How much protein should I eat? The most asked question in bodybuilding. Fifty years ago the answer was simple: as much as you can choke down. But, the government (with their Recommended Daily Allowances), university dietetic programs, and vegetarians have come along and kicked the legs of confidence out from under the muscle-building industry. Your liver will fail! Your kidneys will explode! You can't absorb that much! It'll turn to fat! The RDA would have a person of my size consuming 60 grams a day (RDA is .8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight.) Some self-acclaimed bodybuilding “nutrition experts” would have me consume 400-500 grams a day. We as a population trying to gain muscle and lose fat, or at least stay lean, are not only confused, we're worried about eating too much or too little protein.

I hope this article not only eliminates your confusion, but gives you rock-solid information to build your nutrition program around. You should be confident that your plan will leave you with the most muscle possible when you walk on stage.

There are actually concerns at both extremes. Obviously, if you don't consume enough protein, you're not going to support muscle growth. Also, complications can arise from consuming too much protein, but how much is too much? Some would say that you're safe with any amount if you just drink enough water, “It'll keep you flushed.” Not to be too sarcastic, but how scientific is that?! Are you willing to risk health problems because someone gave you their opinion that was probably based on someone else's opinion that probably has the IQ of a snail? My point is, please do yourself a favor and investigate issues thoroughly before you go to extremes. With that said, let's investigate.

One thing that is helpful to understand is that muscle growth and muscle loss is very dynamic. Just because you gained fifteen pound of muscle five years ago, doesn't mean it stays with you forever. To really understand how you can confidently and precisely gain and maintain muscle with the correct amount of protein, let's go back to the beginning. Protein is used in your body for a whole lot more than just building muscle. It is necessary for repairing and building trillions of cells in your body and the amino acids in protein are used in the millions of chemical reactions that occur every second to sustain life. Remember, building muscle is your body's direct response to a stimulus (weight training) so that it can better handle the load next time. After several days, once recovery has occurred, “detraining” starts and within a couple of weeks you lose what you've gained. Unless, of course, you train again. Just like other “necessary” uses of protein, this muscle gain from training is dependent on how much protein is available to be used. If there isn't enough to support all the needs, something somewhere will get less than is necessary and there is a deficiency. This very simply is a model of malnutrition on one extreme end, and possibly for you, it means you aren't getting as much growth as you could be getting.

The needs of the body are second by second; millions of chemical reactions are taking place simultaneously. This is what I mean by saying it's a dynamic process. About seventy grams of protein is catabolized in your intestines per day to support protein needs. It isn't uncommon to catabolize and reuse up to a pound of skeletal muscle per day. In other words, if you're not getting the right amount of protein at the right times, your body breaks down muscle tissue to supply amino acid needs. You can actually be working out extremely hard several times a week and just be shifting amino acids around your muscular system and not really ever be building new muscle.

The answer most would come up with is to eat more protein. Though correct, that leads us back to where we started: how much? Let's take what we already know and start from there. We need more protein than most people (non-bodybuilders) think. We need protein several times a day. Now, let's answer the big question, how much. If you recall from previous articles of mine in Natural Bodybuilding & Fitness, there is a “functional” difference in how your body digests and uses protein. There are many different ways that protein usability is classified such as the biological value scale, the protein digestibility corrected amino acid score, the net protein utilization scale, etc. All these measurement tools tell us that if we eat a particular protein, this is how much actually gets used by the body. So, it's not just how much we eat, but also the quality and even how much we eat per meal. An easy subject that we won't deal with in this article is “offseason” muscle growth. For most people this means gaining a little bodyfat is okay, and a lot more food is going to be eaten. Even if you're not gaining tons of bodyfat, you're definitely eating more food to maintain bodyweight than when your losing weight. The extra carbs and fat act to buffer, or spare, protein. It's when you're dieting that you lose that buffer and risk being catabolic more often. This is when protein management is vital so you don't lose all the hard earned muscle you worked to gain in the offseason.

I'm going to make a couple assumptions before I lay out my recommendations. First, most people use supplemental protein along with whole foods throughout the day. Since most supplemental protein powders are going to have a higher biological value than whole foods, I would space them throughout the day between whole food meals to spread out the benefits. I'm also going to assume that even though dieting, you are still getting a necessary amount of carbs and fat. If you're following a ketogenic diet, these recommendations don't apply and you'll end up losing muscle anyway. A certain amount of carbohydrates are necessary to spare muscle regardless of how much protein you eat. Lastly, I want to make sure you understand that too much protein at one time doesn't all get used and can be converted to body fat.

Determine if you have a fast, normal, or slow metabolism and then plug yourself into this chart. Once you've established a couple weeks of results, you may need to adjust up or down to a different level.

Slow Metabolism- 1 gram per lb. LBM, 5 meals

Normal Metabolism- 1.25 grams per lb LBM, 6 meals

Fast Metabolism- 1.5 grams per lb LBM, 7 meals

If you have 160 lbs of lean body mass and a normal metabolism, you would consume 200 grams of protein per day over the course of at least six meals. If you had 105 lbs of lean body mass and a slow metabolism, you may only need 105 grams of protein per day broken up over five meals. This ensures that you're getting enough protein to spare muscle while dieting. I would certainly hope you would experiment with slight deviations as well. In other words, I have a slow to normal metabolism, and fit perfectly on this chart, but occasionally I like to increase my protein 25-50 grams a day for a short time if I start to feel my strength decreasing even slightly. Usually this is an indication that you're simply taxing your body beyond normal (more drop sets or super sets, maybe more cardio, etc) and your protein requirements are elevated.

In closing, I want to briefly revisit the importance of how you consume your protein during the day. Studies have shown dramatic differences in blood nitrogen levels (amino acid) with subjects eating the same amount of protein per day, just different sources and different consumption patterns. You can play it safe by being very regimented. I know people who diet using the same exact foods in the same exact amounts at exactly the same times every day and they peak well. They peak well, but they peak with exactly the same results. There are different times of the day and different circumstances when protein is needed more often or in greater amounts. Here are a few tricks that may give you better results. Eating a slightly disproportionate amount of carbs at breakfast helps get your metabolism higher, your blood sugar levels higher, and therefore your energy is higher and your hunger is lower. At a meal like this where your carbs a little higher than normal, I would keep your protein intake at a normal amount. If you take my advice and alternate supplemental proteins and whole food meals, your next meal might likely be a protein shake. I would keep your carbs lower at this meal and your protein just a little higher. If lunch is a whole food meal, I would keep protein to a normal amount and have a decent amount of carbs. Afternoon meal would be a shake or bar. Pre workout meal might be the same. Supper would be similar to lunch and the last meal of the day would be before bed and would include no carbs, just protein.