Recovery

[kencar]

Hey yall,
I'm 10 days back in the gym after being away for the better part of a year. I injured myself and just couldn't kick my butt hard enough to get back till now. Thought is was a bit stupid to pay for gym membership and not use it. Feeling really good after getting though the first week. The one thing I'm noticing is that at my age (55) my recovery time has slowed a bit.

So thought I would check and see what suggestions might be out here for food/supplements before/during/after workouts. My week is structured with 3 days pure 4 days of mixed cardio and throwing weights. So, I'm guessing that I may need to consider a different application for cardo days than the other four but I will let yall tell me what you think is best.

Thanks! Ken...

[Deviation]

So are you doing 7 days with no rest? If that's the case, you should add a rest day or two in the mix. You need that downtime for the body to rebuild.

Foodwise, are you tracking your food? I (and a few others here) use MyFitnessPal.com. This probably the most important part (second being sleep/rest).

Post workout, I like to get some carbs back in my system. On weight training days, I usually have a protein shake made with vanilla soy milk (not a hippy - just like to add another protein source). I'll follow that up later with some oatmeal or granola (ok now I sound like a hippy). On cardio days, I usually treat myself to an ice cold Muscle Milk drink (25g protein/12g carbs/9g fat) with my lunch.

These are just some ideas. It can be as complicated as you want. I've got stuff to do. The simpler I can make it, the better.

[kencar]

Yeah I'm running 7 day cardio but only 4 days lifting. My primary goals are weight loss, endurance, and toning. Once upon a time, I was a svelte 345lbs. I'm sitting at 270 now and my knees are a little tricky so diet is a lot of my means to some of these ends. Hence my question. Now I should note that my workouts have been tailored to favor reps over lift weight increase to push the endurance side of the scale and i'm not having a serious problem with recovery except that after my first week my weight/rep ration came down not up. So my assumption was that my muscle mass had not recovered sufficiently in the prior week of working that target group.

What I did was reduce the weight to allow me increased reps and that seemed to work okay, but also figured that if there was something diet wise I could adjust to allow me greater weight for my reps then I would see faster progress on the primary goal of weight loss.

I may be wrong but that is what prompted the question.
Thanks, Ken...