A Post-Workout Recovery Drink for the Intestinal Body Type

This is the drink for the middle of a training day. Before you train, the pre-workout collagen shooter gets you ready. At bedtime, the evening recovery drink helps you wind down and repair overnight. This one fills the gap right after the workout: you’ve used up fuel, sweated out salt and water, and put a load on your muscles. The glass has three jobs: rebuild, refuel, rehydrate.

It’s also built for a specific gut. If you eat for Carolyn Mein’s Intestinal body type, a lot of standard recovery advice works against you. A sports drink full of dyes. A raw-kale-and-almond smoothie. A pile of supplements. This version keeps the ingredient list short, uses foods that sit well with this type, and leans on the type’s anchor foods, the ones that stay top-tier even on a stressed-gut day.

We already have a maximalist post-workout drink, Bare One K, with thirty-some ingredients and about 2,400 mg of potassium. That one is the weekend project. This is the everyday one: eight core ingredients, five minutes, and easy to repeat.

The recipe (one serving)

Barefoot Betters

Post-Workout Recovery Drink for the Intestinal Body Type

A blended post-workout drink built on the Intestinal type's anchor foods: coconut water and sea salt for electrolytes, a scoop of protein to rebuild, sweet potato and blueberries to refuel, plus cooked spinach, walnuts, and lemon.

🖨 Print👨‍🍳 Cook Mode⏲ TimerIngredientsMethod

Prep5 min

Total5 min

• Servings −1+ serving (about 16 oz)
• Course Drink
• Cuisine Whole-food
• Calories ~400 kcal

Ingredients

The base

• 1–1½ cups unsweetened coconut water — 8–12 oz; plain, no added sugar. Use the larger pour after a sweaty session
• 1 scoop plant protein powder (pea + rice blend) — about 20–25 g protein; unflavored or vanilla

Refuel

• ½ cup cooked sweet potato, cooled — skin off; ¼ cup on light days. Roast a few ahead for the week
• ½ cup frozen blueberries — on a stressed-gut day, use frozen pineapple instead (see below)

Anchors

• ½ cup cooked spinach — or a handful of frozen chopped spinach. Cooked, not raw
• 1 Tbsp walnuts — or 2 tsp walnut butter

Electrolytes & brightness

• ½ lemon, juiced — vitamin C, and it wakes the whole glass up
• ⅛–¼ tsp sea salt — sodium is the main thing sweat takes; the larger amount after a hard sweat
• ½ tsp cream of tartar — optional; about 250 mg extra potassium
• 1 handful ice

Optional

• 1 tsp sorghum syrup — if you want it sweeter; brown rice syrup works too
• 5 g creatine monohydrate — about 1 level tsp; take it daily, so this is just a convenient place for it
• 1 scoop collagen peptides — for joints and connective tissue, and it lifts the glass past 30 g protein; an add-on, not a replacement for the protein powder

Equipment

• Blender

Method

1. Pour the coconut water into the blender first, so the blades catch.
2. Add the protein powder, sweet potato, blueberries, spinach, walnuts, lemon juice, salt, and the cream of tartar if you’re using it, plus any of the optional add-ins.
3. Add the ice and blend 30–45 seconds, until completely smooth and no walnut grit is left.
4. Taste it. More lemon if it’s flat, a little more salt if you sweated hard, a little sorghum if you want it sweeter.
5. Drink it within an hour or so of training, then go for a short, easy walk if you can.

Nutrition

Calories: ~400 kcalCarbohydrates: ~55 gProtein: ~25 g

Notes

• Batch the prep, not the drink. Roast 3–4 sweet potatoes and steam a bag of spinach on the weekend, then portion them into ½-cup scoops in the freezer. Each morning after training, it’s a 2-minute blend.
• Stressed-gut day? Swap the blueberries for frozen pineapple, keep the spinach cooked, cut the coconut water half-and-half with water, and leave out the add-ins.
• Creamier version: swap half the coconut water for unsweetened rice milk and add ½ banana. Rich and thick, but both ease back on the Intestinal Sensitive list, so make it a good-day glass.
• Potassium adds up fast here (roughly 1,800–2,000 mg with the cream of tartar). If you have kidney disease, or take a potassium-sparing diuretic, an ACE inhibitor, or an ARB, leave out the cream of tartar and check with your doctor.
• Approximate nutrition with ½ cup sweet potato and no add-ins: about 400 calories, 25 g protein, 55 g carbohydrate.

Keywords: post workout recovery drink, intestinal body type smoothie, coconut water recovery smoothie, sweet potato protein smoothie, homemade recovery drink, electrolyte protein shake

Where it lands on the Intestinal food lists

Most of the glass maps straight onto Mein’s lists, and four of the foods are anchors: sweet potato, cooked spinach, walnuts, and sorghum. All four stay “Frequently” on both the Healthy and Sensitive lists.

