How much Protein do you need a day?

How much protein do I need per day?

This question comes up often from people who work out “how much protein do I need per day“?

The more you ask the more amount of different answers you will continue to get. There has been many studies done on protein requirements.

And I do admit while it is quite hard to get a definitive answer because of so many different variables one thing does lend it self to every conclusion. We need more than the recommended daily amount.

The RDA (recommended daily amount) of protein for a typical individual is 0.8 g/kg of body weight.

Now some people would laugh at this but honestly this is a respectable number for inactive individuals. Yes there are many studies showing positive benefits of larger amounts of protein intake but for the most part a lot of times protein requirement has been exaggerated.

I myself have always said to eat at least your lean body mass in protein if your goal was to gain weight. And for some individuals who were on the bodybuilding bandwagon I recommended 30 g above their lean body mass.

The truth is many people simply look at the magazines but actually don’t want to be that big. So eating very high amounts of protein is not just unrealistic but unnecessary for their true goals.

Robert Morton a Canadian exercise scientist out of the University of Mancaster Took 49 different studies done on protein and studied them.

These studies covered a range of variables from untrained individuals all the way to people who have trained for six weeks and others who trained for 52 weeks. In all they were over 1800 participants when all studies were taken into account.

What Robert Morton found was quite astonishing to my ears considering I had always recommended such a high amount of protein intake.

Mr. Morton’s statistics showed that protein intake beyond 1.62 grams/kilogram didn't result in any further resistance-training related increases in fat-free mass (lean muscle).

This means that if you are looking to build the max amount of muscle you really didn’t need to eat more than 1.62 grams of protein per kilo of body weight.

Since we are most likely white trash Americans reading this let me break it down in lbs for the mathematical impaired.

• 110 grams a day for a 150-pound lifter

• 129 grams a day for a 175-pound lifter

• 147 grams a day for a 200-pound lifter

• 166 grams a day for a 225-pound lifter

So what does this mean for the people who eat a lot more protein and tend to gain a lot of size? Simply that every study is not set in stone and there’s always different variables. Every human body is different from another person and people respond differently to different macro nutrients compared to others. If you can eat more protein and your goal is to get as big as a firetruck then go for it. Otherwise I would stay around this recommended dose save your money or spend it on higher quality sources.