Recovery Drink After Workout: What to Drink After Each Type of Session, With Recipes

You finish a workout and the fridge is full of options: a sports drink, a protein shake, chocolate milk, coconut water and a bottle of tart cherry juice a friend swore by. The supplement aisle has a dozen more, each with a label saying it's the one your muscles need.

It's easy to feel like you're getting recovery wrong. Plenty of people drink nothing and wonder why they feel flat the next day. Others reach for a sugary recovery product after a 30-minute walk that never needed one.

The fix is to match the drink to what you just did. Below you'll find what a post-workout recovery drink has to do, what to drink after each kind of session, how much protein and carbohydrate to put in it, how to size your fluids from your sweat rate, and what the trials found for chocolate milk, tart cherry juice and electrolyte drinks. You'll also see when water is enough and get four homemade recipes with the numbers worked out.

What Should a Recovery Drink Do?

A recovery drink after a workout has up to three jobs, and most sessions only need one or two of them.

• Rehydrate. Replace the water and sodium you sweated out, so you start the next session hydrated.
• Rebuild. Deliver protein so your muscles can repair and adapt to the training.
• Refuel. Replace glycogen, the carbohydrate stored in muscle, when the session burned through a lot of it.

Which jobs matter depends on how long you trained, how hard, how much you sweated and when you train next. A 40-minute dumbbell session at home needs protein sometime in the next few hours and a glass or two of water. A two-hour run in the heat needs all three, and soon. So the answer to what to drink for muscle recovery starts with naming the session you just finished.

What to Drink After a Workout, by Session Type

This table is the short version. The sections below it explain where each row comes from.

How Much Protein Should a Recovery Drink Have?

Protein is the part of a recovery drink that supports muscle repair after lifting, and the right dose scales with your size. The protein position stand from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (Jäger and colleagues, 2017) suggests about 0.25 g/kg per serving. Schoenfeld and Aragon (2018) reviewed the per-meal question and concluded that 0.4 g/kg per meal, over at least four meals a day, is the target for getting the most muscle building out of your protein.

Two cups of milk give you about 16 grams of protein, a 170-gram pot of nonfat Greek yogurt about 17, and a scoop of most protein powders somewhere between 20 and 30. Whether that shake goes before or after training makes little difference. Timing has its own guide on when to drink a protein shake, so this page sticks to what goes into the glass.

When Carbs Belong in a Post-Workout Recovery Drink

Carbs in a recovery drink are there to refill glycogen. That only becomes urgent in two situations: a long or very hard session that drained your stores, and a second session on the same day.

For fast refuelling, Betts and Williams (2010) reviewed the research and recommended at least 1 g/kg of carbohydrate per hour, started early and taken every 15 to 30 minutes. They also found that adding at least 0.3 g/kg per hour of protein can partly make up for eating fewer carbs than that. This is why a carb-and-protein drink works well when you can't face much food.

For a 70-kilogram cyclist with a second ride four hours later, that means about 70 grams of carbs an hour. Half a liter of low-fat chocolate milk holds about 51 grams of carbs and 17 grams of protein, so one bottle in the first hour followed by a carb-rich meal does the job.

After a typical lifting session the urgency disappears, because you have until your next workout to refill what you used. The best post-workout meal guide sizes those everyday meals, and our guide to carbs for muscle gain sets the daily carb totals for lifters.

Fluids and Sodium: How Much to Drink After a Sweaty Workout

Fluid is the job people most often get wrong, in both directions. The good news is that you can measure your own needs instead of guessing.

Work out your sweat rate

The American College of Sports Medicine position stand on fluid replacement (Sawka and colleagues, 2007) recommends estimating your sweat losses from your body weight before and after exercise, because sweat rates differ so much between people. The arithmetic is simple. Add the drop on the scale to whatever you drank during the session, and treat each kilogram as a liter.

Here's an example. You weigh 70.0 kilograms before an hour-long run, drink half a liter on the way, and weigh 69.2 kilograms afterward. You sweated about 1.3 liters in that hour and finished 0.8 liters short. If you use pounds, each pound lost is about 16 ounces of fluid. Our explainer on why you sweat so much when you work out covers the step-by-step weigh-in and what affects your rate.

