Before anything else: we do not sell food, powder, pills or plans, and we have no arrangement with anybody who does. That is why this guide is short. Once you take the selling out of the subject, there is not a great deal left to say.
What protein actually does
Training gives your body the signal to build and repair muscle. Protein supplies the material to do it with. If the signal is there and the material is short, you get less out of your training than you paid for in effort.
That is genuinely the whole mechanism. It is not a supplement in the marketing sense, it is food, and it is the one part of eating that reliably changes what happens after a session.
How much, roughly
For an adult lifting twice or three times a week, somewhere between 1.2 and 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight a day covers it comfortably. For an eighty kilogram person that is roughly 96 to 128 grams.
Two things worth saying about that range. It is a range rather than a target because the research is not precise enough to justify precision, and being near the bottom of it consistently beats hitting the top of it twice a week. Consistency is doing most of the work here.
If you are over sixty, aim towards the upper end. Older bodies respond a little less readily to the same amount of protein, so it takes slightly more to get the same result. There is more on this in training in your fifties.
What that looks like on a plate
Rough numbers, because rough is all you need:
- A palm sized piece of chicken, fish or meat: 25 to 30 grams
- Two eggs: 12 grams
- A tin of beans or lentils: 15 grams or so
- A large pot of Greek yoghurt: 15 to 20 grams
- A block of tofu or tempeh, quarter of it: 15 grams
- A scoop of any protein powder: 20 to 25 grams
Most people who fall short do so at breakfast and again mid afternoon, and fix the whole problem by changing those two moments. Nothing else in the day needs touching.
Do you need a powder
No. It is convenient, that is all. A powder is a fast and cheap way to add twenty grams to a day that is running short, particularly if you are not hungry in the mornings or you are eating away from home.
If you buy one, buy the plainest one you can find and ignore everything printed on the tub. The blends, the added extras and the timing claims are marketing rather than nutrition. Whey and soy and pea all work fine, and the differences between them matter far less than whether you actually drink it.
Timing
There was a period when everybody believed you had a thirty minute window after training and that missing it wasted the session. That has not held up. What matters is the total across the day, spread reasonably rather than crammed into one meal.
Three or four moments a day, each with a decent amount of protein in it, is the practical version. If it happens to be soon after training, fine. If it is two hours later, also fine.
What you can safely ignore
- Anything promising a faster result. Nothing you can buy in a tub changes the rate at which you get strong.
- Anything sold with a before and after photograph. The photographs are not the product.
- Advice to eat every two hours. It made a lot of people miserable and did not improve anything.
- Detailed tracking, for most people. Weigh and count for a week if you are curious about where you actually are. Then stop, and keep the two or three habits it revealed.
The part that is not about protein
If you are eating enough overall, sleeping reasonably and training twice a week, protein is a small optimisation on top of a decent foundation. If you are short on sleep and skipping meals, it will not rescue anything, and the honest advice is to fix sleep and recovery first.
We would rather tell you that than sell you a tub.