Can Protein Increase Your Muscle and Training Results?

By Mandy Gibbons

Getting Fed Up with Your Lack Of Muscle Tone? Frustrated with Your Muscle Growth?

Have you ever wondered why you weight train like crazy and yet your muscle tone decreases? You’ve increased your weights, cardio’d your head off to lose extra body fat, so you can see your muscle definition, but none of this seems to work. You are not sure what you are doing wrong but you are getting fed up not getting results.

So why Would Protein Help?

When exercising, particularly weight training, our bodies need plenty of protein to develop and maintain muscle. Protein is broken down into amino acids, then turned back into protein to produce and repair our muscles after our training session. Because amino acids can be burned by the body during exercise, especially aerobic exercise, it is important that we make the effort to supplement our muscles to help them repair faster and more efficiently.

What Happens to my Muscles if I don’t Bother to Increase my Protein Intake?

At the beginning of this article I mentioned instances that you may be familiar with. If you are training hard and don’t bother to supplement your muscles with extra protein your muscles can start to deplete - due to your body turning to muscle / protein as a source of energy.

So how Much Protein Should I be Taking?

This depends on your body size, training schedule and program. It is important that you increase your intake to cater for your training so your muscles can survive your training sessions.

Protein intake required for the average person - who performs a light amount of exercise.
Approximately 1 gram of protein per kilo of body weight

Protein intake required an Athlete who has a heavy training schedule that involves alot of resistance exercise, sports specific training or weight training
Approximately 2 grams of protein per kilo of body weight

Protein intake required for the person - who has a hard core heavy weight training schedule.
Approximately 2.5 grams of protein per kilo of body weight

The above are approximations and examples to give you some idea of what the bodies requirements are for protein. Notice the difference in the protein intake for the programs that involve more muscle damage?

Keeping Up with Consuming Larger Amounts of Protein

Such high intakes of protein can be difficult to keep up with on a daily basis. So as well as including the following protein sources in your low fat healthy eating program you can also use a protein powder. (see below)

Sources of protein:
Lean Red Meat, Lean White Meat: Fish, Chicken or turkey (no skin), Eggs (preferably egg whites) Beans and legumes (which are high in carbohydrates). Nuts (nuts are also high in fat)… just to name a few.

When performing regular resistance training try to include a source of protein in each meal. Say for instance: Breakfast: 2 x poached egg whites, morning snack: 1 x protein shake, lunch: lean chicken with salad sandwich, afternoon snack: 1 x protein shake, dinner: grilled lean read meat or fish with veggies. If you are still hungry late at night, and you’ve been training hard, you might want to also have a protein shake before going to bed, as this is your peak muscle recovery time. 2 x protein shakes per day should be sufficient for the average person wanting to increase lean muscle mass. If just after a light snack after dinner try a low fat, low GI style yogurt - small, single serve tub.

Protein Powders

Protein Powders help supplement your eating program with the necessary muscle nutrients that your body requires such as Amino Acids (mentioned above), Vitamins and Minerals. Protein powders are a convenient way of ensuring you receive an adequate protein intake. There are so many protein powders available to us now. You can choose from a variety of different flavors, different powders for different training needs and even easier to mix powders that can be mixed in shakers rather than blenders. One more thing too. Make sure that you drink lots of water when increasing your protein intake to prevent dehydration and to help the digestion of your protein. Some people prefer to cycle their protein intake here and there to give their body a rest from trying to digest large amounts of protein. Like a cleansing process.

Eating “real food” is important so don’t go overboard gulping down protein shakes with every meal because you’ll more than likely find that you’ll end up consuming too much. Which is not only as waste of protein powder but you could cause yourself to raise your calorie intake too high.

Just a few last words!

It is important before starting any new eating program to check with your doctor regarding increases or decreases in certain food intakes and food sources. You should now have a better understanding of why protein is important for assisting with your training. Your eating program and training program work hand in hand to help you achieve the training goals you have worked so hard for.

Green tea is no longer a mystical beverage only available in trendy cafes and specialist shops. In fact, today its popularity is so vast that it can be found in abundant variety on supermarket shelves and even alongside cappuccinos in coffee vending machines. So what led to this popularity, and why is green tea’s reputation more squeaky clean than a standard brew?

The history of green tea stems back as far as traditional consumption to China in around 2000bc. By the 12th Century it had begun to spread across the continent to Japan with the travels of Japanese Buddhist Priest Myōan Eisai; and onward to India and Thailand thereafter. The drinking of green tea in Japan has since become more part of everyday life and is considered in a similar manner to which black tea is in the west with varying quality and price differences.

All tea has been subject to extensive research regarding health benefits, but whilst black teas have been scientifically proven to lower coronary artery disease, the positive effects of green teas have long been regarded as diverse and far reaching. In further active promotion, Eisai wrote Book of Tea (Kissa Yojoki) in 1191, which promoted the positive effects of green tea on the body, most notably, vital organs such as the heart and brain.

In more recent years, many of these claims have been proven scientifically. In the so called ‘war against obesity’ in the UK, Birmingham University has found that green tea promotes the rate of fat oxidation by 17 percent. Similarly, the American Association for Cancer Research used Polyphenon E (a green tea property) in tests on rats and found that just under half of those tested were as likely to develop colon cancer.

Similarly, green tea has also increased in its popularity due to its lack of the stimulant caffeine and its calming properties because of this. Although black tea and coffee are well-known for their caffeine content ranging anywhere between 30 and 100 milligrams, on average green tea contains about 70 percent less and so is less likely to lead to a dependence (caffeinism). Additionally, there are many ways that green tea research is set to explore new further benefits, such as fighting LDL Cholesterol and stopping Parkinson’s Disease.

When it comes to eggs, are you throwing away benefits when you separate the yolks?

Given that we’re really into our fitness, it’s a little odd that we’ve opted to forgo whole eggs and eat prissy egg-white omelets. But if egg whites are better at building muscle, then it all makes sense. So are egg whites the best breakfast bet - or is the yolk?

The Winner: Whole egg, split decision

The Reason: Egg whites are pure protein. They’re ultralean, but also low in nutrients. The yolk contains all the fat, almost half the protein and just about all the nutrients of the egg. Eating whole eggs, therefore, provides you with nutrients you won’t get by eating whites alone - good stuff such as calcium (essential for muscle contractions) and potassium (involved in muscle recovery), among others.

What about the fat? First of all, the saturated fat in eggs makes up less than half of the total fat. The majority of the fat is healthy monosaturated and polyunsaturated fats that don’t get readily deposited as bodyfat. As for the cholesterol, well, that very issue was much discussed a couple of decades ago, but we’re smarter now.

For one thing, cholesterol isn’t the demon it was made out to be. A 2004 study conducted at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) found that the cholesterol in egg yolks didn’t raise levels of bad cholesterol in the bloodstream.

This Table Compares The Precooked Nutrient Content Of The White Of One Large Egg And One Large Whole Egg.