Early research into post-workout nutrition focused almost exclusively on endurance athletes and, really, the only issue of importance was refilling muscle glycogen and re-hydrating the athlete.  For this reason the focus was on carbohydrates and fluids with little else considered.  At some point, I recall it being the mid-90′s some early work suggested that adding protein to post-workout carbohydrates was beneficial in terms of glycogen re-synthesis and a new dietary trend started to form.

Now, it turns out to be a bit more complicated than that whether additional protein actually increases glycogen synthesis depends on a host of factors, primarily how much carbohydrate is provided.  Simply, if sufficient carbohydrate is given following training, adding protein has no further benefit in terms of promoting glycogen re-synthesis.

In situations where insufficient carbs are consumed (by choice or otherwise), extra protein helps.  Which isn’t to say that additional protein following training isn’t valuable for endurance athletes even if carbohydrate are sufficient but that’s not really the topic of today’s article.

While individuals involved in the strength sports and bodybuilding were quick to jump onto the post-workout carb/protein bandwagon, the research wasn’t really aimed at them.  As well, there has always been a bit of a disconnect in using work on endurance athletes (who may be doing hours of exhaustive work) and trying to apply it to individuals in the weight room.

Differences in volume of training, fuel use and goals make using data on one group inappropriate for application to the others.  It’s still common to see well-meaning nutritionists use the same guidelines for both strength/power athletes (including bodybuilders) and endurance athletes but that is simply silly.

In any case, work examining the impact of various combinations of post-workout nutrients in terms of promoting strength or hypertrophy would come later and, at this point, a huge amount of work has been done.  I’m not going to get into every detail (the issue is discussed in absurd detail, 35 pages worth, in The Protein Book) of post-workout nutrition and will focus the article simply on the issue of protein, carbohydrates and the combination of the two in terms of how they impact on post-workout recovery and muscle growth.

To understand what I’m going to say and why I think some current recommendations (especially the one saying that you only need protein post-workout) are not consistent with the research, I need to get into a few details regarding how training impacts on muscle growth and how nutrients impact on this.  Don’t worry about the dense text, there’s a pretty graphic below to help explain it all.  A pretty, pretty graphic.

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How Does Muscle Grow?

Endlessly on the site, I’ve talked about how the primary stimulus for growth is progressive tension overload (with fatigue being a secondary factor) but, believe it or not, that’s not what I’m going to talk about here.  Rather, I want to get a bit deeper into the processes of muscle growth.  I’m not going to get full-blown molecular on you, just a bit more detail than I usually go into.

Now, the ultimate goal of getting bigger muscles is, well, getting bigger muscles.  But what does that actually mean?  Skeletal muscle is composed of a variety of different elements including protein (about 100-120 grams of actual protein per pound of muscle and yes I’m mixing grams and pounds), water (making up the majority), connective tissues, glycogen, minerals and a few other things.  I’m going to focus on the actual protein component of it since that’s the bit that actually generates force, etc.

Protein in your muscle is no different than the protein found in dietary protein, it’s a long-chain of amino acids that have been attached to one another in the structure that makes up skeletal muscle (the various fibers and such).  But how does this process work?

Simply, there are two competing processes that go into what ultimately happens to muscle mass which are protein synthesis and protein breakdown.  Protein synthesis is simply the act of attaching amino acids into one another and making them into muscle.  This is an energetically costly process and occurs through the actions of ribosomes (little cellular messengers that you learned about in 7th grade biology) acting under the instructions of mRNA (something else you forgot about from high school).  So training turns on genes which get translated into mRNA which tell the ribosomes what to build and how to do it.  That’s protein synthesis and you can think of it as ‘good’ when it comes to muscle growth.

The competing process is protein breakdown which is the opposite.  Various specialty enzymes work against you, cleaving off amino acids from the already built skeletal muscle. This happens under the influence of hormones and other factors.  Most tend to think of protein breakdown as ‘bad’ in the sense of muscle growth but it’s a touch more complicated than that.  The ability to break down and rebuild tissues in the body (a process which is ongoing constantly, even when you’re ‘at rest’), provides the human body with a lot of adaptations flexibility.  That is, it allows the body to adapt to changing demands and remodel itself based on the signal it gets from whatever is going on in your life.  In that sense, protein breakdown is not ‘bad’.

Now, what happens to your muscle mass ultimately depends on the balance between these two competing processes.  I’ve tried to illustrate this below with three possible scenarios.

1. Protein synthesis > Protein breakdown = Muscle mass increases
2. Protein synthesis = Protein breakdown = No change in muscle mass
3. Protein synthesis < Protein breakdown = Muscle mass decreases

Assuming your goal is bigger muscles, clearly 1 is the goal.  But this also means that there are two primary ways that we can potentially impact on muscle growth.  We can either increase protein synthesis, decrease protein breakdown or do both at the same time.  And doing both at the same time would be expected to have the biggest impact.

There’s one more factoid you need to know which is this: heavy resistance training increases the rates of both protein synthesis AND breakdown.  That is, training doesn’t just turn on one or another, it turns on both.  This is probably a mechanism to help with the previously mentioned remodeling process.  But both happen following training.

And with that background, now let’s look at how nutrients interact with all of this.

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Protein, Carbohydrates or Both, Oh My!

While athletes are rarely that interested in technical details and only want the practical applications, to understand everything I want to talk about I need to look at a bit more detail, specifically how protein and carbohydrates interact with the processes of protein synthesis and breakdown discussed above.  And it basically works out like this:

1. Protein (amino acids) stimulate protein synthesis but have no impact on protein breakdown.
2. Insulin (secondary to carb consumption) inhibits protein breakdown with no impact on protein synthesis.

It’s actually a touch more complex than this.  Protein can impact on protein breakdown under certain conditions and insulin can impact directly on protein synthesis (and there happens to be a big difference in terms of what happens at rest vs. after training).  But for the most part, following training, the above will hold true.

Which leads us towards an ideal of post-workout nutrition. First and foremost I should point out that if you train and don’t eat anything afterwards (and this assumes you haven’t eaten a few hours before), the body will actually remain in a net catabolic state.  That is, protein breakdown will be greater than protein synthesis.  That’s bad.  But only really applies if you’re training first thing in the morning after a fast (how many studies are done) and haven’t eaten anything.

But let’s assume that you eat something following training.  Should it be protein, carbs, both, or some other combination?  First let’s look at the single feeding studies.   That is, let’s say that you could only choose one or the other following training, which should you choose.  The answer there is clearly protein alone which will be vastly superior to carbohydrate alone.  Because while consuming carbohydrates will decrease protein breakdown, only protein will increase protein synthesis (and provide the building blocks for building new muscle).

And this is also where a rather silly idea has come from in the post-workout recommendations.  Folks will often state that “You only need protein post-workout because carbs don’t effect protein synthesis.”  This is true but ignores the impact of decreasing protein breakdown on net protein gain.

Certainly increasing protein synthesis appears to be relatively more important than decreasing protein breakdown but the simple fact is that you get the biggest overall effect if you target both at the same time.  Which means a combination of protein and carbohydrates.

I should probably mention dietary fat and the simple fact is that fat intake post-workout is woefully understudied.  One study found no difference in anything with a meal containing fat vs one not-containing fat (so you folks insanely obsessed with not slowing gastric emptying by consuming dietary fat can stop worrying) but beyond that there’s little research.  One study did find that full fat milk promoted protein synthesis better than skim milk following training but nobody is sure why.  It wasn’t because more calories were consumed because the researchers also tested enough skim milk to match the calories of the whole milk; whole milk was still superior.

In any case, that’s the overall conclusion that I draw from looking at the body of literature: while protein alone is superior to carbohydrates alone, the combination of the two will have the greatest impact on promoting muscle growth (as well as having other beneficial effects on muscle glycogen, etc).  How much of each?  Well that depends on a host of other factors that will have to wait for a later article (or see The Protein Book).

I’ve shown this schematically in the graphic below, showing how both training and nutrients impact on the processes discussed above.

Arrows are neat!

So that’s that: protein is better than carbohydrate following training but protein plus carbohydrates is optimal. Good luck with your muscles.

Then again, the people who have used Intermittent Fasting (for examples, check out Martin Berkhan’s LeanGains.com) appear to be making exceedingly good progress in terms of muscle gain despite not eating for 14-16 hours during the day suggesting that perhaps the above dogma regarding meal frequency isn’t quite as well established as folks might think.

Now, I’ve discussed meal frequency previously, in terms of its effects on weight, body fat and body composition in the research review on Meal Frequency and Energy Balance and won’t rehash those points here.  Rather, what I want to discuss here is the potential impact of meal frequency on mass gains for athletes trying to increase muscle mass.

And since I covered the topic in exceeding detail in The Protein Book, I’m simply going to excerpt that section of that chapter.  I’d note that I cover a tremendous number of other topics related to meal frequency in that chapter including many practical issues along with the impact of meal frequency on muscle mass maintenance during fat loss.

I’d also note that apparently Layne Norton (a professional natural bodybuilder and all around smart guy who is doing scientific research on the issue of protein and muscle gain) has been experimenting with the ideas I’m going to discuss below (he calls it protein bolusing) but I have no idea how or if it actually panned out.

Finally I’d note that I’m not going to include the reference list for this excerpt.  It’s in the book.

Optimal meal frequency: A theoretical approach

In Chapter 3, I discussed how eating impacted on both protein synthesis and breakdown following a meal. To briefly recap, an increase in blood AAs primarily stimulates protein synthesis with a much lesser impact on protein breakdown; in contrast, increasing insulin levels appears to primarily decrease protein breakdown with only a small impact on protein synthesis. With that information as background, I now want to examine the topic of meal frequency from a slightly more theoretical standpoint by examining two separate questions:

1. Is it possible to eat too frequently?
2. How long will a typical meal maintain the body in an anabolic state?

By determining a potential maximum and minimum amount of time that should pass between meals, an optimal meal frequency can be developed. As well, I want to examine the idea that different meal frequencies might be optimal under different conditions (i.e. maintenance versus mass gains versus dieting).

Is it possible to eat too frequently?

It’s not uncommon to read about bodybuilders or other athletes taking the eat-more-frequently dictum to extreme levels, eating every one to two hours. The idea behind this is the idea that optimal results should occur by maintaining a near continuous influx of nutrients into the body. I imagine if they could find a way to do it, some enterprising athletes would set up a continuous intravenous drip with carbohydrates, amino acids and essential fatty acids.

This may not be a good idea in the first place. Some research, primarily using amino acid infusion, suggests that skeletal muscle can become insensitive to further stimulation of protein synthesis. In one study, amino acids were infused for several hours to 70% over normal levels (17). Protein synthesis increased after roughly 30 minutes and was maintained for the next two hours at which point protein synthesis decreased back to baseline.

Importantly, this decrease occurred despite the maintenance of high levels of blood amino acids. Additionally, there was an increase in urea production (a waste product of protein metabolism), indicating that the excess AAs were simply being catabolized in the liver to be excreted in the urine; that is, those AAs were wasted and never utilized by the muscle.

The researchers took this as a suggestion that there might be a maximum amount of protein synthesis that can occur at any one given time before a “muscle full” situation is reached (18). Perhaps more interestingly, based on the amounts of AAs infused, the researchers estimated that only 3.5 grams of AAs would be required to result in this “muscle full” situation (18). I want to make it very clear that this doesn’t mean that 3.5 grams of orally ingested AAs would cause the same effect. Rather, this represented the delivery of 3.5 grams of AAs to the muscle itself.

However, the total amount of dietary protein to achieve this amount wouldn’t be huge. Most dietary proteins are roughly 40-50% EAAs, and due to processing in the liver, slightly less than half of the ingested AAs actually make it into the bloodstream. To provide 3.5 g EAAs to skeletal muscle would require roughly 15-20 grams of whole protein over a two hour time span.

Interestingly, other more direct research supports this value. In a study I described in an earlier chapter, subjects received doses of EAAs ranging from zero to 20 g EAAs and protein synthesis was studied (19). In young subjects, muscle protein synthesis was maximized with an intake of 10 g EAAs and there was no further increase with 20 g EAAs. This represents roughly 20-25 grams of whole protein.

Consumed every three waking hours (roughly six meals per day), this would allow for a maximum protein intake of 120 grams per day before skeletal muscle protein synthesis is maxed out. For a 100kg (220 pound) athlete, this is only 1.2 g/kg, lower than even the most conservative estimates discussed in Chapter 4. As discussed previously, this research is a difficult to reconcile with other, much higher recommendations or empirical results.

However, recall from Chapter 4 that dietary protein has more functions for athletes than simply the stimulation of protein synthesis. Although the amount described above might very well maximize skeletal muscle protein synthesis, optimizing the function of other important pathways of AA metabolism would very likely raise requirements even further (20). As well, while excess amino acids may simple be oxidized off, there is evidence that increased AA oxidation is involved in the overall “anabolic drive” of the body.

Finishing up this discussion, in their most recent study, the same group examined the effect on protein synthesis of a variety of doses of infused AAs (21). Infusing AAs at four different ranges, the group saw a similar pattern to their earlier work, an initial increase in protein synthesis followed by a return to baseline despite maintenance of high AA levels. Additionally, while the lower infusion rates caused a significant increase in protein synthesis, further increases at the higher concentration levels showed smaller additional benefits. Essentially, providing low to moderate amounts of AAs gave the greatest result.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the paper demonstrated conclusively that it was extracellular AA concentrations (rather than the concentration of AAs inside the muscle cell) that were involved in stimulating protein synthesis. The researchers suggested the existence of some type of amino acid “sensor” in the muscle cell membrane that sensed AA levels. The study also suggested that it was the changes in extracellular AA concentration, rather than the absolute amounts that were driving the changes in protein synthesis. That is, it was the change from lower to higher that had the effect more than the absolute amount of AAs present.

