Do I need to Supplement with Protein?

Jason Price, MS, CSCS, ATC, CPT, USAW Club Coach

A question I get a lot with the individuals I work with is this, “Should I take a Protein shake?” Adding supplements to ones diet has gotten out of control.  People are supplementing when they don’t need to and people that need to don’t supplement.  There are so many different types of supplementation out there; it can be confusing even to the professionals.  A lot of times we get away from the basics of nutrition and make things much more difficult than they need to be.  In a online forum a wise strength coach once said that the only supplement a novice to strength training needs is milk.  Yes that’s right MILK!  So the purpose of this article is to find out if you truly do need to supplement your diet with protein or if you just need to go out and get yourself some good old whole Milk.  For the purposes of this article we are going to keep it to real life situations.  The aim of this article is not for the elite level pro prospect trainee or lifter.  This article is written for the new to strength training or parent of someone new to strength training who can get some ideas on the premise of why strength training individuals need protein and how much they need. 

Now let’s get simple, the Recommended Daily allowance for protein is .8g per kg of body weight.  To figure out your body weight in kg divide your bodyweight in pounds by 2.2 and this gives you your weight in KGs.  So for the average 200 pound person you would need roughly 73g of protein a day.  Now some people achieve this and some don’t.  If you are going to be serious in your training taking your diet serious should be part of the deal.  So since you probably keep a diary or log of your training sessions start including everything you put in your mouth on a daily basis.  This will be a simple way to look back at your diet and evaluate if you are getting enough protein.  When possible try take down the serving size information from the food packaging or an estimated weight of the food.  This will come in handy for figuring out what you are eating and how many grams of it you are.  If you don’t know that information do Google searches for “nutritional information of food” and several sites will come up that will give you info on the nutritional composition of food?  Then total up the grams of protein you are taking in.  Do you meet the recommended allowance, are you under or over.  Now .8g per kg of Body weight is the allowance for the average person.  If you are an athlete or an actively training adult you need to increase that amount to 1.2-1.7b per kg of BW.  Take that same 200 pound person and they will need a range of about 108-155 g of protein.  There is some places that you will find that taking in as much as 2.0g of protein per kg of BW is appropriate.  So now you can see that the big difference from the RDA guideline and what is recommended for athletes.  It is important to remember that the RDA is a guideline for the average population.  Athletes’ dietary standards don’t fall within those guidelines.

So, now that you know a little more on how much protein is needed in the diet of an individual strength training go and do the math, track your diet, and answer your question.  Look at the guidelines provided in this article and if you are not getting enough protein and you are an athlete or active adult, then yes you may want to consider protein supplementation.  If you are getting enough through your diet alone than you probably don’t need to supplement with protein.  Yes, it is that simple.  Just because you are training with weights doesn’t mean you need to be guzzling down protein shake after protein shake.  Take a serious evaluation of your diet and see if you truly need to supplement with protein.