How Much Protein You Really Need (According to Science)

how much protein do you really need especially if the goal is to maintain or even build muscle now when I was younger and first trying to build muscle key word trying I was told by many people that I needed to consume one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day and for me at the time that would have been about 175 grams of protein each day was that too much too little well in today's video we're not only going to discuss the proper amounts of protein we're also going to talk about why bodybuilders and strength athletes are not the only ones that need to be concerned with their protein intake for example Runners and other endurance athletes might need more protein than you actually think so we'll talk about those recommendations for different people and even get into a little bit about if too much can ever be unsafe it's going to be a nitrogenous one so let's jump right into this thank you so a few quick Basics on proteins a protein is made up of hundreds to even thousands of amino acids bonded or strung together and amino acids are compounds made up of carbon hydrogen oxygen and even nitrogen and this nitrogen is going to be important for our discussion about potential safety concerns and even when we talk about something called nitrogen balance but even though a protein could be made up of thousands of amino acids there are still just a total of 20 amino acids that our body utilizes to build various proteins so that means a protein or its unique feature and functionality is dependent on the order or the sequence of the amino acids the number and just how they're folded and bonded together now obviously for our discussion we're going to focus on the types of proteins that are utilized in this amazing tissue the muscle tissue but as a quick cool FYI proteins are used for much more than just muscles they're pretty much classified into five categories you've got enzymes made from proteins certain hormones are made up of protein we've got transport proteins that literally transport substances throughout the blood you've got immune system proteins like antibodies are made from protein and again of course the structural and contractile protein of the muscle tissue that we'll focus on so how do we know how much protein we need well for us to answer this it's helpful to understand that protein is in constant turnover throughout our bodies meaning that throughout a day your body is simultaneously breaking down proteins as well as building or synthesizing new proteins so for example during resistance training or certain types of exercise you'd be breaking down more proteins but during rest and feeding you'd be building up or synthesizing more proteins and so this whole synthesizing building of proteins versus the breakdown of proteins is one of the ways that researchers and Labs have figured out how much protein we actually need and they do this by measuring something called nitrogen balance nitrogen balance is the difference between nitrogen intake which would come from protein intake and nitrogen loss which would come from from the breakdown of protein and as we'll learn a little bit later the byproducts of protein breakdown will get excreted in things like the urine sweat and even the feces but as you may have already gathered if intake equals loss then we'd be in this nitrogen balance and in theory we would need at least that to maintain muscle but what if we wanted to actually build muscle well then we'd need nitrogen intake to be greater than nitrogen loss and be in a positive nitrogen balance and the opposite would also be true if we had nitrogen loss greater than nitrogen intake we would be in a negative nitrogen balance and could potentially lose muscle so let's actually talk numbers here how much protein do you need in a day to be in nitrogen balance or even positive nitrogen balance to build muscle well the recommended dietary allowance or RDA for protein for adults is 0. 8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day or about 0. 36 grams per pound of body weight per day so with my example of when I was younger at 175 pounds that I mentioned in the intro according to the RDA I would need about 63 or 64 grams of protein per day two things here one I am going to mostly just use grams per kilogram for the rest of the video but I'll do my best to put the pound conversion on screen but if you want to do the math for yourself you just take your own body weight and pounds and divide that by 2.

2 to get your weight in kilograms and the second thing we need to understand is that the RDA is the amount of the nutrient that you would need to maintain your basic nutritional needs in a sense the amount you'd need to not get sick and maintain basic physiological functions so 0. 8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day is not going to be enough even for someone who's just relatively active with basic exercise definitely not enough for people who do higher intensity exercise let alone athletes that recommended range is going to be higher and we're going to see that ranges from 1. 2 grams to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day so let's apply some of these numbers to me as an example using my body weight of 175 pounds or about 79.

