Hey guys, Paddy here!
Gary is somewhere up the mountains of South America, and doesn’t have great internet access right now. So he asked me to send out an email this week.
You may (or may not) have noticed
that I have been pretty absent from social media the last while (which has been quite refreshing I must say). The reason I have been absent is because I have been working away at updating the nutrition course lessons. We have had a lot of students complete the course and provide their feedback, and I wanted to update the course with this
feedback in mind. I also wanted to expand on a few topics in the course and ensure that it really does cover quite a lot of what someone coaching nutrition is likely to encounter.
One of the topics
I wanted to expand on in the course was the topic of protein intake.
You would be surprised at how much confusion there is around protein intake and how much protein is sufficient. We see this all the
time with our coaching clients, and you certainly see this on social media. Like many issues in nutrition, a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that when people ask questions like “how much protein should you eat?”, they aren’t all asking the same question.
Some are asking about the minimum amount of protein necessary to prevent deficiency. Some are asking about how much protein is needed to optimise muscle building. Some are asking how much protein is needed to prevent muscle loss while dieting. Some are asking about the intake for
sedentary populations, while others are asking about the intake for heavily exercising populations.
And the answer can be vastly different depending on the exact specifics of the question.
The protein needs to prevent protein deficiency are different for someone who is sedentary vs. someone who trains. There is a difference between the protein intake needed to prevent deficiency and the protein
intake needed to optimise health/fitness/performance. The needs of someone with low body fat and someone with more body fat are also different (if we are to give a recommendation based on body weight alone i.e. grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day). The needs of the elderly are different than that of the youth (the elderly may actually need more). The intake needed to optimise muscle building vs. prevent muscle loss may also be different.
There is actually a lot to unpack here, and unfortunately, the research isn’t as clear as we would like. There are many pitfalls of the research, whether it is using outdated methods of determining protein needs (nitrogen balance
studies), only looking at muscle protein synthesis rather than what is happening in the other tissues of the body, utilising different populations with different activity levels, only measuring total body mass (weight) rather than measuring lean body mass and many more.
So it can be quite difficult to determine how much protein we actually need.
However, when we look at the totality of
the literature, we can make some rough estimations for where our protein intake should probably be.
It would seem that somewhere between 1.5-3.5g protein per kg per day will cover the vast majority of
people’s needs. However, that is actually quite a large range, and most people would probably be better served with an intake in the range of 1.8-2.5g protein per kg per day. Some may need less, and some may need more, but this range seems to cover the vast majority of needs, especially in populations that are training. If you have high levels of body fat or you are sedentary, then you may be able to get away with a lower intake, but given we generally recommend that people try to engage in
regular exercise, I think most of you reading this will benefit from the 1.8-2.5g protein per kg per day range.
Eating this much protein initially can be quite a challenge, especially considering that
most people eat very little protein for breakfast and lunch, and thus they are left trying to fit the vast majority of their protein intake into a single meal (the evening meal). Part of being a coach (or coaching yourself) is knowing how much is supposedly optimal, but probably a much bigger part is knowing how to translate that into the real world practices of an individual.
Part of coaching people on their diet is about building habits around getting protein in throughout the day. The surprising side effect of this is that people tend to feel fuller for longer and they also make better food choices overall.
If you know you have to get some protein in with each of your meals (and even your snacks), you tend to think about your food choices a bit more and you tend to then select better options. Having to think for that second is generally enough to snap people out of
autopilot and stop them from reaching for the poorer food choices they reach for when they are on autopilot. This is part of the reason why we put a large focus on getting calories and protein dialled in with our clients, and why we focus on ensuring our nutrition course teaches coaches to always think about translating recommendations into actionable steps.
If you are coaching yourself, it can be hard to know what to do with the diet, but we do have a variety of resources that can help you with the diet. You can read more about how to set up a diet here, and you can also play around with our dietary calculators here and here. We intend to put a huge focus on creating a lot of
resources on the website to help you with your nutrition, sleep, stress management and training. So if you do need help with knowing what to do, then we recommend staying up to date with the content on the website.
If you need more specific help with your own nutrition, training or lifestyle, we do have coaching spaces available.
If you are interested in getting early (and cheaper) access to the nutrition course, you can sign up to the waitlist here.
