Protein Panic and the Myth of Perfect Timing

The question sounds simple, but it carries a lot of baggage: if you don’t eat right after a workout, are you undoing all your hard work? In this episode, Pete Wright and Srdjan Injac take a calm walk through one of fitness culture’s most persistent anxieties—the so-called anabolic window—and explain why it’s been overstated.

Srdjan reframes the conversation around what actually drives progress: daily calories, adequate protein, sufficient fiber, and long-term consistency. Whether you eat two meals or six, the body cares far more about what you total up over the day than whether you sprint to a shaker bottle the second your workout ends. The much-feared 30-minute cutoff turns out to be less a hard deadline and more a misunderstanding of how long the body remains responsive after training. The conversation also digs into nuance that often gets lost online, including subtle differences in recovery and timing between men and women, how cortisol and glycogen play into post-workout meals, and why “fasted cardio” can make sense for some people and not others. Rather than rules, Srdjan emphasizes experimentation—learning how your own body responds to food timing, workout intensity, and energy availability.

The takeaway is refreshingly unglamorous: stop chasing perfect timing, start building repeatable habits. Eat in a way that fits your life, fuel your workouts, and trust that progress comes from showing up again tomorrow—not from beating a stopwatch to the fridge.

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