If you can give an across-the-board recommendation of how much protein people should consume post-resistance training, let's just leave cardiovascular training separately for the moment, post-resistance training, what would that number be? Would it be 20, 30, 50, or 100? Should it scale with body weight? And how long after training should one consume that protein if the goal is muscle protein synthesis?

To maximize muscle protein synthesis, regardless of whether it's post-exercise, and MPS will be larger with the protein dosing post-exercise than at resting or fasting. To maximize MPS, we really haven't seen doses beyond 50-ish grams, 30 or so to 50. My colleague Brad Schoenfeld and I, we scoured the literature and we wrote this paper on what is the maximal anabolic dose of protein per meal for the goal of muscle building.

And we boiled it down to somewhere between 0.4 to roughly 0.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. And so in freedom units, we're talking 0.2 to 0.25 grams per pound. And that is what appears to max out muscle protein synthesis. 0.2 to 0.5 grams per pound. 0.2 to 0.25.

0.25. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So like about a quarter of your body weight in pounds, if you're looking at grams of protein to maximize per muscle protein synthesis. Yes. Per meal. Okay. Sorry. Because I think many people, including myself, are going to say, okay, but this is only in the meal post-workout.

I mean, I wake up in the morning and I try to work out before I eat because I like to do that. Sometimes I'll have a little bit of protein, but let's assume two conditions just for simplicity. Somebody did resistance training in the previous two hours or, and they're trying to evaluate how much protein to eat at that meal in order to maximize muscle protein synthesis, or they're eating a meal separate for, on a day they're not resistance training.

Yeah. Right. So, and then as just kind of a, a generic example of a meal that doesn't follow resistance training in a window of two hours or so, how much protein should be consumed at these two different meals? The answer to that is so weird, Andrew, honestly. Really? Why does it have to be so weird?

It's freaking weird and it's complicated. That's because, okay. So if we go all the way back to 2003, 2004, and then we walk forward 20 years. So John Ivy and Robert Portman put out this book called Nutrient Timing, and they focused on this narrow post-exercise window of opportunity, they called it.

So the, the anabolic window. And the concept was you needed to consume protein and quickly digesting carbs. So a fast digesting protein, lightning fast, highly glycemic, highly insulinic carb source together within, within 30 to 60 minutes post-exercise in order to maximize the anabolic response and maximize recovery and then maximize your muscle gain.

So that was their hypothesis. This was all based on subjects who were training after an overnight fast. And so what happens when you consume a meal pre-exercise or at any point, let's say, a regular old mixed meal, medium size, the anabolic slash anti-catabolic effect of that meal is going to last anywhere from three to six hours, depending on the size of the meal.

So when you're somebody whose goal it is, above all the other goals, is to gain muscle at the quickest rate possible, you're almost never going to train fasted. You're going to have a pre-exercise meal at some point, at least a couple hours pre-exercise. And so when you're training, you actually still have these substrates in circulation through the exercise bout.

And oftentimes, like if somebody has a meal like an hour pre-exercise, they're still absorbing that pre-exercise meal post-exercise. So we looked at this whole post-exercise period as something that just doesn't necessarily have any external validity. It doesn't have relevance to real world training conditions where people are not training fasted.

And so what we did was, we did a couple of things. First, we wrote a narrative review criticizing the post-exercise anabolic window. And this was in 2013. We kind of pissed off all the researchers who did the seminal work in that area. I'm sensing a theme here. It's teasing.

And then we actually, we did a meta-analysis of the existing literature, looking at the anabolic window thing. And for the listeners, a meta-analysis is a study of the studies. You collect all of the studies on a given question, and then you kind of see, you look at effect sizes, and you sort of see where the evidence leans, whether there's a significant or meaningful effect or not.

And so we did this meta-analysis and we collected studies that compared a protein timing condition where protein was timed within an hour, either pre or post-exercise. And then the control group of the study would have to have protein, a minimum of two hours of nutrient neglect on both sides of the training bound.

So we collected all the studies that compared these conditions. And we had a brilliant stats guy, James Krieger. He ran the regression analysis. And essentially, we found that as long as total daily protein was about 1.66, 1.7 grams per kilogram of body weight, so about 0.7 grams per pound, as long as total daily protein was at that or more, then the timing relative to the training bout didn't make a difference.

This is important for people to hear, because what this translates to in my ears is a very simple takeaway, which is that you don't need to obsess about the post-training anabolic window, especially if you're eating prior to training because you have nutrients circulating. Now, if you eat your last bite of food at 8 p.m.

and you wake up at 7 a.m. and you're training at 10 a.m., then perhaps by the time you finish your leg workout or whatever resistance training workout, you would want to prioritize getting some protein and other nutrients into your system. What you're saying, basically, it's so logical now that I hear it, which is that you have nutrients circulating in your body and stored in your glycogen, and so you're pulling from a reservoir.

Fasted doesn't necessarily mean starving. General rule of thumb, if you're burping your pre-exercise meal towards the end of your workout, then you don't need to run towards this. This is why I don't like to ingest anything prior to training besides caffeine, electrolytes, and water. The reason why there's a weird and complex answer where this is like a single resistance training bout causes this sort of, you know, this interesting cascade of things where muscle protein synthesis will peak 24 hours after the resistance training bout.