5 kilos if we went with the lower end of 1. 2 grams per kilogram then I would need about 94 grams of protein per day but if we went with the higher end of about 2. 0 I would need 159 grams of protein which wasn't too far off actually from the recommendation I was getting from my friends in the early college Years of doing a gram per pound of body weight and having 175 grams per day but as you can see there's quite a big range if I went with the low end I would only need 94 but if I went with a higher end I'd need 159.

so why do we have this big range now you might have assumed that it depends on the type of exercise the intensity of exercise and even your goals and you might have also assumed that those who are more interested in increasing size and muscle mass or hypertrophy and muscle strength would want to be at the higher end of that 2. 0 recommendation and you'd be correct with that assumption but what's very surprising about that is that there are other types of athletes that would stero typically be seen as big huge muscular people they're definitely fit in their own right but they would actually need to be at that higher 2. 0 range so let's go to the Whiteboard and plot this out from 1.

2 to 2. 0 to see where different types of athletes and different types of exercise intensities and modalities would fall and more importantly where you would fall so here we have the protein recommendations plotted on this Black Arrow starting as low as the 0. 8 grams per kilogram that we mentioned with the RDA going all the way up to the higher end of that 2.

0 gram per kilogram of body weight we also have different types of exercises plotted in different ranges here or different types of exercise modalities and hopefully this will help you figure out where you fall along the spectrum of different protein recommendations so let's start with the recreational athlete this would be somebody who exercises a few times a week maybe they play basketball with their friends twice a week or maybe they go on a couple of hikes or walks but that's the majority of their exercise they definitely still want to increase from that 0. 8 gram per kilogram to above that 1. 0 gram per kilogram of body weight now the green is actually where a lot of people find themselves in this would include things like the middle distance endurance athlete maybe you like running 5Ks or 10ks recreationally or maybe you spend a lot of time on the exercise bike or the treadmill and this can vary a little bit and I'll touch on this again when we get to the ultra endurance athlete in just a second but it also would include the consistent gym guard that person who's going five to six times a week they have like that balance of cardio and resistance training maybe they even go to some of the classes offered by the gym now this person may have some desire to increase muscle size a little bit maybe increase their strength and maybe even a little bit of a focus on muscular endurance but they're not totally really into like hey I don't want to get huge but a little bit of a size increase would be okay if that's the case they may want to come closer to that 1.

6 gram per kilogram of body weight but what's not going to shock people is those who are very active in building muscle bodybuilders wanting to do a lot of hypertrophy training a lot of my friends fell into this category where they wanted to put on a lot of muscle mass this would be not a shocker going closer to that 2. 0 gram per kilogram of body weight now they'll often cycle their training from an active muscle building phase to more of a muscle maintenance phase and during that muscle maintenance phase they could technically decrease it a little bit and not have to stay as high at that 2. 0 gram per kilogram of body weight if they stayed there is it going to hurt them no and we are going to talk a little bit about safety concerns if there are any safety concerns going above that number but we'll talk about that in just a second because I want to go over this Ultra endurance athlete and this is often very surprising to a lot of students when we first show them this chart because one this range is so great with the ultra endurance athlete going all the way down to 1.

2 all the way up to 2. 0 and another thing that's surprising and they always think why in the world would an ultra endurance athlete ever need the same amount that somebody who's trying to bodybuild or hypertrophy training because if you look at the body type of an ultra endurance athlete compared to like a bodybuilder or somebody who's concerned with hypertrophy training they look a bit different right the person who's trying to build muscle looks like and they do have more muscle mass doesn't mean the ultra endurance athlete doesn't have their own Fitness capabilities in their own right but it kind of does pose or make sense why people would have that question based on their body type so let's talk about why they may have to be up to this 2. 0 range at some times Ultra endurance athletes will often cycle their training even the middle distance athlete will do some cycling and they'll get to a point where they're increasing their mileage and their volume throughout a week let's say it's a runner and that Runner is increasing their mileage to the point where they get up to 80 miles a week they're running 80 miles a week and some of their long runs they may be running for three to four hours at a time during that three to four hour period there is going to be more protein breakdown than there would be if somebody's only running for an hour so that kind of makes sense so if I have more protein breakdown with the amount of volume that I'm accumulating during the week especially even during the those long runs it makes sense that I'm going to need to replenish that Protein that's being broken down another reason why they would fall into this 2.

