The Simple Truth About Sport Recovery Mix
Sport Recovery Mix is a delicious tasting high calorie recovery drink for athletes that push themselves to their limit. It’s a convenient way to immediately refuel and rehydrate post-workout when you can't make a fresh meal from scratch. While it has a scientifically proven ratio of carbs, fat, protein, and sodium to optimize recovery and performance, it’s the absence of excess chemicals or anything artificial that assures it doesn’t taste like science. Real food. Real recovery.
For us, it’s not just the results for athletes that matters, it’s getting to that result in the simplest way possible with the least harm and the best taste.
Simple Sugar to Refuel
Consuming carbs in the form of simple sugar is one of the best ways to replenish energy spent during endurance exercise. Yes, sugar has a negative stigma, but it’s not always bad. It’s effective in fueling and refueling athletes and is a great performance enhancer. But it can be toxic when consumed when just sitting around and not exercising.
This “out of context fear” of sugar causes people to look for high calorie carbohydrate supplements that have no sugar listed on the nutrition label. But this behavior doesn’t actually solve the problem.
1) Total calories still matter. If you’re avoiding sugar but consuming a lot of calories from carbohydrate because you think it’s healthier, it’s important to know that those carbohydrates all turn into simple sugars by the time they are digested and absorbed into the body. Just because something isn’t labeled as sugar doesn’t mean it isn’t sugar by the time you’re done chewing it.
2) Maltodextrin is the most common complex carbohydrate used in sports nutrition supplements. Maltodextrin is more sugar than sugar. Although it doesn’t have to be labeled as a sugar, it is highly processed, derived almost exclusively from GMO corn, is highly associated with bloating and gastro-intestinal distress, and has a glycemic index that raises blood sugar at almost twice the rate of cane sugar.
Ultimately, we believe in a “what you see is what you get” and a “less is more” approach. No tricks. No extras. Just the fuel athletes need in its simplest form when they need it most. So unless an athlete has just worked their butt off, Sport Recovery Mix is not for them.
Complete Milk Protein
We use complete milk protein from dairy in our Sport Recovery Mix because next to human breast milk, complete milk protein has the highest quantity of essential amino acids per gram of protein.
Essential amino acids are the basic building blocks of protein. Our body can’t make them, so they have to be eaten in our diet for us to survive and thrive. Based on the most current standard for assessing protein quality (Dietary Indispensable Amino Acid Score or DIAAS), the essential amino acids from complete milk proteins are absorbed by the body the best, giving them the highest biological value.
Interesting Fact: Complete milk protein is a naturally occurring ratio of 80% casein and 20% whey protein. Based on the DIAAS, this combination of casein and whey scores higher than either whey or casein alone. Most recovery drink products tend to only use whey – a partial milk protein, rather than the whole or complete protein. While using partial proteins is a cheaper approach, it’s unfortunately not a smarter one.
The bottom line is that when it comes to maximizing muscle rebuilding and recovery, there’s simply no better choice than complete milk protein. Partial just doesn’t cut it.
Real Recovery & Performance
Bottom line for recovery: Does it work? Our ultimate priority was to craft a drink mix that actually improved recovery, measured by real performance. Based on scientific literature, chocolate milk does this job better than many recovery drink products available to athletes (see 1-13 below). This reminded us to keep things simple and reinforced our belief in real food as a staple of athletic performance. But, unlike chocolate milk, we knew we could make a product that did not contain excess ingredients like xantham gum, emulsifiers, and flavoring agents but had a longer shelf life and was easier to travel with.