Along with the indication of a “resistance” to further stimulation of protein synthesis, it appears that raising AA concentrations (after a meal) followed by a decrease in concentrations yield the best results. Basically, spacing meals apart and allowing blood AA levels to drop, rather than maintaining AA concentrations at continuously stable levels, appears to have the greatest impact on protein synthesis. Unfortunately, this still gives no indication of how far apart those meals need to be spaced to allow a “resensitization” of the muscle to a subsequent increase in AA concentrations.

Additionally, since it was based on an amino acid infusion, it’s unclear how this would relate exactly to the consumption of meals. Between digestion and the hormonal response that occurs with eating, it may very well be that eating protein would yield a different result than what the above research found using AA infusion.

In this vein, it’s interesting to look back at the original casein versus whey research that I discussed in Chapter 2. In that study, whey protein showed an initial spike in protein synthesis followed by an increase in amino acid oxidation in the liver, a pattern not dissimilar to the work examined above (22). It seems plausible that once whey had maximally stimulated protein synthesis, the remaining AAs were simply metabolized in the liver.

In contrast, when very small amounts of whey (a few grams at a time) were sipped over a six hour span to mimic the effects of casein, there was no increase in amino acid oxidation (23); however the impact on protein synthesis was also smaller. It may very well be that flooding the body with large amounts of AAs simply overloads the muscle’s ability to utilize amino acids, causing the excess to be burned off. This would also be consistent with the fact that the slower protein, casein, actually generated a higher overall gain in leucine in the body compared to whey; by never overloading the body’s protein synthetic machinery, overall better results were obtained.

Related to the above research, another group compared the body’s use of leucine with subjects either given small hourly meals or three separate meals (24). They found that protein oxidation was decreased (by 16%) in the group given three meals. Essentially, providing amino acids too frequently appears to decrease the body’s utilization of those aminos. Rather, having discrete meals where blood amino acid levels first increase (stimulating protein synthesis without overloading the body’s ability to utilize AA’s) and then decrease for some time (so that muscle can become “sensitive” to the effect of aminos again) would seem to be ideal.

At this point it would appear that eating too frequently (less than every three hours) has no real benefit, and could possibly be detrimental due to the muscle becoming insensitive to the impact of amino acids. It’s interesting to note the preliminary report above which found increased LBM gains with three versus six meals per day. Perhaps by spacing the meals further apart, greater stimulation of protein synthesis occurred when protein was eaten.

For the remainder of this chapter, I’ll take three hours to represent the minimum amount of time that should pass between meals. Eating more frequently is unlikely to be beneficial and may very well have a negative effect.

How long does a meal maintain the body in an anabolic state?

Having looked at the possibility that eating too frequently might actually be detrimental (or at least not particularly beneficial) given how long a typical meal takes to digest, I want to look at how long a given meal might possibly maintain an anabolic state.

Mentioned above, considering the relatively slow rate of protein and other nutrient digestion, it appears that even a moderate sized meal maintains an anabolic state for at least five to six hours (8). Individual whole food meals are still releasing nutrients into the bloodstream at the 5-hour mark (7). Very slowly digesting proteins such as casein may still be releasing AAs into the bloodstream seven to eight hours after ingestion (22). Considering this research, we might set a conservative limit of five hours as the absolute longest time that should pass between eating some source of dietary protein during waking hours.

Summary: Theoretical examination of meal frequency

It appears that eating too frequently could potentially be detrimental to the goal of gaining muscle mass in that muscle tissue becomes insensitive to further stimulation by amino acids, increasing protein oxidation in the liver. Eating more frequently than every three hours would seem to not only be unnecessary (based on the rate of digestion of whole proteins) but could possibly be detrimental.

Given a moderately sized whole food meal, the body will generally remain in an anabolic state for at least five to six hours (and possibly longer depending on the foods chosen). Conservatively, we might use five hours as the upper limit cutoff for time between meals.

This yields a duration between meals of anywhere from three to five hours. This should keep the body in an overall anabolic state without causing problems related to too frequent or too infrequent consumption of meals.

Full time athletes with time to eat very frequently are probably best served with the higher meal frequency simply to ensure adequate caloric intake. Again, smaller individuals with lower total energy intakes may want to use slightly larger meals eaten slightly less frequently for practical reasons. Similarly, individuals who work jobs and are unable to fit in a meal every three hours needn’t worry obsessively about becoming catabolic. A solid food meal containing a high quality protein, carbohydrates, fat and some fiber eaten every five hours will maintain an anabolic state readily.

Protein distribution throughout the day

Related to the topic of meal frequency is the question of whether the day’s protein should be spread evenly throughout the day, or if some other pattern of intake might be superior.

As discussed above, one early study examined whether providing 25% of protein at breakfast and lunch and 50% at dinner had any impact on nitrogen balance compared to spreading the protein evenly across the day’s three meals; no difference was found (9).

More recent work has examined a dietary strategy called “protein pulse” feeding. With that approach, 80% of the day’s protein was given at lunch with only 10% at the other two meals; this was compared to a “spread” pattern where the day’s protein intake was distributed evenly across four meals. In elderly women, the “pulse” pattern led to a greater protein gain compared to the “spread” pattern (25). However, in younger women, the “spread” pattern was superior and led to a greater nitrogen balance (26).

There is a substantial and increasing amount of data that putting some amount of the day’s protein around training is beneficial, a topic that is discussed in detail in the next chapter. Outside of ensuring adequate protein before, during and after training, there is no real indication that distributing the day’s protein in any pattern other than a basic spread pattern is beneficial (again, except possibly for older individuals).

So, for example, take an athlete who will be consuming 200 grams of protein per day with 40 grams of that placed around training. That leaves 160 grams of protein to be evenly distributed across the day’s other meals. With a four meal per day frequency, that yields 40 grams of protein per meal; at six meals per day, the athlete would consume roughly 27 grams of protein at each meal.

Is there an optimal intake pattern for different goals?

In the chapter on protein requirements, I mentioned Tipton and Wolfe’s contention that any discussion of protein requirements has to be context dependent: that is, the goals of the athlete determine what is optimal in terms of protein intake. While they were talking primarily about total daily protein intake, this idea can be extended to other aspects of nutrition including protein intake throughout the day and how it might interact with specific training goals.

Logically, gaining muscle mass versus maintaining muscle mass at maintenance calories versus trying to maintain muscle mass under conditions of caloric restriction (dieting) are different situations, potentially requiring different optimal intakes of protein, AAs, meal frequency or protein intake pattern. The possibility exists that different patterns of protein intake (in terms of both timing and type of protein) might exist for different goals (27).

For practical purposes, I’m going to consider the following discussion in terms of two different goals: muscle mass maintenance (either at maintenance calories or while dieting) and muscle mass gain. I want to note that most of this discussion will be somewhat hypothetical since little direct research exists to date.

The background for this discussion can be derived from a topic I’ve discussed previously in the book in terms of how different patterns of protein digestion (i.e. fast versus slow) can influence whole body metabolism differently.

Recapping briefly, large spikes in amino acid concentration appear to stimulate protein synthesis (recall also the infusion data I discussed above) with little to no impact on protein breakdown. In contrast, maintaining constant low levels of AAs appears to reduce protein breakdown with less of an impact on protein synthesis.

Consuming very large amounts of protein at once (as in the protein “pulse” studies discussed above) has an effect similar to a fast protein such as whey, spiking blood amino acids and promoting protein synthesis as well as oxidation (28).

In contrast, spreading protein out in smaller amounts throughout the day has an effect closer to that of casein, inhibiting protein breakdown with a smaller impact on protein synthesis (28).

I’d mention again that, in the original whey versus casein study, reducing protein breakdown via casein had a larger impact on net leucine balance compared to whey. Recall also that adding whey to other food, which had the effect of slowing down digestion, had a similar effect.

Given that data, it may very well be that simply maintaining relatively constant low levels of amino acids (with a spike around training, discussed next chapter) is optimal for all goals. This would be conceptually similar to the strategy of keeping insulin low but stable during the day with a spike around training. This is essentially the strategy that bodybuilders have empirically settled on under all situations: they eat small amounts of protein, carbohydrates and fat throughout the day with a relatively larger intake of nutrients around training.

With regards to muscle mass maintenance and dieting, there is little to discuss: based on the direct research available as well as the general difficulty in stimulating protein synthesis when calories are reduced, a slow/spread pattern of protein intake is clearly optimal. Maintaining continuous low levels of amino acids throughout the day (in addition to increasing total protein intake) to limit the body’s need to mobilize stored body protein from muscle and other tissues should be the goal. A combination of slow proteins combined with evenly spaced meals to keep blood AA levels stable throughout the day would seem to be optimal.

But is this also the optimal pattern for gaining muscle mass? On the one hand there is the suggestive study above where a group receiving three meals per day gained more LBM than a group receiving six per day; as well there is the research suggesting that maintaining constant levels of AAs might cause skeletal muscle to become “insensitive” to further stimulation; increasing extracellular levels of AAs and then allowing them to fall again appears to be superior. Both of these data points suggest that keeping blood AA levels stable throughout the day might not be optimal from the standpoint of muscle mass gains.

Another recent study throws a wrench in the typically held bodybuilder idea that simply maintaining continuous levels of amino acids with frequent meal feeding is optimal (29). In that study, two groups were compared. The first received three whole food meals while the second received the same three meals with an essential amino acid (EAA) supplement in-between. I should note that the study suffered from one huge design flaw: the groups got different amounts of total protein. It should have also tested a group that got 6 whole food meals and the same amount of protein as the EAA supplemented group.

Recognizing that limitation, the study made at least three major observations. The first was that the EAA supplement generated a greater protein synthetic response than the whole meals. The second was that the EAA supplement generated an anabolic response even when given in-between meals. That is to say, the previously consumed meal, which was still digesting when the supplement was given, didn’t blunt the effect of the EAA supplement. Finally, the EAA supplement didn’t blunt the anabolic response to the meal. Of course, the study didn’t examine what impact this would actually have in the long-term on muscle mass gains but is interesting nonetheless.

This study suggests that a potential pattern at least worth experimenting with for athletes seeking maximal muscle mass gains would be to alternate between slower digesting meals with faster acting sources (perhaps a whey protein drink or an EAA supplement) throughout the day (25).

It also plausible that a combination of slow and fast protein sources at a given meal could give the best of both worlds: a spike in AAs to stimulate protein synthesis followed by a slower increase to inhibit protein breakdown. Preliminary data that I discussed back in Chapter 2 supports that idea as well although it was being primarily applied to protein intake following resistance training. It’s interesting to note that old school bodybuilders often consumed copious amounts of milk to gain lean body mass as milk protein is a mixture of whey and casein.

In terms of meal frequency, a daily intake pattern of 4-6 meals (depending on such factors as size and caloric intake) should be sufficient for the majority of bodybuilders and athletes. There are, of course, going to be exceptions.

In terms of caloric intake, the biggest problem I see among most lifters (especially those who classify themselves as ‘hardgainers’) is that they don’t eat enough in total (this is often coupled with exceedingly poor training approaches). And since you can’t build muscle out of thin air and wishful thinking, that will limit results. A good starting point for calories, is 16-18 cal/lb but this will have to be adjusted based on real world changes in body composition. Some need much more and some may need less to avoid excessive fat gain.

Finally, water is intimately involved in just about every reaction in the body, and water/fluid intake should be kept high to ensure adequate hydration. A good rule of thumb to individualize water intake is that you should have 5 clear urinations per day with two after training. Drink however much fluid (and note that many foods contain water, and all liquids count) is necessary to meet that goal.

Did you do the assignment I gave you, checking to see if your current diet matches up with the above. If not, you need to work on fixing it. As well, you need to see if the rest of your diet matches up with what I’m going to talk about in The Baseline Diet 2009: Part 2.

Today, I’m going to talk about the other three components of The Baseline Diet which are protein, carbohydrates and fats. For each I’m going to talk about a variety of issues including total intake recommendations along with looking at issues of quality, timing, etc. in the context of The Baseline Diet.

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Protein

For bodybuilders and other strength/power athletes, arguably more has been written about protein than any other nutrient and there are reasons (both good and bad) for this. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of confusion surrounding dietary protein for athletes; since much of the supplement industry tends to be driven by commercial (rather than scientific) biases, the profit to be had from protein powder sales means that a lot of nonsense gets written about the topic.

Contrary to popular belief, protein is NOT the main component of muscle; rather water is. Frankly, I’m a little bit surprised that nobody has pushed anabolic water supplements for this reason (new Hydrobolic Dermal Water, now with an added Ester!) but I digress.

Protein requirements for bodybuilders has been a perennial topic of debate. Athletes have long-felt that high-protein diets were superior for muscle growth and results while classically trained dietitians maintain that only the RDA is necessary. Who’s right? Well, I am.

Varying lines of research strongly suggest that higher protein intakes than provided by the RDA (or DRI or whatever you want to call it) are necessary to optimize the results from training. How much is still debated endlessly in the literature among scientists but this isn’t the place to detail that debate.