Drink about 1.5 times what you lost

Your kidneys keep making urine while you rehydrate, so replacing only the exact deficit leaves you short. In Shirreffs and colleagues (1996), 12 men who had lost about 2 percent of their body weight cycling drank 50, 100, 150 or 200 percent of that loss, using a drink with either 23 or 61 mmol/L of sodium. The authors concluded that you have to drink more than you sweated, and that unless the drink carries enough sodium, the extra mostly comes out as urine.

In practice that means about 1.5 liters for every kilogram lost, or about 24 ounces per pound, spread over the next few hours. For the runner above, that's about 1.2 liters with some salt alongside it.

Why sodium keeps the water in

Sodium holds water in the fluid around your cells, so it slows the rush of urine that follows a big drink of plain water. A review of post-exercise rehydration by Evans, James, Shirreffs and Maughan (2017) found that adding sodium helps the body keep the fluid, and that carbohydrate and protein in a drink help too, by changing how the water is absorbed and distributed. A salty meal does the same job as a salty drink, so soup, pretzels, eggs on toast or rice with soy sauce alongside water all count.

How much sodium you sweat

Sweat sodium varies widely from person to person, which a methods review by Baker (2017) lays out in detail. In a dataset of 1,303 athletes, Barnes and colleagues (2019) found that endurance athletes sweated about 1.3 liters an hour and lost roughly 1,200 milligrams of sodium an hour. Soccer and basketball players sweated about 0.95 liters an hour and lost around 800 milligrams. If your clothes dry with a white, gritty crust after training, you're probably at the salty end.

Don't overdo it

More fluid isn't always better. The 2015 international consensus statement on exercise-associated hyponatremia (Hew-Butler and colleagues, 2015) recommends drinking to thirst during exercise, because drinking far beyond your losses can dilute blood sodium to dangerous levels. Gaining weight over a long event means you've drunk too much. The 1.5 times rule applies to what you actually lost, as measured on a scale.

Chocolate Milk as a Recovery Drink: What the Trials Show

Chocolate milk keeps turning up in recovery research because it delivers carbohydrate, protein, fluid and sodium in one cheap drink. Half a liter of low-fat chocolate milk has about 51 grams of carbs, 17 grams of protein and 325 milligrams of sodium, using USDA FoodData Central values. Three trials compared it head to head with other recovery drinks.

• Karp 2006. In Karp and colleagues (2006), nine trained cyclists did a hard interval session, recovered for four hours with chocolate milk, a fluid replacement drink or a carbohydrate replacement drink with the same carbs as the milk, and then rode to exhaustion. They rode longer and did more work after the chocolate milk and the fluid replacement drink than after the carbohydrate replacement drink.
• Thomas 2009. In Thomas, Morris and Stevenson (2009), nine trained cyclists rode to exhaustion after a glycogen-draining session and four hours of recovery. They lasted 32 minutes after chocolate milk, against 21 minutes after a carbohydrate replacement drink and 23 minutes after a fluid replacement drink.
• Lunn 2012. In Lunn and colleagues (2012), male runners drank fat-free chocolate milk or a carbohydrate drink with the same calories after a run. The milk produced higher muscle protein synthesis over three hours of recovery and a longer run to exhaustion afterward, though muscle glycogen came out the same.

Milk also stays in the body well. Shirreffs, Watson and Maughan (2007) had 11 people drink 150 percent of their sweat loss as low-fat milk, a sports drink or water after exercise in a warm room. Over the next five hours they passed 611 milliliters of urine after milk, against about 1,200 after water or the sports drink, and only the milk trials kept them hydrated. In the beverage hydration index study by Maughan and colleagues (2016), skimmed and full-fat milk kept about 1.5 times as much fluid in the body as still water two hours after drinking.

The pooled evidence is positive but modest. Amiri and colleagues (2019) combined 12 trials and found chocolate milk did as well as or better than placebo and other recovery drinks, with a small gain in time to exhaustion over placebo, and they called the evidence limited. So chocolate milk is a good, cheap choice rather than a magic one. Skip it if you're lactose intolerant, and remember that its sugar counts toward your day.

