Eating healthy isn’t as simple as maintaining a certain calorie intake. What you eat can be just as important as how much you eat. This is particularly true if you’re an athlete, because your workouts ask more performance from your body than the workouts of someone who’s just trying to maintain a reasonable level of fitness. You have to fuel your body correctly to get the performance you want.
When you balance carbohydrates, fats and proteins properly, you get longer-lasting energy and build more lean muscle mass. An imbalanced diet can result in becoming fatigued earlier in your workout, not getting the muscle mass results you were hoping for, and a general feeling of weakness and malaise.
Protein is one of those nutrients that is more essential to an athlete’s diet than to the average person’s. Some diets and lifestyles recommend cutting protein out of the diet, or lowering the protein intake. For athletes, this makes it virtually impossible to gain more muscle mass or maintain the muscle mass you already have. Sufficient protein also helps with muscle healing.
A sports medicine doctor, nutritionist or trainer can give you customized advice, based on your body type and what sports you engage in. But generally speaking, typical people need .08 grams of protein for every 2.2 pounds of body weight each day. Athletes need about 1.3 grams of protein to every 2.2 pounds of body weight. The number increases to 1.8 grams if the athlete’s main pursuit is a strength training or endurance activity. That means a person weighing 150 pounds needs up to 122 grams of protein per day, or 4.3 ounces.
That’s not a lot of protein. That’s little more than half your typical serving size for steak. As you can see, it’s true that humans don’t need as much meat as most of us consume, but you do need some. You can get it from vegetarian and even vegan sources (yes, there are more options than just soy), but you do need to get it.