As I discuss in some detail in The Protein Book, I recommend that bodybuilders consume 1.1-1.4 g/lb protein per day (bodybuilders have long used a range of 1-1.5 g/lb); for reasons I won’t discuss here, females can usually get by with less than that, about 1.1-1.2 g/lb. I’d note that these values are for natural lifters; while there is far less research available, it’s generally felt that anabolics work better with more protein and intakes of 2 g/lb or higher are common.

I do want to point out that just jamming in more protein than needed won’t magically increase muscle growth; there is a limit to the rate at which muscle can be synthesized no matter how much protein you eat. I talk about the possible rate of muscle growth in General Philosophies of Muscle Gain.

I’d also note, and this is discussed in The Protein Book, that once protein requirements have been met, eating more dietary energy (from carbohydrates or fats) actually has a greater impact on growth than just eating more protein. I bring this up as lifters often get so far on the protein bandwagon that they eat little else; growth is usually disappointing.

Having talked about total protein requirements, I want to talk about a few related issues such as frequency, timing and type. Like the issue of meal frequency (discussed in The Baseline Diet: Part 1), lifters often go a bit insane about protein frequency. Claims that your muscles will fall off if you don’t eat protein every 2.5 hours has people acting like obsessed maniacs but the truth is far different.

The fact is that whole protein sources take a pretty long time to digest, they may still be releasing amino acids into the bloodstream 5-6 hours later. As I discuss in both The Protein Book and What are Good Sources of Protein – Speed of Digestion Part 1, the now famous Boirie study showed that casein protein was still digesting 8 hours later. The idea that you have to eat protein every 2.5 hours just makes no sense.

As an additional factor, there is actually some evidence that consuming protein too frequently could be detrimental for growth. Again, this is a topic I discuss in some detail in The Protein Book and while the data is preliminary, the idea does seem to be supported. I know this goes against long held ideas in bodybuilding nutrition but the research says what it says.

With that said, I do feel that whenever a meal is consumed, it should contain some protein. Given the rather high protein intakes of bodybuilders and athletes (a 200 lb lifter at 1.5 g/lb is getting 300 grams of protein), spreading it fairly evenly throughout the day simply makes sense.

Of course, an additional issue is that of protein timing around training; as I noted in The Baseline Diet: Part 1, some researchers feel that timing of protein around training is more important than total intake per se. Maybe. The point is this: having nutrients in the system around training certainly seems to be critical for optimal results. This is a topic I can’t do fair justice in this article, I spent 35 pages on it in The Protein Book and anything I’d write here would pale in comparison.

Another issue that athletes often get very obsessive about is protein quality, which protein is best. Well, as I eventually answered in the 12 part series on What Are Good Sources of Protein, there is no single optimal protein source, they all have pros and cons.

Frankly, once total protein and caloric intake is met, I don’t feel that there will be a huge benefit to one protein source over another, total intake will trump quality issues unless someone is doing something very strange with their diet (like eating a single low-quality protein as their only source).

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Carbohydrates

Before I discuss dietary carbohydrates, I want to get something out on the table first. Despite what has been written by otherwise well-meaning individuals, activities such as weight training can ONLY be fueled by muscle glycogen (carbohydrate stored within the muscle).

No amount of adaptation can shift the body to using fat for fuel during weight training (unless your sets last more than about 3 minutes). The implication of this is that glucose is an absolute requirement to sustain weight training performance. And the primary source of glucose in the diet is going to be dietary carbohydrate (I’d note that protein can be converted to glucose in the liver as well).

Carbohydrates are surrounded by controversy in the world of sports nutrition for lifters (and in the general public). Well meaning dietitians give the same carb recommendations to lifters as they do for endurance athletes. Others argue that there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate (true) and prefer to use ludicrous protein intakes to produce glucose.

As with so many topics, I tend to come in more or less right in the middle. While I think that lifters generally don’t need massive carbohydrate intakes (well, maybe if you’re training 2 hours/day every day), I consider excess protein intake an expensive (metabolically and financially) way to produce glucose.

Carbs taste better anyhow and produce more insulin (which is important for overall growth). How many carbs is needed depends on a lot of factors, which I discuss in the article How Many Carbohydrates Do You Need?

A lot of general equations have been thrown around for lifters in terms of carbohydrate intakes for optimal results. I’m no fan of percentage based diets but, assuming calories are adequate, an intake of 45-55% of total calories seems about right as a starting point for carbohydrate intake.

In practice, this might yield a carbohydrate intake of 2-3 g per pound body weight. So a 180 pound lifter might be consuming 360-480 grams of carbs per day or 1440-1920 calories per day. Assuming he was consuming 18 cal/lb (3240 calories), this would yield 45-60% of the total. Math is fun.

I’d note that this can be highly variable, individuals with poor genetic insulin sensitivity often do better with proportionally less carbs and more fats in their diets. So take the above as a starting point and nothing more. If you find yourself bloated and puffy with that many carbs, consider reducing carbs and increasing dietary fats.

Beyond the argument about carbohydrate quantity, there is a separate (but somewhat related) argument about carbohydrate quality (i.e. type of carbohydrates). Carbohydrate sources are roughly divided into starchy carbohydrates (e.g. bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, etc) and fibrous carbohydrates (e.g. most vegetables).

More technically minded nutritionists will frequently speak of something called the Glycemic Index (GI), which refers to the propensity of a given food to raise blood glucose and insulin. In general, fibrous carbs tend to have a lower GI (meaning they have less of an impact on blood glucose and insulin) than starchy carbohydrates but there are some exceptions and GI is problematic at best in the real world.

Lately, this concept has been further developed into discussions of the glycemic load of the diet. Glycemic load is found by multiplying the glycemic index by the total carb intake. Thus a huge amount of a low GI food can have a similar glycemic load to a small amount of a high GI foods.

There is much debate over the importance of GI for athletes and bodybuilders. Many are adamant that only low GI foods should be consumed and, certainly, from a nutrient density standpoint (low GI foods typically contain more fiber and nutrients than higher GI foods, but not always) there is some logic to that. There is also a school of thought that low GI foods should be consumed except around training (where more insulin release is required) and there is certainly much logic to that.

At the same time, GI becomes increasingly more irrelevant when mixed meals are being consumed. High GI foods become lower GI food when you start combining them with protein, fat and fiber. As well, there is evidence that regular (endurance) training decreases the GI of foods as discussed in The Influence of Subject’s Training Status on The Glycemic Index.

Stranger still, at least one study suggests that low GI foods are low GI because they cause a larger initial insulin spike as discussed in Different Glycemic Indexes of Breakfast Cereals Are Not Due to Glucose Entry into Blood but to Glucose Removal by Tissue.

My point being that the whole issue of the glycemic index and glycemic load is a lot more complicated than low GI is good and high GI is bad.

The best guideline I can give regarding this is that, of course, it will be better to choose more nutrient dense, high-fiber carbohydrates (which are usually lower in terms of GI) for the majority of your diet. Just don’t lose sight of the big picture, small differences in GI (or even moderated amounts of higher GI foods) aren’t going to kill you, especially not in the context of regular training, maintaining a reasonable body fat, etc.

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Fats

For years (especially coming out of the fat-phobic 80’s), dietary fat was the forbidden nutrients in athletic and bodybuilding diets. Sometime around the 90’s, that perception started to change as it was recognized that not only were essential fats crucial for health, fat loss, etc. but that fats were not inherently evil.

Arguably one of the main benefits of increased dietary fat is that it makes foods taste better and adherence to your daily diet is a huge aspect of maintaining it in the long-term. As well, for many individuals it can be difficult to consume sufficient calories when dietary fat intake is too low. The caloric density of dietary fat is an easy way to raise calories. I’d note that some individuals find the opposite to be true, in that increased dietary fat promotes such feelings of fullness that caloric intake is more difficult to keep high.

Before I continue, just for background, I want to make sure everyone is familiar with the different ‘types’ of dietary fats which are:

• Saturated fats: Saturated fats are found primarily in animal source foods, although coconut and palm kernel oil both contain high amounts of saturated fats (although they are a special type of saturated fat called medium chain triglycerides). They are solid at room temperature (think butter, milk fat).
• Unsaturated fats: Unsaturated fats are found primarily in vegetable sources foods, although they are alos found in animal source foods in varying amounts. They are liquid at room temperature (think vegetable oil). Oleic acid (found in olive oil) is the most common mono-unsaturated fat.
• Polyunsaturated fats: Technically a sub-category of unsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats are also liquid at room temperature. The essential fatty acids are polyunsaturated fats and are found in varying amounts and ratios in various foods. Generally speaking, they are found in vegetable source foods but the omega-3 fatty acids (aka the fish oils) are found, as you might expect, in fatty fish.
• Trans-fatty acids: Also known as partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, trans-fatty acids are formed when hydrogen is bubbled through vegetable oils to make a semi-solid (think margarine) with a longer shelf life. Some research suggests that trans-fatty acids are worse than saturated fats in many health-related respects.

From a health perspective, massive amounts of research support the critical importance of the essential fatty acids (EFA’s), they improve calorie partitioning, decrease inflammation, and have so many health benefits that if you saw a list of them you’d probably think I was making them up.

And while bodybuilders may be less interested in health than in getting huge, the simple fact is that an unhealthy athlete of any sort isn’t one who can make optimal progress. Ensuring daily EFA intake is critical to optimal health and functioning.

And while it is held as proven true that the omega-6 fatty acids are pro-inflammatory (and that an excess of w-6:w-3 fatty acids causes health problems), recent research actually calls this into debate. At some point in the future, I’ll do a feature article on this topic to discuss it in more detail.

Of course, there is a great deal more controversy regarding the health effects of the different types of fats. The reality is that a great many studies link a high dietary fat intake with a number of disease states. However, it’s a lot more complicated than that sentence makes it out to be.

I’d suggest readers read Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies Part 1 and Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies Part 2 for a lot more detail on this debate. I’m not going to detail the whole argument here since this is already getting too long. Simply put, the global context that fats are being consumed in (e.g. sedentary, overweight, stressed out vs. lean, active athlete) plays an enormous role in how dietary fats affect human physiology.

Of course, there are other reasons for athletes and bodybuilders to worry about dietary fat beyond just heath effects.

One of the major issues that usually comes up with regards to dietary fat is an apparent link between dietary fat intake and testosterone levels. A number of studies have shown that low-fat, high-fiber diets can lower total testosterone and higher-fat, lower-fiber diets can raise it. Some work has suggested that it is saturated fat per se that has the effect on testosterone levels, others suggest that it is total fat intake.

But there are some problems. One is that when you do diet studies of this sort, many variables change. Is it the change in dietary fat, the fiber intake, the carbohydrate to fat ratio or some combination that is causing the changes.

As well, at least some work suggested that while diet could modulate total testosterone levels, it looks like the body will keep free testosterone levels pretty static by modulating levels of sex-hormone binding globulin (SHBG, the thing that binds testosterone). So it may all be moot anyhow.

At this point all that can be said is that sufficient dietary fat intake may be required for optimal hormone levels. But the data set is more unclear than many make it out to be.

I would also note that a handful of studies have noted improved nitrogen balance (a measure of how much protein is being stored in the body) with higher fat and lowered carb intakes; some work I cite in The Protein Book suggests that dietary fat may be better for protein retention than carbs.

Which brings us to the question of how much dietary fat.

As noted, I don’t particularly care for percentage based diets but, for dietary fats, I make an exception and feel that an average intake of 20-25% of total calories is probably as good a starting point as any. If we take our same 180 lb lifter above consuming 18 cal/lb (3240 calories), a 20-25% fat intake equates to 72-90 grams of fat per day (or about 0.4-0.5 g/lb). Across 4-6 meals per day that’s 12-15 grams of fat per meal which I think is about right. As I noted above in the section on carbohydrates, some lifters may find better results with less carbs and more fat depending on the specifics.

Of that total intake, the majority should probably come from monounsaturated fats, I entreat all athletes to get sufficient fish oils (an intake of 6-10 standard 1 gram capsules per day is sufficient IMO) and the rest can come from saturated fats.

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Summing Up

Ok,so that’s the 6 factors of The Baseline Diet. Once again, by baseline diet, this is the diet I think lifters, athletes or even the general public should follow (to establish their results) prior to trying other diet interpretations.

Of course, it’s also arguably the dietary template that most bodybuilders have followed (more or less) over the years. There’s not much new under the sun here. To sum up the 6 aspects:

1. Meal frequency: 4-6 meals per day depending on the specific circumstances. There are exceptions.
2. Total caloric intake: for mass gains, a rule of thumb starting place is 16-18 cal/lb to be adjusted based on real-world body composition changes.
3. Fluid intake: Sufficient to generate 5 clear urinations per day, with 2 after training.
4. Protein intake: 1.1-1.4 g/lb for males, 1.1-1.2 g/lb for females.
5. Carbohydrate intake: ~45-55% of total calories (~2-3 g/lb) from a mix of starchy and fibrous carbohydrate sources, high GI carbs right after training
6. Fat intake: 20-25% of total calories (~0.4-0.5 g/lb).

And that’s The Baseline Diet. Spend some time with it to get your fundamentals right before you start worrying about fancy implementations or magic programs. Until you know how your body responds in general, you can’t ever know if the fancier stuff is working better, worse or the same.

