Protein and strength: the basics

Why protein gets its own guide

Protein is the raw material your body uses to repair and maintain muscle. When intake falls and the body needs to draw on its own tissue, having enough protein arriving — and a reason to keep the muscle, which is what training provides — is what tips the balance towards keeping more of it.

That is the whole argument. It is not complicated and it is not a supplement pitch. I have no interest in what you eat, I am not going to tell you any food is good or bad, and if you want to hit the target with beans, fish, yoghurt, tofu, eggs, a shake or all of them in the same week, that is entirely your business.

The cruelty of it is the timing. Protein-containing foods tend to be the ones that appeal least when appetite drops and nausea is around; several members describe meat becoming actively repellent for months. So the requirement goes up at the exact point the delivery mechanism gets harder. Nobody warns people about that and it catches almost everybody.

The practical, entirely unpreachy version of solving that is protein without a chore. This page is the reasoning underneath it, plus the numbers, which some people want and some people should skip.

Roughly how much

A caveat before any figure: if you have kidney disease, are pregnant, or have any condition where protein intake is medically managed, this section is not for you and your clinician’s advice overrides all of it.

General population guidance sits at around 0.8 g per kilogram of body weight per day, which is a floor designed to prevent deficiency rather than an amount that supports anything.

The research on preserving muscle during weight loss, and the ageing-population guidance, both point considerably higher — commonly in the region of 1.2 to 1.6 g per kilogram per day, with some recommendations for older adults or during pronounced loss going higher still. The resistance-training literature converges on a similar place, with benefit plateauing somewhere around 1.6 g per kilogram in most analyses.

For most people that means a target somewhere between those figures, calculated on a sensible reference body weight rather than the highest number you can find. The protein and fluid target tool does that arithmetic and will also give you a fluid figure, since the two problems arrive together.

Two honest notes. First, these numbers come from populations that were not taking these medicines, so we are transferring them. Second, if you are nowhere near any of them, going from very little to somewhat more is where nearly all the benefit is. Do not let a target you cannot hit stop you improving on where you are.

Spread it out, if you can

Muscle protein synthesis responds to a decent dose of protein in one sitting rather than to a trickle, which is why the advice is usually to spread intake across the day rather than to load it all into one meal.

The commonly quoted approach is a reasonable amount at each of three or four points in the day — the figure often given is somewhere around 25 to 40 g per occasion depending on body size and age, with older adults needing more per sitting to get the same response.

Now the realistic version. On these medicines, three or four substantial eating occasions is not always available. If you can only manage two, two is what you do. If it all lands in the evening because that is the only time anything appeals, that is still far better than not eating it. The perfect distribution is a nice-to-have; the total is what carries most of the effect, and a plan you cannot execute delivers nothing at all.

Members on shifts have a version of this problem that is worse again — see sleep and shift work, which works from the actual week rather than an imagined one.

Where it comes from, and the vegetarian question

Animal sources tend to be more concentrated and to have a fuller amino acid profile per gram, which means fewer grams of food for the same effect — relevant when the total volume you can eat is limited. That is a practical point about volume, not a moral one about food.

Plant sources work perfectly well. They generally need a slightly higher total and some variety across the day to cover the amino acid profile, and the volume can be a genuine obstacle when appetite is low, because the same amount of protein arrives in a bigger meal. Members solve it with more concentrated options — soya, seitan, tofu, and plant protein powders where food is not happening. Vegan and vegetarian protein goes through it properly and that circle is where the actual recipes get swapped.

On powders and shakes: they are food, not medicine, and they are neither virtuous nor a shortcut. For a lot of members in the first months a shake is simply the only delivery method that works on a bad day, and there is nothing wrong with that. Buy the boring cheap one.

Protein without training does much less

This is the part that gets lost when protein is discussed on its own.

Protein is the material. Resistance training is the instruction to use it. Eating well while doing nothing that loads your muscles gives your body the bricks and no reason to build. The trials that show preserved lean tissue during weight loss are, almost without exception, trials that included resistance exercise.

So if you are going to do one of the two, do both, and if you genuinely can only do one this month, keep some form of loading going and get whatever protein you can. Eight minutes and a chair is the smallest honest version of the training half, written for weeks when nothing else is happening, and keeping your strength through a loss phase sets out what the evidence supports.

The other thing worth saying: do not use training as a substitute for eating. If protein has been very low for weeks and you respond by training harder, that is the one combination that reliably makes things worse. Sunil would want me to add that this is mechanistic reasoning rather than a trial finding, and he would be right.

What I would actually do this week

If all of the above is too much, here is the version I give people in circle when they are tired and want to be told something short.

Find out your rough daily figure once, write it on a piece of paper, and stop recalculating it. Then get something with protein into the first thing you eat each day, because the day only gets harder from there. Then keep one or two things in the house that require no cooking and work on a bad day. Then load your muscles twice a week, badly, in whatever form is available.

That is it. Anyone selling you a more complicated version is selling you something.

And if you are not managing any of it this fortnight, that is information about how difficult the fortnight is, not a verdict on you. Come and say so in protein-and-strength. Half that circle is people describing the gap between what they know and what they are managing, which is the only honest subject there is.