Protein eating

Protein timing, protein quantity, protein sources, human, non-human right? 

Excellent. Yes. Adam: Everybody knows that human meat is the most anabolic, but check the local laws in your jurisdiction. Dr. Mike: Transylvania, you're fine. Adam: Sure. Right.

Dr. Mike, first of all, what kind of doctor are you really? Dr. Mike: I'm not a real doctor. I'm a sport physiologist, which means I'm supposed to be educated in taking good athletes and making them better. Adam: Well, you took an athlete today and made him- Dr. Mike: The best. Adam: The best, yes. I just shot a workout.

We did a training video for RP's YouTube channel. That video will be linked in the description if you're watching this on YouTube or in the show notes if you're listening to the pod, and you can see me totally embarrass myself as Dr. Mike reams my little behind. Dr. Mike: Boy, oh boy, that could be taken a different way. I think you did great. Adam: Thank you. Dr.

Mike: But I tell everyone that when I ream their behind. Adam: Say that to all the ladies. Dr. Mike: We'll say, ladies, yes. Adam: Protein, I've always heard one gram of protein per day per pound of body weight, which is mixing metric and imperial, and I don't know why we do that, but you guys have Google at home. You can figure out what that is in your local system. The one gram per pound of body weight, is that a good enough guide in your opinion? Dr. Mike: Yes, it slightly overshoots the need for most, but by overshooting by a small margin, you make sure to not ever really risk taking in too little.

A tiny bit more than you need poses essentially zero downsides for health or anything else, and it also covers your basis for both muscle gaining and fat loss to keep the muscle on the body. If you get a little bit more protein than you "need," it just gets used for energy and other stuff, so it's no big deal. Adam: But for those of us who are trying to be leaner, excess protein means excess calories, which is still bad, right? Dr.

Mike: If you don't count up your

Daily calories and you just do macros individually, definitely bad.

Any extra protein you eat, you'll have to make room for in your carbs or in your fats. Going much over a gram per pound is a bad idea, gram and half, two grams per pound per day, you're just missing out on a lot of carbs and fats that could make you fuller, make your hormonal profile better, make your training energy higher. It's definitely not as much protein as possible. That's for sure bad, but up to about a gram per pound, and in some very nuanced context, a little bit more than that is going to cover almost all of your bases.

You can eat significantly less and get away with it and that's totally cool, but if you know what you're doing. Adam: I don't, so bookmark that. But it's per pound of lean body weight, right? Dr. Mike: It's just body weight really. Adam: Really? I mean, even a person who is significantly obese, they weigh 400 pounds, most of it is adipose tissue, you would tell them to have one gram of protein per pound of that body weight? Dr. Mike: I could and it would still be safe and it would still be very effective. If you wanted to get nitty gritty with them, you could say, "Well, you should really go more towards like a lean mass target." However, protein tends to be relative to most other foods, a pretty satiating macronutrient, because you can only eat so much, especially lean protein until you're like, "Ah." A lot of times, folks that are very over fat, the way you get over fat is almost always and almost everywhere just eating too much tasty food.

And so, if you tell folks like that to eat still a gram per pound, you could tell them to eat less, and it's totally fine.

But if you tell them to eat about a gram per pound, they can turn their eating into a bit more of a difficult task, which means they can't eat as much, which means you get this really serendipitous thing of they're for sure getting enough protein and it's kind of filling them up so much, they can't eat too much more than that and they end up eating at their calorie goal, losing weight, everyone's happy and the world and the sun smile upon us all.

Adam: This is a message that you hit pretty frequently, which is that if you are very overweight yourself or if you have someone that you love who's very overweight, forget the whole trying to reduce calories or changing the lifestyle dramatically or whatever, just say, "Just stop eating the junk. Just stop eating the empty calorie Dorito type foods." Even if you tell them, "Eat as much as you want, just of the other stuff," it's really, really hard to maintain an incredibly high level of adiposity while eating fruits and vegetables and meats. It's nearly impossible. Dr. Mike: I don't know if anyone's ever done it, to be completely honest. Have you ever seen the show. My 600-lb Life by any chance? Adam: I've seen the promotional spots.