I find that lifters, especially new lifters often get so fixated on magic, complicated approaches to training and diet (including mine) that they forget to get the basics in place.  The simple fact is that the basics and fundamentals are where every diet and every training program should start.

Why?  Because they always work.  More advanced approaches should be brought in when they are needed, not just because the trainee is bored or wants to do them.

The bottom line is this:  Before you worry about advanced approaches, get your fundamentals straight. That’s what The Baseline Diet is all about.

Introduction

I’m going to start this article with a few questions. How much mass have you gained in the last few months (or years as the case may be)? If you’re like the average lifter, the answer is assuredly ‘Not as much as I’d like’.

Ok, next question: how much money have you spent on exotic supplements hoping they’d be the secret to freaky mass? Again, if you’re the average lifter the answer is probably ‘Way more than I should have’.

Next is a series of questions: How many meals are you eating per day? How many calories? How many grams of protein?  Carbs?  Fat? When’s the last time you ate fruit or vegetables?  Consistently? How much water are you consuming on a daily basis. If you’re an average lifter (and want to stay such), your answer is probably ‘Umm, I don’t know.’

This brings me in a roundabout way to the topic of this article (and it’s continuation which I’ll put up on Monday): while people are always interested in cutting edge new esoteric approaches to mass gain and nutritional strategies, the simple fact is that there isn’t much new under the sun when it comes to bodybuilding or athletic nutrition.  There are only three major nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) and you can only arrange them in so many ways.

We may know a lot more about optimal nutrition than we did thirty years ago but human biology is still the same as it ever was.  The same basic rules still apply and in this article and the next I want to talk about those basic rules.

A Quick Word on Supplements

I’ve written a lot of columns and Q&A’s for various magazines (print and online) over the years and, by far, the biggest question revolves around supplements.  A majority deals with basic stuff of course: protein powders, thermogenics, creatine but a number also deal with the more esoteric stuff on the market.

Bodybuilding magazines are in the business of convincing lifters that taking a lot of expensive supplements it mandatory to reach their goals; because that’s how they make money.  Telling a lifter to follow a basic progressive training program with a good nutrition doesn’t make money, getting them to buy a product for $45 per month month-in/month-out does.

The simple fact is this, your diet (and of course your training) will determine 90-95% of your success in bodybuilding (or any sport).

At most, supplements can add 5-10% to that level. Unless you’re planning on competing, and that 5-10% may mean the difference between winning and losing, spending a small-fortune on supplements is a waste. As well, until you get the 90-95% of your training and diet in order, the other 5-10% won’t make a damn bit of difference.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-supplements even if I get painted as such.  Sure, I think 99% of what’s out there is crap (and history supports me in that).  More importantly, I see too many lifters and athletes focusing on the wrong thing: they want the magic pill that will make them great, but they forget to worry about the stuff that actually matters.

Put differently, echoing my mentor: I’m anti-anything that detracts trainees from the stuff that really matters.  And supplements all too often do exactly that.  Lifters try to make up for failings in the important stuff with a magic pill, and the magazines and companies know and pander to this.

Ok, enough of that, let’s get to the article.

What is the Baseline Diet?

Most simply defined, the baseline diet is what every athlete needs to determine and put in place before they go mucking about with any supplements, or any goofy diet interpretations (including mine). That is, you should establish AND follow the baseline diet for at least a few months, to track your body’s response, before you try anything else.

Because until you determine what your baseline response is (and have the fundamentals of your diet in place), you can’t make any sort of objective conclusion about the complicated stuff in terms of results.

Now, much of what I’m going to discuss has been said many times before, as I said above there’s not much new here. But I still see enough lifters making the same basic mistakes in their overall daily nutrition that it’s worth repeating the basics again (and again and again).

I’m going to divide the baseline diet into six distinct categories which are meal frequency, caloric intake, water intake, and protein, carbohydrate and fat intake.  I’ll discuss the first three in this article and the second three in Part 2.

Meal Frequency

Meal frequency may be one of the more hotly debated areas of nutrition these days. While it’s always been  dogma (and in earlier versions of this article, I basically reiterated that dogma) that you must eat 6 times per day or more for optimal gains (or weight/fat loss), more recent research has called that severely into question.

Recent work into caloric restriction and intermittent fasting suggests that lower meal frequencies may have additional benefits. Some people are even fasting for many hours per day prior to food consumption with many claimed benefits (such as improved insulin sensitivity, calorie partitioning and fat loss).  I can’t do intermittent fasting justice in this article, again I’d refer people to Martin Berkhan’s Leangains.com for more information.

As I’ve discussed at some point in most of my books, there are more factors which go into choosing meal frequency than any absolute statement (e.g. you MUST eat 6 small meals per day) can cover. How many calories per day someone is consuming, along with several other variables all interact here.

A small female consuming 1200-1500 calories per day may prefer to eat fewer smaller meals (so that each is larger and more satisfying) whereas a large male bodybuilder seeking mass gains (who may be consuming 3000-4000 calories/day or more) may need to eat 6 times per day to get in the required food.

As I discuss in detail in The Protein Book, any given meal will maintain the body in an anabolic state for somewhere between 4-6 hours depending on its composition and form (a solid meal takes 5-6 hours to digest for example) and the idea that you have to eat every 3 hours or your muscles will fall off, or you’ll go into starvation mode, is simply nonsense. I discuss this in some more detail in the article Meal Frequency and Energy Balance.

Now, as many like to point out, higher meal frequencies have been found to improve various aspects of health (notably glucose tolerance and blood cholesterol) but many of these studies use a very unrealistic feeding pattern (e.g. 17 meal/day compared to 3). Whether 6 meals per day has a true benefit over 3 meals per day in terms of health is massively debatable.  As noted, emerging research is finding that intermittent fasting and lower meal frequencies may have major benefits.

But since this article is about a baseline diet for bodybuilders and athletes, who usually have a fairly high daily caloric intake, a higher meal frequency is probably still going to be preferred.  This is just a practical consideration, an athlete with a large caloric requirement will probably find it easier to get them in eating more frequently.

Just realize that it isn’t absolutely mandatory. As long as you’re eating every 3-5 hours (assuming large-ish solid meals), you’ll remain in an an anabolic state. Obsessing that it’s been 2.5 hours since your last feeding is simply silly; stressing out over nothing will do you far more damage than going 4 hours between meals.

For more details, you can read the full discussion of meal frequency in The Protein Book.

Nutrient Timing

Beyond the global issue of meal frequency, an area of major interest and debate is that of nutrient timing.  The original version of this article repeated the basic idea that breakfast was a key aspect of halting overnight catabolism, but the research and practical experience of the intermittent fasting folks calls that into question.  So I won’t repeat that particular bit of readily accepted dogma.

However, nutrient timing around training is currently a massive area of interest with some researchers going so far as to say that timing of nutrients (especially protein) around training is more important to overall results than total protein intake itself.  Maybe.  There are a lot of issues surrounding the studies (not the least of which is that most of them are done in the fasted state which means they have limited relevance to athletes who have eaten during the day) to date but the simple fact is that the research is fairly clear: nutrients consumed around training are critical to stimulating optimal gains in muscle mass.

Now, how soon after training is debatable, one study found that whether nutrients were taken an hour or three hours after training, the results were the same (in older folks, it’s critical that they be consumed soon after training).   So the whole focus on ‘You MUST eat within 47 seconds of finishing your last set or your workout was waste.’ is basically a lot of internet nonsense.

But the general point still stands, lifters should be eating something around training. Whether it’s before, during, after or a combination of the three, nutrients (and that means carbohdyrates and protein) around training promote better gains in muscle mass.

I can’t possibly give sufficient details on amounts in this article.  Again, The Protein Book has a 35 page chapter dedicated to the topic of around workout nutrition for those who want to know all the details.

Eating at Bedtime/During the Night

In the original version of this article, I made some comments about the practice of consuming nutrients right before bedtime and/or in the middle of the night.   The idea was that the time between the last meal of the day and breakfast was one of catabolism and the theory is that eating at this time might help with growth.  Maybe.

There is data that the gut needs ‘rest’ for optimal function (e.g. that around the clock feeding causes problems) but it’s all based on studies of folks in hospitals so it’s relevance to athletes is debatable.

Another consideration is that sleep should not be compromised to get more nutrients into the body.  Sleep is critical for recovery and forcing yourself to wake up to eat something probably does more harm than good.  I originally said simply this: If you wake up in the middle of the night (e.g. to pee), eating something might be worth considering.  If not, don’t worry about it.

Basically, I’m torn on this one.  Of course, as I mentioned above, the reality is that a solid meal takes at least 5-6 hours to fully digest.  If you eat a particularly large dinner meal, that will actually be providing nutrients through a good portion of the night anyhow.  I’m just not sure it’s worth worrying about, moreso if it means interrupting good sleep.

Total Caloric Intake

Although macronutrient composition affects success in bodybuilding and athletics, caloric intake is arguably as important. Invariably the lifters I’ve met who wanted to gain mass (but couldn’t) were either overtraining (or training stupidly) or simply not eating enough.  Usually it’s both.

In the late 90′s, we saw the rise (and subsequent fall) of the lean mass gainer, a low calorie drink that magically caused you to gain mass. In all cases, these products contained creatine which causes rapid water weight gain.  It was a neat trick but served only to confuse lifters who apparently thought that they could build muscle out of hopeful thinking and thin air.

On top of that, there is a pervading belief (perhaps we should call it a desire) to gain mass while losing fat at the same time. While fat beginners can pull this off, as can those returning from a layoff, anyone past the beginner stage will find this generally impossible without the use of repartitioning drugs or complicated diets which alternate distinct periods of over- and under-eating (such as the mass variant in my Ultimate Diet 2.0).

The strategy I regularly advocate is the alternation periods of specific mass gain (accepting fat gains) with specific fat loss (minimizing muscle loss). This avoids the buildup of excessive bodyfat levels, while allowing one to gain mass.  I discuss this more in the article General Mass Gain Philosophies.

The bottom line is this: building muscle requires a surplus/excess of two things: the building blocks of muscle (protein/amino acids) and energy (calories).  You can’t build muscle out of nothing and, without both in sufficient amounts, nothing happens.  I’ll discuss protein intake in Part 2, here I only want to look at total caloric intake.

Bodybuilders always want to know “How many calories for mass gains?” to which the simplest answer is “Enough.” In principle, for mass gains calories should be high enough that a small fat gain is seen (as measured by calipers) every couple of weeks. This should be more than sufficient to support muscle mass gains.

As as starting point I usually suggest 10-20% over maintenance calories for mass gains.  Of course, this assumes that you know what your maintenance calories actually are.  If you do, just add 10-20% to that.

If not, a caloric level of 16-18 calories per pound is usually a good starting place for mass gains; this then has to be adjusted based on real world results in strength, mass and body fat.   I’ve also known individuals who had to consume 25 cal/lb to gain weight/mass.

Why the variance?

The big variable here usually has to do with non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) which I discuss in some detail in Metabolic Rate Overview.  In short, NEAT refers to activities that aren’t exercise that burn calories.  Fidgeting, moving around, etc.  And people vary drastically in how NEAT responds to overfeeding with some people (the stereotypical ‘hardgainer’) often shown massively increased NEAT when they try to eat a lot.  So calories that would go to support muscle growth just get burnt off with excess activity.  But I’m getting off topic.

In any case, I suggest trainees start at that calorie level and make adjustments depending on biweekly body composition measures. So start at say 18 cal/lb and see how your caliper measurements (men should probably use abdominal, women thigh as these tend to be most representative of body fat levels) change after 2 weeks.

If they went up a little (maybe a couple of millimeters over 2 weeks) and you’re gaining strength in the gym, you’re probably at a sufficient calorie level to maximize growth without excessive fat gain.  More calories probably won’t increase muscle gain but may give disproportionate fat gain.

If neither weight nor body fat has increased, calories are too low.  At that point, I’d suggest adding another couple of hundred calories per day to your diet. Eventually you’ll find that calorie level that starts putting weight on you. Obviously, as you get bigger, you’ll have to add more calories as well.

Of course, if body fat has gone up significantly more than that, calories are too high and should be scaled backwards slightly.  I’d note that, if you start at the low end of my calorie recommendations, too many calories shouldn’t generally be a problem.

And as noted up above, my general experience with folks who can’t gain muscle mass is usually an issue of too few calories (or truly absurd training schemes) rather than too many.

Water Intake

While it should be a no-brainer, water intake is another place where trainees make basic mistakes (I am guilty of this myself). The effects of dehydration range from minimal (at 2% dehydration, strength and performance decrease) to painful (can anybody say kidney stones) to worse (at 10% dehydration, death can occur).

While there are many generalized water intake equations (such as 8 glasses per day), these may not be correct for everyone. To poach another guideline from my mentor, a good rule of thumb is 5 clear urinations per day, and 2 of those should come after your workout. Yes, that means looking in the toilet when you pee.

This gives trainees a way of individualizing water intake. Obviously someone who lives in a hot, humid environment (or trains in a non-air conditioned gym) will need more water than someone who lives in moderate temperatures and trains in a posh gym.

I’d note that, despite more dogmatic rhetoric to the contrary, all fluids contribute to hydration state (as do many high-water foods such as fruits and vegetables).  Yes, even caffeinated ones; research clearly shows that the small amount of fluid lost from the caffeine is still much less than the amount gained by drinking the drink.

