Determining how much protein you actually need in your day is easy

In bodybuilding or strength-training circles it seems like people are always fixated on how much protein they need to get in their diet. This is very important to someone that is trying to build muscle because if you don't get the right amount of protein you are not going to see muscle growth the way that you would actually like to see it happen. It is a necessary part of the process.

This only really applies to people that are looking for muscle growth and not really for people that are looking to be better at a particular sport. As I get older, I tend to focus more on just maintaining my muscle mass, rather than grow it but that is an objective in and of itself. There is a science to it that has been narrowed down to a rather precise amount depending on your age, current weight, and desired weight as well.

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There really isn't much argument about this anymore because the science all kind of agrees that there is a certain amount of protein that you need in a day for maintenance and a certain amount you need for growth. Some people just overload and don't really even count grams of protein and this is fine provided you don't find yourself consuming too many calories and putting on fat because of it. Protein will behave inside your body just like anything else if you have too much of it. if the body can't use it, it will store it as fat. That is just the way that it is.

NIH states that the daily minimum of protein should be around 0.4 grams of protein per pound of body weight but this is for someone to just survive who never exercises. If you are reading this blog you probably are already or are at least desiring to be someone a bit more active than just surviving so it can be a bit more complicated for you.

I find that calculators are quite helpful such as this one here. It is just a lot easier to use one of these rather than read a chart since there are so many factors such as age, fitness goals, whether you are male of female, and how much exercise you currently do.

One thing I would like to emphasize is that you be honest when you are filling this thing out. If you don't really exercise 5 times a week at a moderate pace, then don't say you do. You'll screw up the output if you do that.

So for me at nearly 100kg (210 lbs) and the fact that I exercise reasonable hard 5 times a week and my desire is to lose weight or maintain it, my necessary protein intake is 235 grams. PER DAY.

This can be a kind of daunting this to accomplish for someone that doesn't focus heavily on getting a bunch of protein. I do focus on it and since I don't always have time to meal prep properly I supplement with protein shakes. With my shakes I manage to take care of nearly 100 grams of the protein per day before I even need to consider my actual meals. It is pretty easy with just a little bit of dedication to manage the other 135 with real food.

Another thing that people can use if they are the kind of person that uses apps for everything is to download and use the free MyFitnessPal app.

There is a paid "pro" account in this app but I haven't found any real practical purpose for it. The good thing about MyFitnessPal is that it has almost all the nutritional information of all food in the world already stored in the database. With most items you can simply scan the bar code on the item and it will add it to your daily intake. It's handy for sure and because it is free there is no reason to not give it a try.

If you want to gain or maintain muscle, this very important step is something that you should definitely pay attention to. It might seem daunting at first, but it gets to be routine especially if you repeat meals. MyFitnessPal will save any meal you enter so it is extremely easy to add them again a second time.