Dr. Mike: Good enough. In all those episodes, you get a bit of a taste, pun intended, of what folks are eating typically before they get on their weight loss diet. These are individuals that weigh in excess of 600 pounds and they're candidates for bariatric surgery. Never in a single episode. I've ever seen anyone eat remotely healthy foods. It's all junk, junk, junk, junk, junk. That's really the only way you can put it down.

From another perspective, competitive bodybuilders like myself who try to gain weight on purpose but are trying to attend to our health and eating high quality foods because it's better for performance and better for results, we eat at a caloric surplus to try to gain weight, but so much food that it's healthy food and then it ends up being preposterously difficult to do.

We'll have some junk on occasion just to bump the calories up. If you take it from the other perspective, most of your food is junk or a lot of it is junk. If you just try to do a calorie cutting diet, you're going to get hungry, cranky, miserable. But if you just change your eating to more healthy foods, fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean proteins, healthy fats like nut butter, olive oil, et cetera, and limit your junk to as little as possible, maybe here and there on occasion, but ideally not much or not at all, you're going to find that you're super full, have super tons of energy and you're just losing weight week upon week upon week fast, because the only way to maintain a 400-pound body of almost every case is to eat tons of junk.

If you just take the junk out,

Replace with healthy food, it's going to be a super easy way to at least start your fitness journey.

Adam: Back to the protein.

I weigh 200 pounds, not entirely lean.

Dr. Mike: Lean enough. Adam: If I'm eating 200 grams of protein a day, can I have it all at one time? I kind of want to have it all at one time sometimes. Dr. Mike: Just mix a bunch of protein powder together and eat it with a spoon, like a jello, like a pudding. Adam: That is not my plan for those 200 grams. Dr. Mike: Oops.

That was my plan. You could have it all at one time. It would help you recover and help you grow a muscle, but it wouldn't work nearly as well as if you had it over two servings. That wouldn't work nearly as well as if you had it over three and you keep chopping it up and spreading out, somewhere around four or five, roughly evenly spaced, roughly equivalent doses of protein, so 40 to 50 grams in your case per meal, four or five times per day, after that six or seven or eight times doesn't seem to offer any sort of benefit that we can detect at least in research.

Most bodybuilders who have tried eating eight times a day, tried four times a day, they can't really tell a difference either. I would say four or five, especially for most folks watching, four evenly spaced protein meals per day is awesome, about as good as it gets for putting on muscle, keeping a high daily energy, retaining muscle on a diet. But I'd say three times a day, you're doing okay. You could do a little better by eating four.

Twice a day, it'll work, but not for optimum results. Once a day is, gee, it was just really not the best use of your protein. Adam: Well, what goes wrong when you have it all in one sitting as I may or may not be doing tomorrow back in Detroit at a certain establishment? Will the protein end up going to body fat rather than building muscle? Is that the danger? Dr. Mike: Protein is rarely used for body fats, but it will be used for just energy. Adam: It'll be used for energy and then the carbs, the baked potato that I have with my steak will go to body fats. Dr. Mike: Correct, and the fat you eat will definitely go to fat. The real problem is all that really ends up in the wash because you'll have time during the day when you're eating not much of anything and then you'll burn all that fat off, but instead of some large fraction of 40 grams every five hours going to feed and maintain your muscle mass, maybe only 60 or 70 grams out of that 200 in one meal will go to that, and then the rest of the 130, 140 grams will just go to be burned off as energy.

The total amount of protein burned off as energy if you eat protein once a day is at least half of it, probably like two thirds. But if you sum it up over multiple meals, it could be a very small fraction, maybe like 25 or 30%. That's a big difference. That's a lot of protein. That could be sparing muscle, could be building muscle just going out of the wash and being burned. Not ideal. Adam: I mean, the conventional wisdom states that the body has no protein storage mechanism like it has a fat storage mechanism. As I understand it, that's not totally true.

We've got free amino acids running through our system, we've got stuff in our liver, we've got all kinds of things, right? Dr.

Mike: Free amino acid pool is profoundly small.

Adam: Oh, okay. Don't call me that. Dr. Mike: I'm sorry, I meant it. Technically speaking, if you want to get real nitty gritty, skeletal muscle can function as a reservoir of protein. Adam: I think we'd rather not consider it as such.