It’s worth nothing that recent research has found that plain water is actually the worst drink for rehydration following exercise.  Milk was actually shown to be superior to either plain water or Powerade/Gatorade type drinks, most likely due to the potassium and sodium content.  You can read more about this in the artilce Milk as an Effective Post-Exercise Rehydration Drink.

Finally, thirst is a poor indicator of hydration state. By the time you’re thirsty, you’re already a bit dehydrated.

Your Assignment

So between now and Monday, I want you to take a look at your overall nutrition (I know it’s only a few days, I originally wrote this article and it’s second part with a month between them), looking at your current meal frequency, total caloric intake and water intake.

This means keeping a food log of everything you eat and drink during the day. You should keep such a log for a minimum of 3 days (including one weekend day, where most of us let dietary discipline lapse) up to a full-week. You’ll also need a basic calorie counter to determine caloric intake.

Now check what you came up with against the guidelines above.  Are you eating at a suffiicent frequency (~4-6 times per day with 3-5 hours between meals), are you getting sufficient calories to support mass gains, are you getting sufficient hydration (check your pee) daily.

If the answer is ‘yes’, you’re ahead of the game.  If the answer is ‘no’, you need to work on fixing those issues before you worry about anyting else.

Read The Baseline Diet 2009: Part 2.

Much of what Alan talks about in this piece is actually discussed in the article I did on Milk: The New Sports Drink? – A Review but, Alan, in an obsessive way that I can only admire, gets into much more detail.

Enjoy.

Lyle

An Objective Comparison of Chocolate Milk and Surge Recovery.

By Alan Aragon

INTRODUCTION TO CENSORSHIP

Recently, a member of the t-nation.com forums posted a question about whether or not it’s safe for her 12 year-old son to have a postexercise product called Surge instead of chocolate milk. Bill Roberts, a product formulator for Biotest (the supplement company behind t-nation.com), said essentially that the carb source in chocolate milk (sucrose) was inferior to the carb source in Surge (dextrose). I then challenged him to justify his position. My position was that using sucrose isn’t any more of a nutritional compromise than using dextrose. His answer was that “everyone knows” dextrose is superior to sucrose for postworkout glycogen resynthesis, and that sucrose is inherently unhealthier than dextrose. I countered his position by presenting scientific research refuting his claims. He then got all bent out of shape and started hurling ad hominems at me, obviously frustrated that he was losing a public battle.

“Everyone knows”

In one of Bill’s posts, he literally said “everyone knows” more than a dozen times – while failing to provide a single trace of scientific research supporting his claims. If indeed everyone knew, and was in agreement with him, he would have had at least a handful of cronies sticking up for him, if for nothing else but to pad his fall to the mat. But alas, he received support from no one except one moderator, who I’ll quote as saying, “I refuse to back up my claims, so sue me”.

To Bill’s credit, the soccer mom who asked the original question wouldn’t listen to anyone but him, so kudos to Bill on his politician-like rhetorical skills. In the mean time, several members expressed their disappointment in Bill’s neglect for citing research evidence to back his stance. I also know for a fact that a good handful of posts from innocent observers (supporting my side of the debate) were censored from posting in the thread. This was presumably because their posts made Bill look even more uninformed.

It’s not surprising that people’s posts were blocked from appearing in the thread because eventually, my own posts never made it into the thread. At that point, I knew that continuing the debate was just not going to happen. Nevertheless, all of the key posts made it through; all of the posts that clearly showed Bill’s inability (and unwillingness) to engage in scientific debate were right there, plain as day. Ultimately, Bill ended up looking as prideful as he was ignorant. In order to save face, either Bill or administrators of t-nation.com had the thread deleted.

Ironically, I recently wrote an article for t-nation.com (A Musclehead’s Guide to Alcohol). If I may say so myself, it was a hit, judging by the reader feedback and frequent links back to the article. Given that, it was downright humorous to be censored by the forum administrators shortly after contributing to their library of wisdom. In the following sections, I’ll compare the components of Surge with chocolate milk for postexercise recovery. For the sake of simplicity and context-specificity, I’ll judge the application of the two products to the target market of Surge, which consists of general fitness and bodybuilding fans.

MEET THE COMPETITORS

In the brown corner, we have chocolate milk. The ingredients of chocolate milk vary slightly across brands, but in general, the ingredients are: milk, sugar (or high fructose corn syrup), cocoa processed with alkali, natural and artificial flavors, salt, carrageenan, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3. Like regular milk, chocolate milk is available in varying levels of milk fat. For the purposes of this comparison, I’ll use the one most consumers are most likely to choose, the low-fat variety.

In the red corner, we have Surge Recovery (which I’ll continue to abbreviate as Surge). The ingredient list is as follows: d-glucose (dextrose), whey-protein hydrolysate, maltodextrin, natural and artificial flavors, sucralose. Other ingredients include L-leucine and DL-phenylalanine.

Research behind the products

What’s exciting about this comparison is that both of these products have been highly heralded and hyped in their respective arenas. Surge in its exact formulation doesn’t have any peer-reviewed research behind it. However, Berardi et al reported that a solution of similar construction to Surge (33% whey hydrolysate, 33% glucose and 33% maltodextrin) was slightly superior for glycogen resynthesis at 6 hrs postexercise compared to a 100% maltodextrin solution[1]. Effects on muscle protein flux were not measured.

Chocolate milk has thus far had an impressive run in the research examining its applications to various sporting goals [2,3]. It has performed equally well for rehydration and glycogen resynthesis compared to carb-based sports drinks, and it has outperformed them (and soy-based drinks) for protecting and synthesizing muscle protein. A standout study in this area was a comparison of chocolate milk, Gatorade, and Endurox R4 (a sports drink with a 4:1 carb to protein ratio) [4]. Chocolate milk was equally effective as Gatorade for total work output and prolonging time to exhaustion. Interestingly, both of the latter products outperformed Endurox R4 in both tests. The researchers speculated that the use of maltodextrin rather than sucrose (yes, you read that correctly) as the dominant carbohydrate source was the Achilles heel of Endurox R4. More on the virtues of sucrose instead of straight glucose for exercise applications will be covered.

QUANTITATIVE MACRONUTRIENT COMPARISON

When isocalorically matched, Surge and lowfat chocolate milk have the expected similarities and differences. The suggested serving of Surge has 7.7 g more protein than chocolate milk, while chocolate milk has 10.3 g more carbohydrate. While the lesser protein content of chocolate milk might on the surface seem like a point scored for Surge, this is actually a non-issue.

Recent research by Tang et al found that as little as 10g whey plus 21 g fructose taken after resistance exercise was able to stimulate a rise in muscle protein synthesis [5]. Considering that an isocaloric serving of lowfat chocolate milk has 17.3 g protein plus 56.3 g carbohydrate, a hike in muscle protein synthesis (as well as inhibition of protein breakdown) would be easily achieved. Chocolate milk has 4g more fat than Surge. Again, this might be viewed as a detriment for those conserving fat calories, but it’s still a low absolute amount of fat. This also may have a potential benefit which I’ll discuss in a minute. Bottom line: there’s no clear winner in this department; there’s too many contingencies to make a blanket judgement.

QUALITATIVE MACRONUTRIENT COMPARISON

Protein

Surge uses whey protein hydrolysate (WPH). In theory, WPH is favorable because it’s already broken down into peptide fragments. This spurred the assumption that it would have faster absorption and uptake by muscle, which in turn would result in greater net anabolism. However, a recent study by Farnfield et al observed the exact opposite when WPH was compared with whey protein isolate (WPI), which consists of intact whole protein [6]. WPH not only was absorbed more slowly, but its levels in the blood also declined more rapidly, resulting in a much weaker response curve. Leucine and the rest of the BCAAs were significantly better absorbed from WPI than WPH. The researchers concluded that total amino acid availability of WPI was superior to WPH.

Of note, Surge is fortified with leucine, a branched chain amino acid (BCAA) that plays a critical role in muscle protein synthesis. An isocaloric serving of chocolate milk has 1.7g leucine. This may or may not have any impact, especially within the context of a high protein intake typical of the athletic population. It’s important to keep in mind that most high-quality animal-based protein is 18-26% BCAA [7]. Adding a few grams of supplemental BCAA to a pre-existent high intake within the diet is not likely to yield any magic. Surge is also fortified with phenylalanine, presumably for the purpose of enhancing the insulin response. Again, this is an unnecessary tactic since insulin’s primary action is the inhibition of muscle protein breakdown. This antiproteolytic effect of nutrient-mediated insulin response is maximal at elevations just slightly above fasting levels [8].

Chocolate milk’s protein is no different than that of regular milk. Milk protein is roughly 20% whey and 80% casein. Thus far in the scientific literature, comparisons of casein-dominant proteins with whey for sports applications are evenly split. Some studies show casein as superior (in spite of a higher leucine content in the whey treatments) [9,10], while others point to whey as the victor [11,12]. The only certainty is that it can’t be assumed that faster is better when it comes to promoting net anabolism. An acute study on post-ingestion amino acid kinetics by LaCroix suggests that milk protein is best left as-is rather than isolating its protein fractions [13]. Compared to total milk protein, whey’s amino acid delivery was too transient, and underwent rapid deamination during the postprandial period. The authors concluded that milk proteins had the best nutritional quality, which suggested a synergistic effect between its casein and whey. Bottom line: chocolate milk gets the edge; WPH has thus far bit the dust compared to WPI in a head-to-head comparison, and whey has not been consistently superior to total milk protein.

Carbohydrate

Surge has dextrose (synonymous with glucose) as its sole carbohydrate source, while chocolate milk has an even mix of sucrose (in the form of either sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup) and lactose. While it’s common to assume that dextrose is superior to sucrose for postexercise glycogen resynthesis, research doesn’t necessarily agree. A trial by Bowtell et al showed a glucose polymer to synthesize more glycogen by the 2-hr mark postworkout [14]. However, two other trials whose postexercise observation periods were 4 and 6 hours respectively saw no significant difference in glycogen storage between sucrose and glucose [15,16].

Perhaps the most overlooked advantage of a fructose-containing carbohydrate source (sucrose is 50% fructose) is that it supports liver glycogen better than a glucose-only source, as in the case of Surge. A little-known fact is that hepatic glycogenolysis (liver glycogen use) occurs to a significant degree during exercise, and the magnitude of glycogenolysis is intensity-dependent [17]. Illustrating the potential superiority of sucrose over glucose, Casey et al saw no difference in muscle glycogen resynthesis 4 hrs postexercise [15]. However, there was more liver glycogen resynthesis in the sucrose group, and this correlated with a slightly greater exercise capacity.

One of the potential concerns of consuming a large amount of sucrose instead of glucose is how the 50% fructose content in sucrose might be metabolized from a lipogenic standpoint. Answering this question directly, McDevitt saw no difference in de novo lipogenesis (conversion to fat) between the massive overfeeding of either glucose or sucrose at 135g above maintenance needs [18]. Another potential concern is the use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in chocolate milk. The common fear of HFCS being some sort of special agent that undermines health is simply not grounded in science. HFCS is virtually identical to sucrose both in chemical structure and metabolic effect [19]. Independent researcher John White eloquently clarified HFCS misconceptions in a recent review, which I’ll quote [20].

“Although examples of pure fructose causing metabolic upset at high concentrations abound, especially when fed as the sole carbohydrate source, there is no evidence that the common fructose-glucose sweeteners do the same. Thus, studies using extreme carbohydrate diets may be useful for probing biochemical pathways, but they have no relevance to the human diet or to current consumption. I conclude that the HFCS-obesity hypothesis is supported neither in the United States nor worldwide.”

It bears mentioning that lactose intolerance can prohibit regular milk use for certain susceptible individuals. However, this can be remedied by using Lactaid brand milk, or by using lactase pills or drops. Bottom line: For those who can digest lactose or are willing to take the extra step to make it digestible, chocolate milk wins. But since there are those who can’t or won’t do what’s required to tolerate lactose, I’m calling this a tie.

Fat

Coincidentally, Surge and chocolate milk have identical proportions of saturated fat. Lowfat chocolate milk has more fat than Surge, which would cause some folks to call a foul for postworkout purposes. However, a trial by Elliot et al found that postexercise ingestion of whole milk was superior for increasing net protein balance than fat-free milk [21]. The most striking aspect about this trial was that the calorie-matched dose of fat free milk contained 14.5g protein, versus 8.0 g in the whole milk. Apparently, postworkout fat intake (particularly milk fat) is nothing to fear, and may even be beneficial from the standpoint of synthesizing muscle protein. Bottom line: it’s a tie, since there is very little evidence favoring one fat profile/amount versus the other. On one hand, you can be saving fat calories by going with Surge. On the other hand, postworkout milk fat might potentially enhance protein synthesis. Things come out even.

MICRONUTRIENT COMPARISON (per 340 kcal serving)*

*This comparison is limited to the micronutrients on the Surge label. And yes, I realize that not all of the above are technically micronutrients.

A quick glance at the above chart shows that chocolate milk is markedly more nutrient-dense, with the exception of a higher content of leucine and phenylalanine in Surge, whose significance (or lack of) I discussed earlier. As an interesting triviality, both have a low cholesterol content, but Surge has 4.6 times more. Chocolate milk has more sodium, but it also has a significantly higher potassium-to-sodium ratio. Bottom line: chocolate milk wins this one decisively.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Price

Chocolate milk by the half gallon (64oz, or about 2000 ml) is approximately $3.00 USD. Sticking with our 340 kcal figure, this yields 3.7 servings, which boils down to $0.81 per serving. A tub of Surge costs $36.00 and yields 16 servings (3 scoops, 340 kcals per serving). This boils down to $2.25 per serving. That’s 277% more expensive than chocolate milk. Even on a protein-matched basis, Surge is still roughly double the price. Bottom line: chocolate milk is many times easier on your wallet.

