If you don't understand recovery drinks/meals, you're not training hard enough. The entire point of pre/post workout meals is to keep your body fueled and not eating away at itself. Therefore, being able to train at high intensity with less recovery time/soreness between workouts.

I went years before I took a good look at nutrition and ran myself into an overtraining/exhaustion hole. My body just couldn't keep up with what I wanted it to do. But with the addition of dietary supplements and proper eating, my body feels like its on steroids compared to training before dietary supplements.

Nutrition is an often overlooked part of training.