Dr. Mike: Exactly. As you spend a lot of time building it, you don't necessarily want to break it down. It turns out that versus saying we do or not have a reservoir for some macronutrients, it's probably better to think of it as how big and how easy access of a reservoir do we have. Fat, enormous, super easy access. Carbs, decent, really easy access. Protein, difficult to access the reservoir itself other than skeletal muscle, if we say skeletal muscles, not a reservoir, barely have anything. In the short term, if your body doesn't have fat floating around, it gets it out of fat tissue.

No harm, no foul. If you don't have amino acids floating around in sufficient concentrations, gee-whiz, your body just starts looking at the muscle. In the old cartoons, when you look at chicken that's squawking around and you just see it as the cooked chicken outline, it starts to do that to your muscle and quickly gets to burning it off. Your body cares to keep muscle on your body, but it doesn't care that much, because you especially, so for example, compared to your ancestors who evolved into you, you already have excess muscle mass by a long shot. And so, relative to your natural titration, your body's like, "I'm plenty jacked." If I go about 30 minutes without enough protein, I'm going to start peeling it out of those legs, biceps, everything to do what? To feed organs like the brain, the heart, the digestive tract. Way more important that those things get protein because they keep you alive and functioning. Your body doesn't prioritize skeletal muscle much, which means that if you don't give it relatively regular protein feedings of enough concentration, it'll just be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, skeletal muscle, step in here and do something about this. Donate your protein." If you care about being a little bit more jacked, you have to attend to that by regularly feeding your body protein to prevent that from happening.

Adam: I suppose I sometimes think of protein purely as being this raw building block material of skeletal muscle, but what you're saying is that it's like all the organs, the brain, all of that, they need amino acids to make proteins that do other jobs other than being muscle, right? Dr. Mike: Absolutely. Something like your digestive tract has a consumption of amino acid that's way higher and faster. It just takes more of your protein than muscle does. Your skin, I mean, you slough off tons of skin all the time. That's a huge protein content. You don't slough off skeletal muscle all the time. Technically you do, there's a turnover, but geez, turnover rate for the cells inside your gut is insanely high.

Skin, insanely high. That's where most of your body's protein ends up going. Skeletal and muscle beyond a certain point is like a luxury.

Your body treats it as such.

If the economy takes a dive, you're

Not going to say, "well, i have to have my top head and my dirigible." you might just keep your prized horse and you're stable at that point and sell the dirigible.

But if something is considered essential like your heart, your brain, digestive tract, your body will take and give protein to those things quickly and skeletal muscle gets kicked out to the curb with peg leg and a little tiny hat and it goes and begs for money in the street, in the 1920s of course. Adam: With my monocle firmly in place, as it will stay, it's the last thing that's going to go. I will ask I imagine that the math gets more complicated, more sensitive, harder as you would say, exotic levels of leanness that someone like myself will never achieve, where you're really having to trick your body into retaining muscle when it really would rather you spend muscle instead of fat.

Dr. Mike: Sure. I say the math stays pretty straightforward. You may need a little bit more protein like 1.1 or 1.2 grams per pound if you get very, very lean. In addition to that, you just need to make sure you're training consistently to give your body the messaging that like, "Hey, keep this around," because tissues will keep various amounts of themselves around based on the signaling they receive. Your heart and lungs and digestive tract are always like, "Give me protein, give me protein, give me protein." If you just leave your muscle there and you don't work out, the muscle's like, "I don't need this." But if you consistently stimulate it several times a week per muscle, enough sets, et cetera, you get nice and tired during your workouts, then you end up being in a situation where the muscle's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I need this.

Please keep it here." Then it maintains its level. So, plenty of protein around the clock, consistent resistance training and of course as much sleep as possible and a low stress environment as possible.

Adam: You lost me there. Dr. Mike: We lose most. Adam: Why can't we just eat protein? If the body is able to utilize protein as an energy source, does it end up as glucose in the end? How does it actually metabolize amino acids into energy? Dr. Mike: There's a couple processes to which- . Adam: I like complexity. Hit me. Dr.

Mike: Some amino acids can be essentially broken apart and inserted at various parts of the energy manufacturer process. Some of them can actually function a little bit like glucose. They're inserted at various parts during glycolysis. Some of them are no good for that and they're inserted in various sub-components during the Krebs cycle, so it ends up being like it gets used somewhere, but not all in the exact same place and it really does depend on the amino acid. It's all like, where can we throw it in? How can we modify it beforehand? Now, that modification, it costs some energy. Hello, fly. Adam: Hello, fly. Bye-bye.