Convenience & taste

Convenience is the single area where Surge wins. Being a powder, it’s non-perishable, requiring no refrigeration. This makes it more easily portable. Taste will always be, well, a matter of taste. I highly doubt that in a blinded test that Surge would win over chocolate milk. Bottom line: Surge is more convenient, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess that chocolate milk would taste better to most people.

CONCLUSION

I have no vested interest in glorifying chocolate milk, nor do I stand to benefit by vilifying Surge. My goal was to objectively examine the facts. Using research as the judge, chocolate milk was superior or equal to Surge in all categories. The single exception was a win for Surge in the convenience department. So, if the consumer were forced to choose between the two products, the decision would boil down to quality at the expense of convenience, or vice versa. I personally would go for the higher quality, lower price, and strength of the scientific evidence. Chocolate milk it is.

REFERENCES CITED:

1. Berardi JM, et al. Postexercise muscle glycogen recovery enhanced with a carbohydrate-protein supplement. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2006 Jun;38(6):1106-13.
2. Roy BD. Milk: the new sports drink? a review. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2008 Oct 2;5:15.
3. McDonald L. (Review of) Milk the new sports drink? a review. Bodyrecomposition.com, 2008.
4. Karp JR. Chocolate milk as a post-exercise recovery aid. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2006 Feb;16(1):78-91. [
5. Tang JE, et al. Minimal whey protein with carbohydrate stimulates muscle protein synthesis following resistance exercise in trained young men. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2007 Dec;32(6):1132-8.
6. Farnfield MM, et al. Plasma amino acid response after ingestion of different whey protein fractions. Int J Food Sci Nutr. 2008 May 8:1-11.
7. Millward DJ, et al. Protein quality assessment: impact of expanding understanding of protein and amino acid needs for optimal health. Am J Clin Nutr. 2008 May;87(5):1576S-1581S.
8. Rennie MJ, et al. Branched-chain amino acids as fuels and anabolic signals in human muscle. J Nutr. 2006 Jan;136(1 Suppl):264S-8S.
9. Demling RH, Desanti L. Effect of a hypocaloric diet, increased protein intake and resistance training on lean mass gains and fat mass loss in overweight police officers. Ann Nutr Metab. 2000;44(1):21-9.
10. Kerksick CM, et al. The effects of protein and amino acid supplementation on performance and training adaptations during ten weeks of resistance training. J Strength Cond Res. 2006 Aug;20(3):643-53.
11. Lands LC, et al. Effect of supplementation with a cystein donor on muscular performance. J Appl Physiol 1999;87:1381-5.
12. Cribb PJ, et al. The effect of whey isolate and resistance training on strength, body composition, and plasma glutamine. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2006 Oct;16(5):494-509.
13. LaCroix M, et al. Compared with casein or total milk protein, digestion of milk soluble proteins is too rapid to sustain the anabolic postprandial amino acid requirement. Am J Clin Nutr. 2006 Nov;84(5):1070-9.
14. Bowtell JL, et al. Effect of different carbohydrate drinks on whole body carbohydrate storage after exhaustive exercise. J Appl Physiol 2000; 88 (5): 1529-36.
15. Casey A, et al. Effect of carbohydrate ingestion on glycogen resynthesis in human liver and skeletal muscle, measured by (13)C MRS. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2000 Jan;278(1):E65-75.
16. Blom PC, et al. Effect of different post-exercise sugar diets on the rate of muscle glycogen synthesis. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1987 Oct;19(5):491-6.
17. Suh SH, et al. Regulation of blood glucose homeostasis during prolonged exercise. Mol Cells. 2007 Jun 30;23(3):272-9.
18. McDevitt et al. De novo lipogenesis during controlled overfeeding with sucrose or glucose in lean and obese women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec;74(6):737-46.
19. Melanson KJ, et al. High-fructose corn syrup, energy intake, and appetite regulation. Am J Clin Nutr. 2008 Dec;88(6):1738S-1744S.
20. White JS. Straight talk about high-fructose corn syrup: what it is and what it ain’t. Am J Clin Nutr. 2008 Dec;88(6):1716S-1721S.
21. Elliot TA, et al. Milk ingestion stimulates net muscle protein synthesis following resistance exercise. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2006 Apr;38(4):667-74.

In this article (which will actually form an introduction to a series of articles I’ll be doing over the next several weeks and months), I want to talk about some basic concepts related to mass gaining nutrition, primarily looking at some of the different philosophies of mass-gaining that are out there. As usually, I’ll look at each in my normal way, looking at the various pros and cons of each approach.

And, of course, I’ll give my own recommendations for what I think is actually optimal for most trainees under most circumstances. Please note my use of the word ‘most’ in that sentence; there are always exceptions, situations where I might do something different. Here I’m speaking more in generalities.

Old School Bulking/Cutting

In the olden days of bodybuilding, the standard approach to gaining muscle mass was to get big and fat in the off-season and this was called bulking. In modern terms this is generally referred to as GFH which stands for Get Fucking Huge

Both approaches revolve around the same concept: trainees train their balls off and eat as much as they can force down, gaining weight (and body fat) rapidly. In the old days, guys would then diet like maniacs and there are stories of guys bulking up to over 300 pounds before dropping to sub-200 pounds for their contest. Yes, insanity. Dieting is a little bit more sane now and it usually takes a good 6-12 months for the fat boys to get lean again.

I’d note that, to some degree, this idea still exists today among some professional bodybuilders. For example, here’s Lee Priest in the off-season and in competition condition.

Fat Boy Eating

Lookit Those Abs

There are also a good many stories of big strong powerlifters dieting down to seriously amazing bodybuilding levels of leanness and development. Dave Gulledge is a particularly good example, here’s pictures of him before leaning out and after.

Not Actually that Fat

Damn

So there’s clearly some merit to the ‘get big and strong and FAT’ approach to gaining muscle mass. When the trainee gets the fat off (which may take a year or more depending on the degree of fatness), assuming they don’t diet too badly and lose all the muscle, they often look absolutely amazing. It’s also a lot of fun to just eat and eat and eat and not care where the calories come from. Pizza, donuts, candy bars, whatever gets the calories down the pie-hole is good to go.

What isn’t usually talked about is the supporting ‘elements’ (read: drugs) that are involved here. Between increasing the amount of muscle mass gained while the folks in question get big and fat (and increasing the total amount of muscle that can be held) to sparing muscle loss while they diet off 150 pounds of lard, the drugs make a huge difference.

But the GFH approach to mass gain can backfire badly for naturals as there are biological limits to both the rate of muscle gain (per day or per week) as well as the maximum amount of muscle a natural lifter can carry. Simply, I don’t think this is generally ideal for the natural bodybuilder or athlete to gain muscle mass.

Athletes can’t usually afford to get that fat in the first place (performance suffers) and excess fat gain while gaining muscle mass for bodybuilders just means that much longer of a diet to get it back off. As mentioned above, and discussed below, given a maximum weekly rate of muscle gain, gaining weight at too fast a rate simply means that much more fat is being gained without increasing the rate of muscle mass gain.

Even for non-competitive bodybuilders, assuming the trainee is actually training for appearance reasons, getting excessively big and fat for part of the year really isn’t consistent with that goal. If you’re training for looks, ruining them by getting super fat just doesn’t make sense. That’s on top of other potential negatives of the GFH approach such as stretch marks and the potential to permanently increase the bodies set point (making it harder to get and stay lean when you diet back down).

I should note that, for very skinny folks or those looking for the most rapid rate of gain to reach their genetic limits, there is something to be said for the GFH philosophy. But, for most, I generally feel that the cons outweigh the pros and outside of a situation like a pro-football player or someone who just needed to get big and strong fast and didn’t care about the excess fat gain (or actually needed it to be competitive), I’d be unlikely to recommend this approach.

Lean Gaining

At the other extreme is the near obsession with lean-gaining, the idea being that folks are going to gain muscle mass without putting on an ounce of body-fat. Some supplements actually catered to this and the big fad in the 90′s were low-calorie mass gainers, products that claimed to magically put muscle on people without providing excess calories. And they did increase lean weight but only because they all contained creatine which increases lean body mass (via water retention) by several pounds. Thankfully, that fad has gone.

Lean gaining is usually based around insanely meticulous calorie and nutrient counting and timing, an obsession with clean eating, etc. without ever actually providing sufficient nutrients to grow at any meaningful rate. When you hear someone say that you can’t put on more than three pounds of muscle in a year, this is who you’re usually talking to: the guys who won’t allow even an ounce of fat gain. Or you’re talking to a natural bodybuilder who’s been at it for 10 years and is near his genetic limit. But it’s usually the lean-obsessed guys who aren’t gaining jack squat for muscle in a year.

The benefits of the lean-gaining approach, mind you, are that you get to look great year round; of course if your goal is contest bodybuilding (or sports), it also means literally no dieting time. If you model or make your living based on your physique, being able to do a photo shoot within a few weeks (or days) notice may be financially beneficial as well. This tends not to represent the majority of obsessives who try to use the lean-gaining approach.

The simple fact is that a bodybuilder who refuses to gain any fat and doesn’t put on any muscle between shows won’t be improving year to year. Unless they have perfect symmetry, size, shape, etc. their fear of body fat is preventing them from ever getting any better.

Athletes often have to add muscle mass (to improve strength, power or move up a weight class) and often don’t have very long to do it. Keeping calories too low year round hurts improvements in both mass and strength gains and even weight class athletes such as Olympic Lifters and Powerlifters usually train at a weight slightly higher than their weight class: this lets them eat more food, train more effectively and make faster gains; they can always drop weight and fat when needed.

The simple fact is that the body needs not only an appropriate training stimulus but also sufficient building blocks (protein, amino acids) AND sufficient dietary energy (calories) for maximal improvements. I discuss this in some detail in Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2. Staying excessively lean (which means either doing tons of cardio, restricting calories, or both) isn’t consistent with the goal of trying to get stronger and more muscular for the most part.

Another drawback to the whole lean-gaining thing is that the meticulous attention to nutrition every day can drive people crazy. Of course, bodybuilders are usually a bit nutso anyhow and orthorexia is a very real eating-disorder. But worrying about every gram of everything that you eat every day of your life can drive some people insane (more insane); it also triggers some awesome binges when they lose control for even a second.

Before moving on, I would note that some lean gaining approaches, notably the mass variant of my own Ultimate Diet 2.0, as well as some of the intermittent fasting approaches (such as Martin Berkhan’s Lean Gains) take a more relaxed approach to the idea of gaining muscle mass while limiting fat gain. Rather than being based around keeping calories pretty low/controlled all the time, they are based around the short-term (1-3 days) alternation of low and high-calorie intakes.

The lowered calorie periods limit or reduce fat gains while the high-calorie periods support growth and gains. There’s more flexibility, trainees get some big-eating periods (helping to stave off insanity and binges) and there are other benefits of them for people who are determined to stay lean year round but want to actually gain some muscle mass. But these approaches are typically much different than the ‘typical’ approach to lean-gaining.

As well, for many they are simply not worth the time or energy investment and I want to describe what I feel is perhaps an ‘ideal’ approach to gaining mass (over the long-term) without either getting too fat or limiting gains by staying too lean.

Before getting to that, I need to discuss something that will not make a lot of readers happy.

How Fast Can You Actually Gain Muscle Mass?

We live in an instant gratification society and are constantly bombarded with amazing claims; while this is probably most true in the world of weight loss, it’s not much different when it comes to muscle gain.

Magazines advertise 20 pounds or rock hard muscle in a mere 8-10 weeks, a supplement promises 5 lbs of muscle in 3 days or whatever; all around we see claims of rapid gains in muscle mass. Sadly, this is all basically bullshit. Yeah, with glycogen loading or creatine you can increase lean body mass (not the same as muscle mass) fairly rapidly but beyond that, skeletal muscle actually grows fairly slowly.

How slowly?

On average, a natural male doing everything right will be doing very well to gain 1/2 of pound muscle per week. A female might gain half that or about 1/2 pound muscle every 2 weeks.

Let’s put that in perspective: over a full year of training, assuming the trainee is doing everything right, that’s 26 pounds of the good stuff for men (13 pounds for women). Which, if you think about it, actually isn’t that awful. It’s simply awful compared to what people think they are going to get based on the false promises in the magazines (or the claims of drug using bodybuilders).

That assumes that half-pound is gained week-in, week-out for the entire year. Oddly, and somewhat tangentially, it usually doesn’t work that way. Trainees may go a long time with no measurable gains and then wake up several pounds heavier seemingly overnight. I have no idea why, that’s just how it usually works.

I’d note that, under the right conditions (usually underweight high school kids), much faster rates of gain are often seen or reported. But these tend to be exceptions to the rule more than the norm and since I’m usually writing for the average male trainee who’s not 15 years old with raging hormones, I don’t consider those values very illustrative. And, occasionally, when the stars are right, and everything clicks, a true one pound per week of muscle mass gain may be seen for short periods. But again, that tends to be the exception.

