Plates for the hour after training

There's a window after training that you can either use or waste. Not strictly - the nutritional timing arguments are messier than the gym-bro version - but in practice, what you eat first after a session shapes how you feel the next morning.

The number we keep coming back to is eighty grams of protein per plate. That's roughly twice what most "balanced" dinners deliver, and it's the threshold where a heavy session stops eating into your soreness for the rest of the week. You don't get there on chicken-and-veg portions; you get there on chicken-and-veg-and-actually-a-real-portion-of-rice.

Carbs are the other lever. Lifting under-fuelled is a real thing, and lifting and then eating under-fuelled is worse. We aim for around eight-hundred kilocalories on these plates, with a meaningful portion as starch - rice, pasta, couscous, whatever. The goal is that the next session doesn't feel borrowed from this one.

Fat is the variable to manage. Olive oil and a hard cheese are useful for getting calories up without padding the plate; a glug of sesame oil or coconut oil will land you over a thousand kcal fast, which is fine some weeks and not others. Read the room.

What this list is not is a "post-workout meal" in the sense of a clinical formula. It's seven dinners that, when we make them after a heavy lift, leave us feeling like we recovered. Treat them as templates, swap proteins as the freezer dictates, and don't apologise for the second helping.

Nothing shake-based, nothing out of a tub. A little carbs, a little fat, a lot of meat or fish at the centre.