Dr. Mike: That modification costs some energy. It is a little difficult to do. Your body prefers not to do it. So your body, if it has proteins, carbs and fats in the same meal, generally won't use protein for a lot of energy. It'll use carbohydrates and fats, which are much more readily, just carbs go into that whole process all the way through. Proteins are used, they need to be modified first.

They're inserted at various parts of that

Process.

 

Sometimes they don't yield as much energy and all that stuff. Ideally, your body will use carbs and fats. If you have protein around and not much else around, or if you're starving and your muscle gets pulled out or protein gets pulled out of your muscle, then it gets reinserted into other cells pathways at those various junctures to do a good enough job. Sometimes when that happens, converted the ketones first and all this other stuff. It can get quite complex. Adam: But if I can run the car on protein, why not just be safe and only run the car on protein and a multivitamin to not get a sailor disease? Dr. Mike: Safe from what? Adam: I would like to be as jacked as possible. Dr.

Mike: I guess. Being jacked as possible is going as fast as possible in your car. You're not running with the highest quality fuel if you're trying to use protein for the same stuff that you're trying to use ideally with carbohydrates. Carbohydrates fuel your performance better than protein does. They actually let you train harder in the gym. They recover you from gym training better than protein does for later gym training that day. They give you more daily energy for tasks, which also means your daily step count will be higher or easier to achieve if you cap your step count with a step tracker or something. Carbohydrates are better for your brain.

They let you think more clearly. If you go on a low carb diet, you clearly- . Adam: Oh, dear. Dr. Mike: right away decide that, "Oh, I don't even know what my name is." If you just try to excise carbohydrates completely, you'll certainly have enough protein for all the good functions that it has, but another thing carbohydrates are good for is anti-catabolism. They actually prevent protein breakdown in their own presence and they do all those other great things. If you're looking at marginal utility, up to a certain point, more protein is better. Up to a point beyond a gram per pound, more protein is about neutral.

Shortly thereafter, it's negative relative to having to reduce the carbs. Having as many carbs as you can once you filled your protein is great until they impinge on having an essential amount of fat. Really, the best way to diet for a performance body composition ever is to have a balance of enough protein, enough carbs, and enough fats to do all the things you want to do, just going and saying, "Well, I just want one macronutrient. I just want one thing." I don't know. It's kind of putting a really crappy fuel into a race car. It will go around the track. You're just not going to be setting any records. Adam: Wise words.

It's just I taught journalism for years and years, and so, I still have residual associated press style in me that says, "Never refer to a non-physician as doctor." . Dr. Mike: Interesting. Adam: Yes, that's their thing. Let me tell you, I've heard about it from a lot of non-physician doctors over the years who are very upset about that. Dr. Mike: Excellent. Well, you can also call me Professor.

Mike, because I am a professor or just Mike. Adam: What's up, teach? Dr. Mike: What up, fam? Adam: I've watched your channel for a long time. People, seriously, if you're like me, even if you're not that interested in exercise physiology or diet or anything like that, check out Renaissance. Periodization. It's all Dr. Mike. He's like me, but smarter and funnier and jacked-er.

You're going to love him. Dr. Mike: Oh, most of that's not true. Adam: I have a whole bunch of totally random ideas I've screamed at the screen while watching the RP channel. Dr. Mike: Let's have them. What are they? Adam: And I just want to scream them at you. Dr.

Mike: Yes, please. Scream away. Adam: It's not even the model of what this theory presupposes is X. That's a really deep joke for five people, but anywhos. What my theory presupposes is professional bodybuilders, the guys who are the best in the world, they don't do full range of motion. Dr. Mike: Sometimes, yeah.

Adam: You are a big proponent of

Full range of motion, which for people who don't know, it means whatever the exercise is, whatever the movement is, you'd go all the way through the entire range of motion that is available to you in your joints.

You go all the way up and

All the way down or whatever the hell it is.

To a man, the top guys tend to usually do the middle 50% of the range of motion. What my theory presupposes is maybe they are great in spite of that, but could they be great because of it? Is there some as yet unidentified mechanism that might be advantageous to that kind of body building if you only do the middle 50% of the rep? Dr. Mike: No. Adam: Shit. Dr. Mike: But I have thought of that before. Adam: I bet you have.