Let me reiterate: the average male trainee is doing well to gain about 1/2 pound muscle per week, 2 pounds per month or about 24-26 pounds per year. I’d note that that will generally only happen in the first year of training and things slow down after that. A female may be gaining about half that much, 1 pound per month of actual muscle tissue or 10-12 pounds per year. I know it sucks but that’s reality.

I bring this up as it has some relevance to the weekly rate of weight gain that is acceptable for what I’m going to describe next.

A Happy Medium: Bulk a Little, Cut a Little

As many know, and altogether too many don’t know or realize, I’m usually a happy medium kind of guy. I find most extremist stances to be flawed and usually end up somewhere between the two in my recommendations; that’s on top of trying to look at the context of a given trainee’s situation. This is true for training, diet and most everything else you care to name. It’s certainly true for the topic of this article.

As noted above, there’s no doubt that gaining some fat will allow a faster rate of muscle gain. The drawback is that, gain too much fat and dieting time is extended and appearance suffers. And while staying lean is nice from an appearance standpoint, trying to stay too lean all the time tends to hurt mass and strength gains because the trainee simply can’t eat enough.

The solution of course is to simply alternate shorter periods of mass-gaining (let’s not use the term bulking since it seems to cause people so many mental problems) where the goal is maximal muscle gains while accepting small amounts of fat gain before dropping into a short dieting phase to strip off the fat without losing any of the muscle gain.

Please read the bold bits carefully, they are the key to all of this. What’s ideal for most situations in my experience is to try to maximize muscle gain (smart training, slight caloric surplus) by allowing a small amount of fat gain to occur. While this causes the trainee to get fatter (this should be done without getting outright FAT), this also maximizes the rate of muscle gain. While dieting, of course, the goal should always be to limit muscle mass losses (as outlined in pretty much any of my books). Done properly, alternating mass gain with proper dieting, the end result is more muscle mass.

This idea isn’t new mind you, and has probably been around for 30-40 years or more (McCallum wrote about it in The Keys to Progress and Dan Duchaine was an advocate of this approach). I simply happen to think it’s superior for most applications to either GFH or the ‘Gotta stay ripped year round crew’ for the average natural bodybuilder or athlete (or simply individuals interested in gaining muscle mass).

So let’s put some numbers and guidelines to this.

1. First and foremost, for reasons outlined in my article Initial Body Fat and Body Composition Changes, trainees should not be starting out their muscle gaining phase too fat. Males should be ~10-12% body fat before even considering going on any kind of ‘bulk’ (fatter trainees can usually gain some muscle while losing fat with a basic recomposition plan; this is beyond the scope of this article). For a female, this would be roughly equivalent to 19-24% body fat.

Bodybuilders with contest aspirations might even start out a little bit leaner, perhaps 8% for males and 17-20% for females; this is simply to facilitate getting into contest shape in less time. Any leaner than that and hormones and energy tend to suffer. And, yes, this means that many will have to diet first before they even consider putting on muscle. That’s life.

2. It would be ideal, if, after dieting, the trainee took two weeks at maintenance to stabilize at the new body fat level. The reasons for this are numerous but revolve around letting some of the hormonal adaptations to dieting normalize. I’ve written about this endlessly on the site and my full diet break concept is outlined in detail in both The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook and A Guide to Flexible Dieting. Briefly, take two weeks at roughly maintenance calories with at least 150 grams/day of carbohydrate.

3. Now you can start gaining weight. Assuming relative average partitioning (not superior or inferior), a weight gain of approximately one pound per week (of which half should be muscle) and half a pound per week for females (of which half should be muscle), or 4 and 2 pounds/month respectively should roughly maximize muscle gains without excessive fat gain. There will be some fat gain, of course, but, simply, any faster rate of weight gain (I’ve seen folks suggest 2-3 pounds per week) will only increase fat gain without increasing the rate of muscle mass gain.

4. When the trainee hits a body fat percentage of approximately 15% for men (24-27% for women), the mass gaining phase should end. How long this take will depend on the size of the person but realistically, a 170 pound male trainee with 10% body fat could gain 16 pounds (8 pounds fat, 8 pounds muscle) before hitting the 15% mark. At one pound per week, that’s 16 weeks of gaining. Which, I’d note should be broken up into at least two separate training blocks.

A female starting at 130 pounds and 19% body fat could realistically get to 154 pounds (12 pound fat/12 pounds lean) before hitting 24% body fat. For the female trainee, at one half-pound per week is nearly a year of training; again that would be broken up into distinct training phases.

5. After finishing the mass-gaining phase, a consolidation phase of two weeks (this used to be called a ‘hardening’ phase) where calories are brought back down to maintenance levels (and cardio, if not being done, is brought in) should occur before actively dieting.

Of course, the diet itself is a completely separate topic, some prefer to lose as slowly as they’ve gained, others are using the ideas in my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook to strip off the fat as rapidly as possible so that they can get back to gaining again. Both are valid and my article series on Fat Loss for Athletes is worth reading for more information.

Let me summarize the above a little more briefly: trainees should set a bottom and top-end for acceptable body fat levels. For males, 10-15% is a good range, for females 19-27% or so works. Diet down until you hit the low end, stabilize for two weeks, gain until you hit the high end, stabilize for two weeks, then diet back down while keeping the muscle. Over many months or a year of training, you should end up with more muscle than you started with which is the whole goal.

You can worry about being lean and having a six pack when it’s warm and you don’t look stupid being mostly nude. The winter is a good time to pack on some muscle mass and justify all that Halloween candy (“I’m bulking, bro”).

But in the same way that many diets fail for a lot of reasons, there are equally common reasons that trainees fail to make the muscular gains that they desire. I want to look at several of them, addressing potential solutions along the way

Not eating enough

Outside of poor training (which can be either too much or too little), not eating enough is the number one mistake I see most trainees making who can’t gain muscle. This is true even of individuals who swear up, down and sideways that they eat a ton but no matter what they can’t gain weight. It’s been said that ‘hardgainers’ tend to be overtrainers and undereaters and there is much truth to that.

Almost invariably, when you track these big eaters, they really aren’t eating that much. Research has routinely shown that overweight individuals tend to under-estimate food intake (e.g. they think they are eating much less than they actually are) but in my experience ‘hardgainers’ are doing the opposite: vastly overestimating how much they are actually eating in a given day, or over the span of a week.

Similarly, although such trainees may get in a lot of food acutely, invariably they often compensate for those high-caloric intakes by lowering calories on the following day (or even in the same day). So while they might remember that one big-assed lunch meal, they won’t remember how they ate almost nothing later in the day because they got full.

Some people simply lack the appetite to eat sufficient amounts to gain muscle (or any weight at all). While they may be able to force feed calories for a little bit, their appetite regulatory mechanisms kick in and they unconsciously reduce calories. Their bodies also tend to upregulate metabolic rate better than others, so they burn off more calories (a phenomenon called non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT).

But the simple fact is this: if such ‘big-eaters’ were actually eating as much as they think they are, they would be at least gaining some body fat, even if they were gaining zero muscle. If a trainee swears he’s eating a ton, but he’s not even gaining body fat, I know he’s still not eating enough (or even as much as he thinks he is).

Since I’m talking about body fat, I might as well address another very common cause of poor muscle gain and that’s trainees who fear putting on even an ounce of body fat. They’ll deliberately keep their calories low all the time and then wonder why they aren’t magically synthesizing muscle mass out of thin air. At this point, I’m not even including the folks who want to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

The simple physiological fact is that, to gain muscle, you have to provide not only the proper training stimulus, but also the building blocks for the new tissue. This means not only sufficient protein (see below) but also sufficient calories and energy. While it’s wonderful to hope that the energy to build new muscle will be pulled out of fat cells, the reality is that this rarely happens (there are some odd exceptions such as folks beginning a program, and those returning from a layoff).

And while there are extremes (such as my Ultimate Diet 2.0 or some of the intermittent fasting schemes) that allow people to put on muscle while remaining lean, they always invariably alternate periods of low and high calories. With the high calorie part of the diet (e.g. the weekend on the UD2) providing sufficient protein and energy to drive muscle mass gains.

Now, although this is a slightly different topic, I entreat trainees not to take the ‘Eat enough to gain’ to the opposite extreme. While GFH (look it up) can work for many people, eating so much food that a trainee gains a disproportionate amount of fat is just as much of a mistake as not eating enough in the first place.

Unless you’re a sumo wrestler or football lineman, eventually the fat has to come off; the more you put on while gaining muscle mass, the longer you have to diet. Which is not only a psychological chore but often results in performance or muscle mass losses (especially if you diet badly).

What I’m getting at is some optimum level, an intake sufficient to provide sufficient calories and protein for muscle growth without becoming a total fat-ass. Which isn’t very helpful without some starting points which I’ll present now.

Muscle magazine claims notwithstanding, a natural trainee is usually doing damn well to gain 0.5 pounds of muscle per week (and a female might gain half of that). Yes, you’ll occasionally see a faster rate of gain but much more than that (especially for sustained periods) tends to be rare.

And while that may not sound like much, realize that a 0.5 lb per week muscle gain over the course of a year comes out to 26 pounds of lean body mass. And most won’t get that past their first year of training.

However, to get that rate of muscle mass gain will usually require some amount of fat gain, depending on how much over maintenance you’re eating, this might be an additional half pound of fat per week. So a reasonable weekly or monthly weight gain rate might be 1 pound per week or 4 pounds per month of which about half should be muscle and the other half fat.

Short dieting cycles can be inserted to take off the fat of course, a number of people on my forum have been using the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook to strip off fat between short bulking cycles so that they can get back to normal training.

I’d note that this shouldn’t take a huge number of calories over maintenance. Assuming a trainee is not burning off excessive calories through either a ton of cardio (or NEAT), you’re not looking at much more than 500 calories over maintenance to support about the maximum rate of muscle gain for a natural lifter. I’d suggest putting a majority of that on training days (and around training) with a lesser surplus on non-training days. That should help keep fat gains down somewhat.

Of course, this will have to be adjusted based on real world changes in body composition. If you’re not gaining any weight, you need to up calories. If you’re gaining a disproportionate amount of fat, you need to cut things back.

Problems with Protein Intake

While less common than simply not eating enough, I have found many individuals to have problems with inadequate protein intake when it comes to the desire to build muscle. Although they don’t usually want or need to gain a lot of muscle, endurance athletes tend to be the worst in terms of not getting enough protein, since they frequently overemphasize carbohydrates to such a ridiculous degree. But even among weight trainers, occasionally you find someone who simply won’t eat sufficient protein to support gains in muscle mass. Considering the rather high protein intake of even the average American, anywhere from 2-3 times the RDA, this is a little odd.

What usually happens is that these individuals have fallen into the trap of the endurance athlete and overemphasized carbohydrates to the point of neglecting protein (and usually fat as well); this was a much bigger problem in the 80′s and 90′s when sports nutritionists overemphasized carbs but isn’t heard of now (now, the opposite extreme, carbs are the devil, is more often seen).

Sometimes, in their quest to eliminate dietary fat from their diet, trainees quit eating meat, this seems to occur a lot among female trainees. Vegetarians can have greater problems but even eggs, fish and chicken can fulfill protein requirements easily. And while there is the occasional claim of someone building a lot of muscle with a true vegan diet, I’d say that most who claim veganism turned to that AFTER building up their muscle mass with a more traditional diet.

Occasionally you find someone who just doesn’t like protein very much. Women, moreso than men, tend to underconsume protein and overconsume carbohydrates. As low as the RDA for women is (44 grams/day), I’ve still run into women who aren’t even getting that much protein a day in their diet. You get the idea.

The point being that some people just don’t get enough protein. As with sufficient calories, adequate protein is critical for gains in muscle mass. The common number that is thrown out is 1 g/lb body mass and this is a good starting place. As I detail in The Protein Book, raising protein to 1.5 g/lb (another common value) may have small, cumulative benefits that current research can’t turn up. It usually can’t hurt unless it prevents sufficient intake of the other nutrients.

I would note that, for natural lifters, I don’t see much point to intakes over 1.5 g/lb. An exception is hardcore diets but I’m talking about muscle gain here. As caloric intake goes up, protein requirements go down and suggestions to eat 2 g/lb for naturals seems more of a ploy to sell protein powder than anything physiological.

As a final comment on protein intake, it’s very common to find wannabe bodybuilders taking protein intake to the other extreme, and making it the entirety of their daily diet. This ultimately sort of ties into the first problem I talked about: inadequate calorie intake. For the kinds of caloric intakes that many people need to gain muscle/weight at any decent rate, it’s nearly impossible to consume enough protein to do it. It’s also inefficient as hell, both metabolically and financially but those are separate issues.

For example, a 170 lb male may have a maintenance caloric requirement of around 2500 calories/day. To gain weight, he may need three thousand or more calories per day. Three thousand plus calories or more from protein alone is nearly impossible to achieve.

This is on top of the fact that protein calories aren’t used as efficiently for energy as calories from carbohydrates or fats (this can be great for weight control but is a real detriment for weight/muscle gain). That’s on top of the fact that protein plus carbohydrates is far more anabolic than protein or carbohydrates by themselves. Studies have shown that, once protein requirements are met, more muscle is gained by adding dietary energy (from carbs or fat) than from just plugging in more protein.

Is sufficient protein crucial for muscle mass gains? Yes.

Is it all a lifter should be eating? Absolutely not.