Tart Cherry Juice for Muscle Soreness

Tart cherry juice is the one recovery drink with evidence for easing soreness rather than refuelling. A meta-analysis by Hill, Keane, Quinlan and Howatson (2021) found that tart cherry supplements had a small effect on muscle soreness and a moderate effect on how quickly strength came back after strenuous exercise. The trials mostly gave it twice a day for several days around a hard event, such as a marathon, rather than as one glass after an ordinary session. A cup carries about 37 grams of carbohydrate, so count it. Our review of tart cherry juice and muscle recovery research covers the doses and the individual trials.

Electrolyte Drinks and Coconut Water: When They Help

Electrolyte drinks are built for sessions that cost you a lot of sweat and fuel: long runs and rides, hot-weather training and team sports. In those cases their sodium and carbohydrate help you rehydrate and refuel at the same time. After a 40-minute session at home, plain water and your next meal do the same job without the extra sugar.

Coconut water is a natural option with plenty of potassium, about 600 milligrams per cup in USDA data. Its sodium varies a lot between products, though, and sodium is the electrolyte that keeps fluid in. In Kalman and colleagues (2012), 12 trained men who lost about 2 percent of their body weight in an hour on a treadmill rehydrated equally well with water, coconut water or a sports drink, and performed the same in a follow-up test. Coconut water caused more stomach upset.

Electrolyte powders and tablets vary just as much. Check the sodium on the label. A drink with more sodium keeps more of its fluid in, as the Shirreffs trial showed, so a powder with very little sodium mostly gives you flavor.

When Water Is Enough

For most workouts, water is the right recovery drink. That covers sessions under about an hour, moderate sweating and a meal within the next couple of hours. Food brings back the sodium, potassium, carbohydrate and protein, and the water brings back the fluid. In Maughan's hydration index study, a sports drink kept no more fluid in the body than plain water in people who were already hydrated, and neither did orange juice, cola, tea, coffee or sparkling water.

Water also makes the most sense in a fat-loss phase. A half-liter bottle of chocolate milk carries about 320 calories, enough to erase a good share of the deficit you trained for.

Homemade Recovery Drink After Workout: 4 Recipes With the Numbers

You don't need a product to make a good recovery drink. These four use supermarket ingredients, and every number comes from USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy). A pinch of salt is counted as USDA's dash of 0.4 grams.

1. Chocolate milk, for long or hard sessions

Half a liter of low-fat chocolate milk, chilled. It provides about 51 grams of carbs, 17 grams of protein, 325 milligrams of sodium and 860 milligrams of potassium, for roughly 320 calories.

2. Milk and a banana, after lifting

Two cups of 2% milk and a medium banana, blended or simply eaten together. That's about 50 grams of carbs, 17 grams of protein, 230 milligrams of sodium and 1,100 milligrams of potassium, with no added sugar.

3. Berry and banana yogurt smoothie, after lifting

Blend a 170-gram pot of plain nonfat Greek yogurt, a cup of 2% milk, a medium banana, a cup of frozen blueberries and a pinch of salt. You get about 64 grams of carbs, 27 grams of protein, 330 milligrams of sodium and 1,090 milligrams of potassium.

4. Orange and honey electrolyte drink, after a hot or sweaty session

Stir a quarter teaspoon of table salt and a tablespoon of honey into 500 milliliters of water, then add a cup of orange juice. That makes about 750 milliliters with 43 grams of carbs, about 580 milligrams of sodium and about 500 milligrams of potassium. It works out to roughly 34 mmol/L of sodium, between the two drinks in the Shirreffs trial, and about 6 percent carbohydrate.

The Bottom Line

Match the drink to the session. Water covers most workouts. After lifting, get 0.25 to 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram from milk, yogurt or a shake. After long, hard or sweaty sessions, add carbs and sodium and drink about 1.5 times the weight you lost. Chocolate milk is a cheap way to do all of that at once, and tart cherry juice is worth trying around a big event.

The drink is the small part. Recovery only pays off if there's a next session to recover for, and staying consistent is where most plans fall apart. Our roundup of the best fitness apps for consistency compares tools built around showing up. FitCraft is on that list. Its AI coaches are 3D characters who talk you through each workout and say your name, and the app keeps a streak and a calendar of the days you've trained, with leaderboards when you want an extra push. As Katie put it: "I've tried everything. This is the first time I've stuck with something past two weeks."