzymes. However, we sweat it out heavily during exercise. Therefore, replacing it afterwards is important.
Gaining Optimal Results
As I said earlier, diet and physical activity make up the two important parts of effective exercise. However, no one combination will work to achieve every person’s goals. If you’re looking to build muscle, we recommend trying to pack high protein vegetables into your juice. These will commonly be leafy greens, which also serve as a great source of iron, promoting increased blood cell production. Having more blood cells will allow better oxygen circulation around the body, providing more energy from respiration.
For weight loss, you’ll be wanting to use lots of low-calorie ingredients that still provide some energy. However, you have to be careful when juicing for this purpose. If you drink the juice and only do enough exercise to burn off the energy from it, you’ll never see any progress. Juicing should only be used to give you more energy, helping you push yourself further than normal.
Our Juice Recommendations
Using the right ingredients is crucial when producing a truly beneficial juice. Here are two optimal juice recipes to help you achieve your workout goals:
The Muscle Builder
- 2 Handfuls of Spinach
- 1 Handful of Shredded Cabbage
- 2 Carrots
- 1 Celery Stick
The Fat Burner
- 1 Handful of Kale
- 3 Celery Sticks
- 1 Carrot
- 1 Apple
- ½ Lemon
Both of these recipes contain a range of beneficial nutrients, just be sure to use them wisely and don’t overdo it. If the total of ingredients seems like too much for your body size, then tone it down and if it doesn’t seem to be enough, then add plenty more. These recipes are also only guidelines for effective juicing and further customisation for your needs is recommended.