I suppose, for completeness, I should discuss the issue of protein quality, an issue that trainees (and especially bodybuilders) get themselves endlessly wound up about. In short (and, this is discussed in massive detail in The Protein Book), at an intake of 1.5 g/lb. from varied high quality sources, it just doesn’t matter. Quality matters hugely when you have someone eating a small amount of some single shitty protein. This describes conditions in third world countries, this doesn’t describe conditions for an American athlete eating plenty of protein from meat, fish, dairy, whey, casein, etc.

Which isn’t to say that different proteins don’t have varying pros and cons or aren’t more or less appropriate around training or what have you. I’m simply saying that, given sufficient protein and energy from high quality sources, protein quality isn’t nearly the issue that people (read: supplement companies) make it out to be. It certainly won’t be a deal breaker for muscle gains.

Training Issues: Cardio

Of course, diet isn’t the only place trainees run into problems, there are also issues related to training. To get it out of the way, let me talk about cardio training and mass gains, an area where opinions vary widely. Some say to do no cardio, some suggest it daily; the current fad of ‘intervals are the best for everything’ has people doing intervals multiple times per week while trying to gain muscle. What’s going on?

Frankly, for all but the most extreme hardgainer types (the guys who burn off a ton of calories when they try to gain weight), I think the inclusion of some cardio can be beneficial. It can help with appetite (by increasing it), keep conditioning up a bit, tends to improve recovery and may help alleviate some fat gain. Perhaps most importantly, it keeps the fat burning metabolic pathways running so that, when dieting is resumed, fat loss seems to occur faster.

However, too much will certainly hurt things. Reams of data suggest interference effects of excessive cardio on strength (and muscle mass gains); I won’t even bore you with the molecular mechanisms here (you can read AMPk: Master Metabolic Regulator for the details). But it’s only when it’s done excessively or at too high of an intensity (cough, cough, intervals) that it’s a problem.

I know that everything on the internet is true but this fad of keeping in lots of intervals when you’re trying to get stronger and bigger is frankly pretty stupid so far as I’m concerned. 20-30 minutes of boring old standard low to medium intensity cardio done 2-4 times per week is plenty and, surprise surprise, your legs might actually grow because you aren’t overtraining them with two weight sessions and two interval sessions per week.

Training issues: Weights

Of course, where the real problems usually start in terms of training is the weight room. To say that the training being performed by most individuals in most weight rooms sucks is an understatement. The problem is that much of the advice being followed is coming out of the professional bodybuilding ranks at least as it is disseminated through the bodybuilding magazines.

Yes, the internet has helped out with this and there’s a lot more realistic information out there but a lot of people are still trying to follow programs based on the training of elite drugged out bodybuilders. And, contrary to popular belief, 99% of internet trainees are not elite, or advanced. A lot of them aren’t even intermediates. But they are trying to follow programs aimed at those folks.

In my experience, the typical approach of blasting a muscle group once per week for an insane number of sets and exercises simply doesn’t work for the majority. Yes, fine, there are some who do fine on it. They usually have good genetics and hormones. But the number who failed completely with that type of training is legion. You can’t use the minority who succeed on it and ignore the majority who didn’t.

There’s a lot of reasons that type of training isn’t ideal for most people, this isn’t the place to discuss it. Fine, you get real sore, and you’re real tired coming out of the gym. But who cares if you aren’t making progress? Being sore and exhausted wasn’t the goal of this the last time I looked.

I should note that many fall at the opposite extreme of training, hitting a bodypart for one set once per week or what have you. They’ll go to complete muscular failure, hit the hard isometric hold and be blown out and shaking when they leave the gym. Again, since being tired isn’t the main goal, who cares. This can be just as big of a mistake for another set of reasons that I’m not going to discuss here.

The bottom line is that, in my opinion, in my experience, and in the realm of a lot of good research, something in between those two extremes appears to be best. A weekly training frequency of 3-4 times per week is usually quite doable although, for many (older trainees especially), four days may be pushing it unless the workouts are kept very short. And yes, some people get away training six days per week but they are usually in and out of the gym very quickly.

This will allow each bodypart to be hit roughly twice per week or, at the least, once every 5 days (about the lowest frequency I recommend for naturals). Upper/lower splits are popular but there are other ways to approach it as well.

A moderate number of sets, perhaps 4-8 per bodypart (more for larger, less for smaller) is usually about right as well. Research suggests that 40-60 contractions per bodypart per workout seems to give the optimal response. 4 sets of 10 would be at the low end of that, 8 sets of 8 (perhaps 2 exercises for 4 sets of 8 reps each) would be at the high end. A typical workout might last 60-90 minutes depending on how it’s split up.

One final comment on training before I wrap this up: an insidious (and stupid) idea that is out there (especially in the realm of bodybuilding) is that trainees should focus on irrelevant things: the feel, the squeeze, the pump. This is crap and guys who do this, unless they are on drugs, simply don’t grow. Muscle grows as a function of progressive tension overload, if you’re not adding weight to the bar over time, you’re not growing. This doesn’t mean that you have to add weight at every workout, but if you’re not gradually going heavier over time, you won’t be growing either.

Possibly one of the longest standing debates in sports nutrition (not that people don’t argue about stuff constantly) is over protein requirements for athletes. Traditionally, there have been two primary and opposing views to this topic.

In the first camp are mainstream nutrition types, usually registered dieticians who maintain that the RDA for protein is sufficient for all conditions, including individuals involved heavily in sports. Their bible, the RDA Handbook mirrors this stance. So what is the RDA? Currently it’s set at 0.8 g/kg (0.36 g/lb) protein per day. For a 200 lb individual that’s a mere 72 grams of protein per day. I bet most of the people reading this eat that at a meal.

As a sub-argument to what I wrote above, some will point out that, even if protein requirements in athletes are higher, since most strength athletes already eat more protein than the supposed requirements, there is no need to worry about it in the first place. That is, strength athletes already consume enough protein and needn’t focus on trying to get more.

At the other extreme are the athletes themselves who have long felt (and therefore argued) that high proteins are absolutely necessary for optimal results. Bodybuilders have traditionally used 1 g/lb (2.2 g/kg) as a baseline recommendation with others taking this level to 2 g/lb (4.4 g/kg) or sometimes even higher. Muscle magazines, usually with a vested interest in moving protein powder tend to promote high protein intakes with claims of athletes eating 800-1000 grams protein per day (a level only achievable with supplementation) being claimed by top bodybuilders.

Who’s Right?

Science nerds like me always want to see the research on the topic. Of course, if you know me at all, you know that I’ve read it all. To say that it’s a bit mixed is an understatement and even researchers can’t make up their damn minds, preferring to hold polite arguments with one another for months in scientific journals.

Some research seems to clearly indicate an increased requirement for protein. But it uses a methodology (nitrogen balance) that is questionable at best, so the low-protein folks will shoot it down.

Other research (done with low intensity aerobic work) suggests that training improves protein retention; that is, as athletes become more trained, their protein requirements may actually go down. But does research with lower intensity aerobic work apply to the kind of training a strength/power athlete is doing? Probably not, so the high protein researchers will shoot that down. Around and around it goes.

Some research (again using a questionable methodology) suggests that athletes need more protein when they start a new or intensified training program but after a couple of weeks, protein requirements go back down. What happens if you’re always pushing your limits day in, day out, week in, week out? Nobody knows.

Of course the impact of anabolic steroids on protein requirements is almost a complete unknown although, empirically, most who would argue that a natural bodybuilder only needs 1 g/lb daily would also argue that someone using anabolics needs about double that to maximize the effects of the drugs.

A final problem is what’s being measured. Athletes want to know what will maximizes their performance, strength, power, speed, throwing, etc. Researchers invariably measure stuff of less relevance to athletes and coaches. Nitrogen balance, amino acid uptake, sometimes actual muscle growth is measured over the length of the study. Is the amount of protein needed to optimize performance different than what’s needed to maximize some aspect of muscular physiology?

An added issue is that solely looking at skeletal muscle may be missing pathways of importance to athletes. Immune system, connective tissue synthesis and a host of other pathways use amino acids; presumably athletes will upregulate those pathways. Meaning that true protein requirements, if you only look at what’s going on in the muscle, may be under-estimating what athletes truly need to maximize every aspect of performance.

The debate rages on and on and I’m not going togo into much more detail here about it. If you want to read about it in seemingly endless detail, I spent an entire chapter addressing both sides of the controversy in The Protein Book.

Sufficed to say that, as is always the case, both sides have their research, both ends of the research can be criticized on some methodological grounds or another and I don’t think researchers are going to stop arguing with one another any time soon.

Reaching a Consensus

And yet, I’m going to tell you how to rationalize all of the above stuff that I imagine most of you skimmed in the first place. Two researchers, named Tipton and Wolfe wrote a cool paper about this argument. In it they first detailed all of the stuff I just bored you with. At the end they gave their recommendations where they basically argued that

• We don’t know how much protein is required to optimize all of the potential pathways important to athletes.
• We know that a protein intake of 1.4 g/lb (3.0 g/kg) isn’t harmful and may have benefits that are too small to be measured in research
• As long as eating lots of protein doesn’t keep an athlete from eating too few of the other nutrients (carbs/fats), there’s no reason to not eat a lot. And there may be benefits.

Essentially, a high protein intake won’t hurt an athlete (basically everything you may have read about the dangers of high protein intakes is nonsense), it may provide small benefits of importance to elite athletes and, at the end of the day athletes and coaches don’t give a shit about pedantic scientific debates over amino acid metabolism that gives researchers and nerds like me a giant hardon. Admittedly, they didn’t put it in exactly those terms but that’s the gist of it.

So here’s my recommendation, strength/power athletes should aim for 1.5 g/lb protein per day (again, this is about 3.3 g/kg for the metrically inclined). So for a 200 lb strength/power athlete, that’s 300 grams of protein per day. For a 300 lber, that’s 450 grams per day. If you’re Jeff Lewis, I imagine your protein requirements are basically ‘All of it’ or perhaps ‘A cow’. Per day.

Since most strength/power athletes have plenty high caloric requirements, this will still leave plenty of room for the other macros and, if nothing else, will ensure that protein intake is not limiting in any way. I’d note that female athletes often restrict calories heavily (for both good and bad reasons) and it is possible for them to get into situations where protein ends up making up damn near all of their daily food intake. There is some evidence that female athletes can get by with less protein but I’m not going to get into that here; perhaps a later article for Elite Fitness can address that.

I’d add that athletes who are using anabolics may wish to take this even higher, 2 g/lb (4.4 g/kg) or possibly higher. Again, very little research here.

I should address one other issue that always seems to come up about now which is whether to set protein requirements relative to lean body mass or total weight. There are some good arguments for both. In theory, using lean body mass probably makes the most sense, fat cells don’t have a huge protein requirement. At the same time, problems in measuring LBM and the fact that a little bit too much protein is arguably superior to too little make total bodyweight more tenable. Or at least easier to use. I’d only note that, for athletes carrying tremendous amounts of body fat (you know who you are), scaling protein intake back to take that into account may no be a bad idea. It may not be necessary but it can still be done.

More Protein Issues

Having looked at the issue of quantity, I want to talk briefly about issues of quality and variety. Frankly, the whole deal with protein quality has been blown way out of proportion by most folks. Unless you’re talking about folks eating small amounts of single shitty quality proteins every day, it’s just not that relevant. So yeah, for someone getting 30 grams of some piss quality grain as their only protein source, quality matters.

When an athlete is eating 1.5 g/lb or more of high quality (read: animal source) proteins per day, it really doesn’t. Now, yes, there are differences between proteins in terms of digestion speed (which is relevant for around workout nutrition) and other micronutrients (e.g. red meat has lots of zinc and iron, fatty fish has fish oils, etc.), amino acid can vary too (e.g. dairy proteins have more leucine than other sources) but unless you live on that one source, it’s just not that critical an issue to worry about most of the time. Rather, I recommend that strength/power athletes try to obtain their daily protein from mixed sources every day. That way, any potential limitation of one protein will be fixed by the consumption of another protein. As well, although there isn’t much research to base this on, I feel that consuming different protein sources at a given meal may be superior to single sources. You’re getting slightly different amino acid patterns, digestion speeds, etc. You’ll see this reflected in the sample menus below.

Of course, protein powders are always an option. I think they tend to have their greatest utility around training but they can be used for athletes on the go, or who are working endlessly during the day and who need to get protein in large amounts quickly. For various reasons (discussed, of course, in my book), I prefer milk protein isolate (a mix of whey and casein) for most applications. Fast digesting proteins such as whey are most appropriate before or during training (I prefer MPI post-workout).

Putting it to Use

So with that as a background, I want to present two sample meal plans, focusing only on protein intake for the two example lifters I used above. One plan is based around 300 grams of protein per day, the other around 450 grams of protein per day. Although I didn’t touch on meal frequency in this article, athletes with large food intakes generally need to split their meals up so I’ll be using a 5-6 meal/day frequency in the examples below. Each meal below contains either 50 grams of protein (left column) or 75 grams of protein (right column).

I want to make it clear that I didn’t present these meals in any order of importance, nor should readers simply do these meal plans without thinking about it. Rather, I wanted to show lifters how they could achieve the kinds of protein intakes I discussed above in a practical manner. Of course, bigger and smaller athletes can scale the numbers up or down (or add additional meals) as needed to hit their targets.

Let me make it clear that the above are purely examples of the types and amounts of food that athletes could eat to reach the protein intakes listed above. There obviously other good sources of protein and athletes requiring less protein on a daily basis would scale the amounts downwards.