A few details the card can’t show:

• Blueberries are a “Frequently” fruit on a good day, but they drop to “Rarely” on the Sensitive list. When your gut is having a hard week, swap them for frozen pineapple (“Moderately” on both lists). Dried pineapple is even better: it’s a top-tier anchor, and two tablespoons blended in do the job.
• Cooked spinach, not raw. Raw spinach drops to “Rarely” under stress. Cooked spinach is an anchor. Frozen chopped spinach is blanched before it’s frozen, so it counts as cooked and is the easiest option.
• Coconut water isn’t on Mein’s lists. The nearest entries are coconut (“Moderately” on Healthy, “Rarely” on Sensitive) and pineapple-coconut juice (“Moderately” on both), so treat it as a “Moderately” food. That’s why the sensitive-day version cuts it with water.
• Rice milk isn’t a basmati stand-in. It’s tempting to treat rice milk as basmati rice in liquid form, since basmati is one of this type’s anchor grains. But Mein lists rice milk (Rice Dream) separately: “Moderately” on Healthy and “Rarely” on Sensitive. That’s why the creamy version is a good-day option.
• Protein powder, cream of tartar, creatine, and collagen are all supplements that aren’t on the 1997 food lists, so the card leaves them out.

Why these ingredients

Protein, to rebuild. Training breaks muscle down, and you rebuild it from protein. A scoop of pea-and-rice protein gives you a complete, dairy-free 20–25 g. Pea and rice cover each other’s weak spots in amino acids, which is why blends are common. (Brady’s own TB12 protein is pea-based too.) Collagen is good for connective tissue, but it’s an incomplete protein: it has no tryptophan and not much leucine, the amino acid that switches on muscle repair. So use it on top of the main protein, not instead of it. A scoop of collagen on top of the protein powder also gets you to Azadi’s 30 g floor (more on him below). If you already had collagen in the pre-workout shooter, a slightly larger scoop of the protein powder does the same job.

Carbs, to refuel. Most recovery smoothies get their body from banana and avocado. We use coconut water instead, which is lighter and better for hydration, but that takes out most of the carbs. Sweet potato puts them back. It’s starchy, gentle, and an Intestinal anchor that stays top-tier even under stress. Blended with blueberries and a little lemon, you taste fruit, not potato. With the blueberries and coconut water, the glass comes to about 55 g of carbohydrate against 25 g of protein. That’s a reasonable refueling ratio after a real session. On a light day, use ¼ cup of sweet potato.

Electrolytes, to rehydrate. Sweat is mostly water and sodium, so the pinch of sea salt matters more than it looks. Potassium is the other half. Coconut water is naturally high in it (about 600 mg per 11 oz), and so are the sweet potato and cooked spinach. The optional ½ tsp of cream of tartar adds about 250 mg more. Altogether that’s roughly 1,800–2,000 mg of potassium in one glass, from food you can name.

The anchors. Walnuts are this type’s strongest nut. They stay “Frequently” under stress, when pecans drop to “Rarely,” and they add omega-3 fat and a creamy body. Cooked spinach brings magnesium, potassium, and folate without the raw fiber load that a stressed Intestinal gut doesn’t like.

Lemon. Vitamin C, a bright flavor, and a clean way to cut the sweetness. Lemon juice is “Moderately” on both lists. Dr. Berg’s own shake uses lemon and apple cider vinegar. You can add a teaspoon of ACV if you like the tang, but lemon alone does the job.

What we borrowed, and from whom

This drink pulls from several people whose work we follow. Their framing is their opinion, so here’s what we took from each:

