Marion Freijsen A blog about Sports, Fitness & Health

the importance of Protein

There are tons of myths about protein and sports. For instance, that simply eating more protein will increase your muscles. Now – it would be nice if it worked like that but then again, when have you ever found something to be that easy? No, unfortunately, eating protein alone will not build all that nice toned muscle for you – you have to work at it yourself!

But protein is a very important nutrition source for muscles and you should look closely at your diet and ensure you are getting enough of it, for your activity. Like most things – if you are simply interesting in treading water, or walking a block now and again, you do not really need to look at your nutrition that closely (just don’t overeat, that’s all). But if you are doing major cardio, or actually weighttraining to gain muscle – you will need to consider protein and how much of it you are getting through your regular diet. In the first case, cardio, if you are not eating enough of it, eventually your muscles will start breaking down and “eat” themselves in order to supply your body with enough energy to keep doing your cardio training. This is only after depleting available stores of carbohydrates and/or fat – but protein is important nevertheless to prevent you losing muscle instead of building it.

If you are looking to BUILD muscle specifically and are doing weight training a couple of times a week – then eating slightly more protein then normal will support your efforts and ensure you feed your muscles the stuff they need to recover and build up from the minute injuries you put them through when you train. In this case, you should look at 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound bodyweight (or 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilo) on average. Don’t kid yourself though – eating more then that does not mean you build more muscle – just more bulk as the excess calories are stored as fat.