INSIDE HOOK – After three sets of jogging, running and sprinting intervals at Barry’s, I grabbed the lightest weights I could find and hobbled over to my designated bench for the strength training portion of the high-intensity interval training session.
The instructor clocked my confusion and I immediately regretted telling the receptionist that it was my first time.
“Everyone give it up for Lauren, who is new to the family,” she said enthusiastically through her pop star headset.
The fatigued group clapped, as if my struggle to make it through the first half of class didn’t tip everyone off that I was a newb. But I knew it would all be worth it, because afterwards I had an excuse to drink chocolate milk.
Got Chocolate Milk?
I recently came across several studies that found that drinking chocolate milk immediately after exercise and again two hours later “appears to be optimal for exercise recovery and may attenuate indices of muscle damage.”
This raised the important question of why I can’t eat chocolate ice cream instead. But as for chocolate milk, it contains an ideal mix of carbohydrates, proteins and fat, as well as water and electrolytes, according to a meta-analysis on the topic.
“Chocolate milk has a unique content,” confirmed Amin Salehi-Abargouei, co-author of the paper, adding that the research did not look at other dairy products like ice cream.
“We expect to see the same effects for foods with the same content.” (To my dismay, the ingredients in chocolate Haagen-Dazs are not the same as a cup of cocoa-infused two percent.)
However, they did engage in a different comparison and found chocolate milk was just as effective, if not more effective, at promoting recovery as traditional sports drinks.
Much like Klay Thompson, the NBA player who attempted to rebrand this sugary drink into a recovery beverage back in 2017 …