• Tom Brady (TB12). Hydration above everything. The TB12 Method tells you to drink at least half your body weight in ounces of water every day, with electrolytes added, plus a plant-forward, anti-inflammatory plate and a plant-based protein. That’s where the coconut-water base and the pea protein come from. (A fair caveat: the half-your-body-weight rule is a coaching rule, not something the hydration research has settled.)
• Dr. Eric Berg, DC. Make your electrolytes from food, not from a sugar-loaded sports drink, and don’t neglect potassium. His homemade electrolyte shake uses blueberries, lemon, apple cider vinegar, and sea salt, and it’s the starting point for both this drink and Bare One K. The cream of tartar is his trick too.
• Ben Azadi (Keto Kamp). His video on cortisol belly shaped this drink more than any other source. Three of his points apply directly. First, a protein floor of 30–35 g at every meal. Second, don’t stack stressors: on a short night’s sleep, a long fast plus a hard workout is one hard thing too many, and fasted training on five hours of sleep is “not the best idea.” Third, coming from a keto guy, single-ingredient whole-food carbs like sweet potato help with the cortisol problem, because a body that thinks it’s in a famine makes its own glucose through cortisol. That’s the case for putting sweet potato in a recovery drink. He also recommends magnesium glycinate at night, which is where we keep it: in the evening drink.
• Paul Saladino, MD, in his conversation with Azadi on visceral fat. A few points that shaped this glass: he puts creatine in the top tier, “five for everyone,” meaning 5 g a day, and more when you’re short on sleep. He ranks the post-meal walk as S-tier, the best thing you can do for visceral fat. And he thinks most people need more carbohydrate than they think, especially around training, because carbs before and during a workout lower cortisol afterward. That’s a direct counterpoint to the “keep it zero-carb” approach, and it’s why this drink has real carbs in it. One more of his rules fits this site well: eat foods with a label your great-grandmother would recognize.
• Dr. Livingood. His video is about what to put in your morning coffee: eight add-ins, ranked, and collagen protein and MCT or coconut oil are both on the list. We kept collagen here as an add-on. We left out the MCT oil, because fat slows digestion and MCT can be rough on a sensitive gut. Save it for the coffee.

Three versions of the same glass

Everyday (the card above). Coconut water, protein, sweet potato, blueberries, spinach, walnuts, lemon, and salt. Use it after strength work or a normal session.

Sensitive-day. For when your gut is having a hard week: frozen pineapple instead of blueberries, the coconut water cut half-and-half with water, the spinach definitely cooked, and no add-ins. Keep the protein, salt, and sweet potato. Simple, and all anchors.

Hard-session. Long, hot, or very sweaty sessions: the full 12 oz of coconut water, ¼ tsp salt, ½ cup sweet potato, the cream of tartar, and the creatine. If you’re still hungry an hour later, that’s your cue to eat a real meal: some chicken and basmati rice, or a bowl of digestible pinto beans.

After the glass

The drink is the easy part. What you do for the rest of the day decides how well you recover:

• Take a short walk. Ten easy minutes after you eat or drink. It’s the cheapest habit on Saladino’s list and one of the best.
• Keep sipping water. The glass doesn’t replace your water for the day. Keep a bottle with a pinch of salt in it nearby.
• Protect your sleep. Muscle is rebuilt overnight. The evening recovery drink and the evening routine are the other half of this drink.

A few honest cautions

• Potassium. With the cream of tartar, this glass has close to 2,000 mg. With healthy kidneys, that’s what the glass is for. With kidney disease, or on a potassium-sparing diuretic, an ACE inhibitor, an ARB, or a potassium supplement, leave out the cream of tartar and check with your doctor before drinking this regularly.
• Creatine is one of the most-studied supplements there is, and it’s safe for healthy adults at 3–5 g a day. If you have kidney disease, talk to your doctor first. It can also add a couple of pounds of water weight in muscle in the first few weeks. That’s expected, not fat.
• New to blended spinach and walnuts? Start with smaller amounts and blend thoroughly. A gritty glass is a gut-unfriendly glass.

The training day, start to finish

1. Before: the pre-workout collagen shooter, 30–60 minutes before you train.
2. After: this drink, within an hour or so. Then a short walk.
3. Bedtime: the evening recovery drink, to wind down and rebuild overnight.

The first gets you ready to work, the second refuels you, and the third helps you rebuild while you sleep.

Sources

• Tom Brady, The TB12 Method (Simon & Schuster, 2017): the half-your-body-weight-in-ounces hydration rule with added electrolytes, and the plant-forward, anti-inflammatory eating framework.
• Dr. Eric Berg, YouTube: Do-It-Yourself Homemade Electrolyte Shake.
• Ben Azadi, Keto Kamp: If I Had Only 7 Days to Shrink Cortisol Belly, I’d Fix These 5 Things: the 30–35 g protein floor, not stacking stressors, whole-food carbs like sweet potato, and magnesium at night.
• Paul Saladino with Ben Azadi, Keto Kamp: The 5 BEST Ways to Lose Visceral Fat in 30 Days: creatine at 5 g a day, post-meal walking, and carbohydrate around training.
• Dr. Livingood: Put THIS In Your Coffee Every Morning To Burn Belly Fat FAST!: collagen and MCT/coconut oil among his eight coffee add-ins.
• Carolyn Mein, DC, Different Bodies, Different Diets (1997): Intestinal-type food tiers, via our Intestinal food guide.
• USDA FoodData Central: potassium values for coconut water, sweet potato, spinach, and cream of tartar.

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