Dr. Mike: A few times. Adam: Well, this is the thing about exercising. I've talked about this, that it's fundamentally really boring and if you're smart, you've got a lot of brain space available while you're doing the repetitions as it were. And so, I bet your little gears are turning. Dr. Mike: Lots to think about. Adam: Could it maybe build the middle of the muscle belly and thus make the muscle belly protrude more? Dr.

Mike: Maybe. Direct investigations into that have not yielded those sorts of results. Adam: Someone's directly investigated that? That seems like the most useless thing for a scientist to investigate. Dr. Mike: I think my entire field is pretty useless. Yes, absolutely they have. It just doesn't pan out. Now, there may be studies in the future which can elucidate a mechanism that's advantaged, although we can do a little philosophical thing where we go back and maybe ask the bodybuilders why they do that or try to ascertain why they do that.

The reality is they are men on considerable amounts of exogenous testosterone. They are ego-driven. They like to lift heavy and that range of motion allows them to lift really heavy and feel good about themselves. If they did a more full range of motion, they would have to reduce the weight and incur quite a bit more pain during the movement itself, because a deep stretch under heavy loads is difficult, more difficult. Adam: Maybe it saves their joints. It leads to longevity in their career, right? Dr. Mike: Could hypothesize that. But then we would have to contend with the idea that folks that lift through a middle range of motion in order to make it challenging for a given number of reps, let's say a set of 10, they actually have to use considerable more weight and that ends up being much worse for their joints.

When you lift through the full range of motion, it actually tends to strengthen the joints more while simultaneously not providing the kind of insane external forces to them that'll put you at a higher risk of injury. If you're squatting 50% of the way down and something goes wrong, you're getting hurt. If you're squatting all the way down, there's not a whole lot that you haven't exposed your tissues to that can really surprise you.

It turns out it's actually worse for

The joints to go through a partial range of motion than through a full range of motion.

Though they will tell you that they do it to save the joints, but a lot of them just don't even exercise properly to begin with. Their technique is so bad that they're not qualified to be saying what does and does not feel good for the joints. Adam: But surely, there's just things that science doesn't know about these dudes, because they're so rare. They're unicorns, they're genetic unicorns, and they're on way more drugs than almost anyone who gets studied by real scientists does on.

Because when you guys do these studies, mostly, you're studying undergraduate boys and girls. Dr. Mike: Totally. Adam: Like normals, you're studying normals. Dr. Mike: The normals as we call them. Adam: Maybe everything changes when you're blasting trend or whatever they do. Dr.

Mike: Yes. I'm in that world myself. I have trained with many bodybuilders. One of the people that works for our company, Renaissance Periodization, is himself a competitive active. IFBB Pro. Adam: Jared? Dr. Mike: Jared Feather. He trains a lot of IFBB Pros.

I have become more muscular than at least some fraction of IFBB Pros or muscularity-wise, I'm well in the mix. Having lived that experience myself and having coached other pros and taught them to train with a full range of motion, they nearly universally report much better results and much lower injury risk and much less total fatigue and a perception that their growth rates are better. I've also trained with partial range of motions myself, and so has Jared, and it just works worse. All of the literature confirms that it should work worse. To us, there's really not much to discover. When people who are really, really good at body building switch to a more range of motion, they typically experience an improvement in their abilities, at least two body builders come to mind. One Big Ramy, who is currently Mr. Olympia, trains mostly with full ranges of motion and nobody can touch him muscularly.

To have that person who's the best trained with the full range of motion, that's pretty good. Not worth a ton, but worth something. Then another example is Nick Walker. Nick Walker's a top five Olympian. He used to train with very partial ranges of motion. Then when he began working with Matt Janssen, a famous bodybuilding coach, Matt had him expand his range of motion considerably and Nick just gained a crap load of muscle mass and just never really got hurt. He was able to do more to his muscles with a fraction of the weight he used to use. Gee-whiz, we're seeing this transformation slowly.

There's other folks like John Jewett IFBB Pro who trained with a full range of motion, many others. The idea that the top guys don't train in full range of motion used to be more true in the '90s. It is incrementally since then becoming less and less true. Adam: Do you think that Ronnie Coleman could have been bigger than Ronnie Coleman had he not trained with a lot of momentum and short range of motion and all that kind of stuff? Dr. Mike: Yes, absolutely...