Exercise/Protein question

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I have a question for all of you exercise gurus out there. I've read in exercise magazines that if you're doing any sort of strength training, you should be eating around 110-140 grams of protein a day, or you won't be able to build any new muscle. My question is, how on earth do you eat that much? Do you take supplements?

In general, my daily meals will consist of a sandwich and something like yogurt for lunch (10-20g total) and chicken or fish with vegetables and rice for dinner (30g total). And that's on a good day! I just don't see how you can feasibly get 120g of protein a day unless you're eating like, 2 whole chickens daily (a single whole chicken typically lasts me a full week or close to it). Are those realistic dietary requirements or are those numbers too high?

I pretty much focus exclusively on cardio when I exercise, but I would really like to start incorporating more strength training and building some muscle, I just have no clue what I'm doing (there's soo much information out there, and a lot of it is conflicting, kind of overwhelming lol)

Eating two-meals a day should be sufficient for building muscle(small meal and large meal).

"You have to keep taking in protein every few hours to build muscle" is one of the bigger exercise-myths in my opinion.

It's BS. A pound of chicken has, what, 120g of protein? A pound of human muscle will have roughly the same amount, right? Nobody's adding a pound of muscle a day. Obviously this process won't be completely efficient, but you see the point.

http://www.jacn.org/content/19/suppl_5/513S.full

Another really interesting study here is a Russian study on protein needs of Olympic weightlifters. http://www.drmelsiff.com/10352/russian- ... -and-diet/ Recommends protein be a whopping 16-18% of calories.

Without shakes or eating pounds of meat daily, it's not really all too possible to get the mythical bodybuilding protein requirements, but plenty of people before those options existed were strong and muscular. I think growth of muscle mass, while obviously being dependent upon protein, is much more dependent on total calories consumed than protein.

Basically, as long as your protein intake isn't at like starving in Africa kinda levels, you'd be best off just upping calories and letting protein up itself from upping calories. What you're eating currently is probably too little. Probably would be best to double the total of what you're eating at least for gaining muscle, usually you eat around 3000 calories a day or so.

Proteins are important, and I'd recommend that you consume at least 1.8 grams per kg of bodyweight (and maybe slightly more, just for the sake of "safety"). You can get 140 grams from a dinner with meat, a cottage cheese as an inbetween snack and 5 eggs before bedtime. Based on my own experiences, it's far more convenient to just invest in a bucket of proteins, though.

One thing many people don't get, though, is that protein powder is not instead of a healthy diet, it's a supplement to a healthy diet. Not only do most people who exercise eat to little proteins, they eat to little unsaturated fat as well. However, most people get more than enough carbs and fiber.

You're supposed to eat a pound of protein per lb of bodyweight if you want to gain muscle.

When I was at uni, I was eating 180+g (I'm 185lbs) of protein (120g from shakes and 60g from chicken) while doing judo/kickboxing and 45 mins cardio every other day for a couple of months and the amount of muscle I gained from doing mostly cardio was ridiculous. I didn't gain or lose weight, I just packed on muscle! I did wonder how big I would have got if I just did strength training!

I drink a lot of milk (always have--I was brought up drinking it) and it is an excellent source of protein. It has 36g per litre (which I can easily drink in a day), which is a good start right there. If you eat two servings of Greek Yogurt then that's another 16g (it makes a good post-workout snack), and you can get 10-20g from a handful of almonds. A decent portion of meat (such as a chicken breast) contains easily more than 50g of protein (can't remember the exact number). When I'm being conscientous about these things I also eat 10 turkey meatballs as an evening (after dinner) snack, which would give ~20g. The rest will tend to just sneak in through miscellaneous things you're eating which aren't necessarily big sources of protein but which nonetheless add up.

I refuse to take supplements because they are expensive, I've read in Consumer Reports that many have levels of heavy metals above FDA thresholds, and because I (unfairly!) associate them with dumb jocks. But it is definitely possible to get plenty of protein from your diet. I think a lot of fitness gurus over-emphasize how much protein you need anyway. And I have good sized muscles (if only I could get rid of that last bit of fat so that people could really see them )

For starters, if you want any reliable information about exercise (and gaining muscle) NEVER read magazine's (or just don't do what hey tell you).
There's so much free information on the internet (although it can be hard to weed out all the bro-science).

But yeah.. he protein thingy is right heheh. As a rule of thmb just use 2x your LBM (lean body mass).

The mistake people make is that they think that more protein-->more muscle. It's only true up to a certain threshold. There seems to be some agreement on about 20-30g per meal. Your body can't break down more than that at any one time.