Name: Nutrition Coach: How Much Protein You Actually Need (Ignored by 99%)
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T21:58:48.000Z
Duration: 8 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What is the maximal anabolic dose of protein per meal for the goal of muscle building?

And we boiled it down to first in the order of importance is total daily protein.

If you get total daily protein right, then the timing of the constituent doses of the total are just a distant secondary concern.

If you can give an across the board recommendation of how much protein people should consume post resistance training, let's just leave cardiovascular training separately for the moment.

Post resistance training, what would that number be?

And how long after training should one consume that protein?

If the goal is muscle protein synthesis to maximize MPS, we really haven't seen doses beyond 50ish grams, 30, 30 or so to 50.

My colleague Brad Schoenfeld and I, we scoured the literature and we wrote this paper on what is the maximal anabolic dose of protein per meal for the goal of muscle building?

And we boiled it down to somewhere between 0.4 and to roughly 0.6 grams per kilogram of body weight.

And so in freedom units, we're talking 0.2 to 0.25 grams per pound.

And that is what appears to max out muscle protein.

So like about a quarter of your of your body weight in pounds is if you're looking at grams of protein to maximize per muscle protein.

Because I think many people, including myself, are gonna say, okay, but

I mean, I wake up in the morning and I try to work out before I eat.

Sometimes I'll have a little bit of protein.

But let's assume two conditions just for simplicity.

Somebody did resistance training in the previous two hours or and they're trying to evaluate how much protein to eat at that meal in order to maximize muscle protein synthesis.

Or they're eating a meal separate on a day, they're not resistance training.

So and then as just kind of a generic example of a meal that doesn't follow resistance training in the window of two hours or so, how much protein should be consumed at these two different meals.

We did a meta analysis of the existing literature, looking at the anabolic window thing and for the listeners, a meta analysis analysis is a study of the studies.

You collect all of the studies on a given question and then you kind of see, you look at, you know, effect sizes and you sort of see where the evidence leans, whether there's an, you know, a significant or meaningful effect.

We collected studies that compared a protein timing condition where protein was timed within an hour either pre or post exercise, and

then the control group of the study would have to have protein a minimum of two hours of nutrient neglect on both sides of the training bound.

So we collected all the studies that compared these conditions.

Essentially, we found that as long as total daily protein was about 1.66 1.7 grams per kilogram of body weight, so about 0.7 grams per pound, as long as total daily protein was at that or more, then the timing relative to the training bout didn't make a difference.

This is important for people to hear because what this translates to in my ears is a very simple takeaway, which is that you don't need to obsess about the post training anabolic window, especially if you're eating prior to training.

Yes, because you have nutrients circulating now.

If you eat your last bite of food at 8pm and you wake up at 7am and you're training at 10am, then perhaps by the time you finish your leg workout or whatever resistance training workout, you would want to prioritize getting some protein and other nutrients into your system.

What you're saying, basically, it makes it so logical, now that I hear it, which is that you have nutrients circulating in your body and stored in your glycogen and so you're pulling from a reservoir.

Fasted doesn't necessarily mean starving.

The first in the order of importance is total daily protein.

Many people find it difficult to distribute their protein evenly through the day.

Many people also find it difficult to get enough protein in the middle of the day meals or the morning meals.

And I know people will say, well, you have some eggs and some protein.

But at least in this country, most people tend to emphasize dinner as their largest meal, for better or worse.

So a lot of people stack their protein heavily towards the end of the day.

Assuming caloric load is appropriate, et cetera.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong or bad about doing that from the perspective of body composition and health?

We're talking about the general population, not somebody who's trying to win a physique competition or run a marathon or ultra.

One of my colleagues, Yassin Lock, he took our, our pre post model and he kind of like he ran his own randomized control trial version of it.

But he wanted to kind of exploit the possibility of further protein neglect on both sides of the training bout.

So he compared an immediate pre and post immediate Pre and post 25 grams of protein sandwiching the resistance training bout with a group that neglected all nutrients for three hours on both sides of the resistance training valve.

Total daily protein was optimized at around close to a gram per pound, 2ish grams per kilogram of body weight.

No significant difference, no meaningful difference in muscle size and strength gains at the end of the I believe it was a 10 or 12 week study.

So what I'm hearing through all these answers, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's tremendous flexibility as to when you consume the protein that we all need, but

that the overall protein requirement seems to center somewhere around 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight somewhere in there total per day.

If the amount in a given meal is a bit higher than 20 or 30 grams, you're fine.

If it's a bit lower, you're probably fine.

But the thing that also I believe needs highlighting that most people don't talk about is distinguishing between what's in circulation versus when one ingests something.

We love to think that we drink 30 grams of protein or eat the chicken breast or the piece of steak or have the eggs and suddenly those amino acids are available.

And it makes so much more rational sense now that you describe it, that eating first makes those amino acids available for the muscles a couple hours later.

And we just don't learn about it that way.

So I'm very grateful that you're bringing it up that way.

I realized we could probably drill into protein requirements ad nauseam.

The way I like to put it is total daily protein is the cake.

The specific timing of protein relative to the training belt, that is the icing on the cake.

And it's a very thin layer of icing on it.

And when you form practical takeaways from the findings, we can say that if you prefer to train fasted and you just feel better doing your cardio in a fasted state, great, do it fasted.

If you can't stand doing fasted cardio and you'd rather have a breakfast beforehand, then go ahead and do that.