0 category at times during those high volume weeks or the high volume period of training is because they'll end up using a greater percentage of protein for energy than a lot of these other athletes or exercisers would because again if you're running that long and for that much time you are just going to have to tap into protein for an energy source our main energy source for our muscle cells is going to be carbohydrates and fats and all of us will sometimes use a small amount of protein for an energy source but again when you're accumulating that much volume it's going to take more protein as an energy source or at least utilize more protein as an energy source and again another reason why they would have to replenish that with a higher amount of protein intake so let's discuss a few other things regarding the protein recommendations that we just talked about on that chart one Whatever category you found yourself in you still know notice that there was a little bit of a range in protein recommendation for example you could have two different people doing the exact same exercise routine and based on differences in physiology and genetics you might see that one person might need more or a little bit less protein than the other person and because of that you are going to want to do some experimentation if you're not meeting your muscle maintenance or muscle strength or size goals or needs then you would obviously want to increase that protein intake to the higher end of that Spectrum again based on what category you find yourself in the other thing that these recommendations assume they are based on the idea that you are getting enough caloric intake to meet your energy demands or needs meaning you're getting enough carbohydrates enough fats and then obviously we're adding the protein component on here because if you are trying to lose weight and when most people talk about losing weight they're talking about losing fat and often still want to hold on to the muscle but when you're trying to lose weight you're going to be at a caloric deficit and if you're at a caloric deficit kind of like what we talked about with the ultra endurance athlete more more of the protein that you're ingesting is going to get funneled in and utilized as an energy source so that means it would be pulled away from muscle maintenance and even increasing muscle size and strength and so if that's the case and you're at a caloric deficit you're going to want to increase your protein intake overall and as a proportion of your macronutrients to kind of offset that extra protein being utilized for energy and finally let's talk about that upper end of the two point grams per kilogram for people who would consider themselves serious bodybuilders is that 2. 0 really enough because you'll often hear in the bodybuilder realm that you need more than that 2. 5 grams up to 3.

5 grams per kilogram of body weight so the first question that you may think of with that amount of protein is is that actually safe well let's talk about protein breakdown in a little bit more detail when we break down protein in our bodies there's a byproduct called ammonia ammonia is a nitrogen containing compound that is actually toxic to the body so then what happens is the liver will convert that ammonia yeah into something called urea and then urea can be excreted in the urine now our body has a maximum rate at which it can convert ammonia to that urea so the idea is if you have too much protein and too much ammonia as a byproduct then you could run into problems of toxicity and so most data shows that that 2. 5 grams per kilogram is still relatively safe but they tend to say that should likely be the upper limit one because there isn't much data to support that anything above that can really improve muscle protein synthesis even in the serious bodybuilders and then two obviously anything you go above that the more protein you continue to ingest you increase your risk of maxing out that rate of ammonia conversion to urea and then causing a safety issue with your wonderful body so hopefully that gave you some useful information about the daily recommendations for protein intake and I apologize about all that gram per kilogram talk and the conversions and a little bit of the math that we had to do but that does give me a nice segue to say thank you to the sponsor today's video brilliant brilliant. org is an amazing interactive online learning platform for stem subjects it's one of the best ways to learn math science and computer science and for those of you that are new to the channel we've been working with brilliant for years because we truly believe in what they do for people's education I still personally use brilliant so no matter where you are in your educational Journey if you're in junior high high school college or just want to be a lifelong learner brilliant will definitely have lessons that are applicable to you and as a bonus they're constantly adding new lessons each and every month my favorite lessons are still the ones on scientific thinking because I love improving logic critical thinking skills and learning how to apply knowledge to real world situations so if you're interested in becoming a little bit more brilliant go to brilliant.