Great post, thanks for posting. Since you asked for suggestions I’ll give a nitpik,
- “1.6-2.2g/kg in order to preserve or build muscle.”
1.6g/kg seems to be where most people fail to see gains from additional consumption of protein, you can build muscle while eating 0.8g/kg it just potentially won’t be as quick. So dont hold yourself back from working out just because you can’t/won’t change your diet to be high protein, you’ll still get large gains, especially if you are untrained (both from the neural side and the muscle growth side).
To be clear I still support eating large amounts of protein, it’s how I lost large amounts of weight too. If you’re trying to both lose weight and gain muscle at the same time, it’s wise to eat even more.
Thanks! I asked Claude to look into this a bit more and its response was in line with my expectations, i.e. roughly “the 1.6g/kg number is the central estimate of a high-quality meta-analysis, but the uncertainty bars around that number are very wide, and disputed by later analysis”. It also pointed me to a really interesting post by Greg Nuckols about the topic: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/protein-science/
I don’t think I’m going to change the numbers at that point in the post, but I may add something about not needing tons of protein to gain muscle if you’re a beginner.
Fair enough, I haven’t seen that link before, interesting stuff. You’ve inspired me to try an extra high protein diet and see how I feel. Interestingly the USDA’s new guideline is 1.2g-1.6g/kg and that’s not even for strength training.
I think the only thing I’d change with the framing is that I got the impression 1.6g-2.2g/kg was required for strength training rather than what you need to maximize gains. Otherwise I retract my critic of the science, the evidence does seem to point towards 2g/kg or perhaps more as being optimal.
My overall impression is that this is one of the trickiest things in the post to evaluate; iirc Menno Henselmans would describe a target number on the lower end, while several other exercise science communicators would suggest higher numbers “to be safe”; eating tons of protein can be expensive or difficult but I don’t know of a sufficiently-straightforward way to express the tradeoff and uncertainty without a long digression.
Great post, thanks for posting. Since you asked for suggestions I’ll give a nitpik,
- “1.6-2.2g/kg in order to preserve or build muscle.”
1.6g/kg seems to be where most people fail to see gains from additional consumption of protein, you can build muscle while eating 0.8g/kg it just potentially won’t be as quick. So dont hold yourself back from working out just because you can’t/won’t change your diet to be high protein, you’ll still get large gains, especially if you are untrained (both from the neural side and the muscle growth side).
To be clear I still support eating large amounts of protein, it’s how I lost large amounts of weight too. If you’re trying to both lose weight and gain muscle at the same time, it’s wise to eat even more.
Thanks! I asked Claude to look into this a bit more and its response was in line with my expectations, i.e. roughly “the 1.6g/kg number is the central estimate of a high-quality meta-analysis, but the uncertainty bars around that number are very wide, and disputed by later analysis”. It also pointed me to a really interesting post by Greg Nuckols about the topic: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/protein-science/
I don’t think I’m going to change the numbers at that point in the post, but I may add something about not needing tons of protein to gain muscle if you’re a beginner.
Fair enough, I haven’t seen that link before, interesting stuff. You’ve inspired me to try an extra high protein diet and see how I feel. Interestingly the USDA’s new guideline is 1.2g-1.6g/kg and that’s not even for strength training.
I think the only thing I’d change with the framing is that I got the impression 1.6g-2.2g/kg was required for strength training rather than what you need to maximize gains. Otherwise I retract my critic of the science, the evidence does seem to point towards 2g/kg or perhaps more as being optimal.
My overall impression is that this is one of the trickiest things in the post to evaluate; iirc Menno Henselmans would describe a target number on the lower end, while several other exercise science communicators would suggest higher numbers “to be safe”; eating tons of protein can be expensive or difficult but I don’t know of a sufficiently-straightforward way to express the tradeoff and uncertainty without a long digression.