And it'll take as long as 48 to 72 hours to kind of come down to baseline levels to where you had not done the resistance training bout. So the anabolic window is actually not hours, but days. So it's more a matter of making sure you are consuming. Well, the first in the order of importance is total daily protein.

So there's this hierarchy of importance. If you get total daily protein right, then the timing of the constituent doses of the total are just a distant secondary concern. Even if it's only distributed across two meals, like let's say, um, I train in the morning, maybe I have a, uh, some caffeine and a scoop of a, you know, protein shake before like with some whey protein, maybe a few almonds to, you know, slow digestion down or whatever, um, train.

And then I don't get to eat until 3 PM and I only train for an hour, let's say, and then at 3 PM, I have a little bit of a chicken breast and a salad, maybe a slice of bread because I'm, I'm on the fly. And then that night I get home and I'm hungry and I eat two ribeye steaks.

I'm exaggerating here. I wouldn't do that. I'd like to, but I don't. Those two ribeye steaks probably give you 75 or even a hundred grams of protein and a bunch of other things too. Can you use all of that for muscle protein synthesis? The short answer is yes. Um, the nuanced answer is, let me tell you about a couple studies.

Okay. Well, as you do that, but, but let me ask you a little differently, not to, not to shut down the, the, the emphasis on studies, cause that's why you're here. But is there anything wrong with consuming high or very high protein meal every once in a while, especially if you're not eating much or consuming much protein throughout the day.

And the reason I ask this is for practical reasons. Many people find it difficult to distribute their protein evenly through the day. Many people also find it difficult to get enough protein in the middle of the day meals or the morning meals. It can be done. And I know people will say, well, you have some eggs and some protein.

There are ways to do it. Sure. But at least in this country, most people tend to emphasize dinner as their largest meal for better or worse. And you can usually order high quality, high protein foods in a restaurant, like a steak, chicken breast, fish, et cetera. So a lot of people stack their protein heavily towards the end of the day.

Sure. Assuming caloric load is appropriate, et cetera. Is there anything fundamentally wrong or bad about doing that from the perspective of body composition and health? I would say no. Um, and then there's levels to it, right? Um, like what population are we looking at? Are we looking at guys who are trying to win a national competition in bodybuilding, for example?

No, we're talking about men and women, um, teens up to 75 years old who are trying to be fit by doing a combination of resistance training and hopefully some cardiovascular training as well, trying to get their steps in. We're talking about the general population, not somebody who's trying to win a physique competition or run a marathon or ultra.

Okay. So generally, no. And I want to qualify that a little bit. So my colleagues and I did a study testing out this anabolic window thing. This was 2014 where we tested immediate pre-exercise 25 grams of whey protein versus immediate post-exercise 25 grams of whey protein. Uh, we ran the experiment for 10 weeks.

Yeah. 10 weeks. Yep. Eight or 10, probably 10. Um, and there was no significant advantage of either, um, condition. So, and our thinking was, look, everybody's harping about this post-exercise anabolic window. So it really, if there is this opportunity to consume nutrients at prime time to feed the hungry muscles, then you would want to focus on availability of nutrients in circulation and not when you actually consume the nutrients because there's this time course for them to, for the nutrients to peak in circulation.

It's usually somewhere between one and two hours after you ingest the stuff. So how about we consume protein immediately pre, and then it'll be peaking in the blood like an hour ish later, and then you'll be right in the anabolic window. So we didn't see any advantage to the immediate pre-protein versus the immediate post-protein.

That was in 2014. So fast forward to 2024 ish, 23, 24. Uh, one of my colleagues, Yasin Locke, he took our, our pre-post model and he kind of like, he ran his own, uh, randomized control trial version of it, but he wanted to kind of exploit the possibility of further protein neglect on both sides of the training bout.

So he compared an immediate pre, um, and post immediate pre and post 25 grams of protein sandwiching the resistance training bout with a group that neglected all, all nutrients for three hours on both sides of the resistance training bout. Total daily protein was optimized at around, uh, close to a gram per pound, two, two ish grams per kilogram of body weight.

No significant difference, no meaningful difference in muscle size and strength gains at the end of the, I believe it was a 10 or 12 week study. That's very reassuring to me. I mean, because I have a busy schedule as do many people. And sometimes I'm a little hungry before I train and I'll want a scoop of protein powder and I'll think, Oh, is it better?

We'll talk about whether or not it's better to train fasted, uh, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes people don't like to train fasted. Sometimes people don't like to eat immediately after they train. Sometimes you have to shower up and head to dinner after you train or shower up and head to a meeting and you don't have the opportunity to ingest this in the quote unquote anabolic window.

So what I'm hearing through all these answers, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's tremendous flexibility as to when you consume the protein that we all need, but that it, the overall protein requirement seems to center somewhere around 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight, somewhere in their total per day.

If the amount in a given meal is a bit higher than 20 or 30 grams, you're fine. If it's a bit lower, you're probably fine. But the thing that also I believe needs highlighting that most people don't talk about is distinguishing between what's in circulation versus when one ingests something.

Like we'd love to think that we drink 30 grams of protein or eat the chicken breast or the piece of steak or have the eggs and suddenly those amino acids are available. And it makes so much more rational sense now that you describe it, that eating first makes those amino acids available for the muscles a couple hours later.

And we just don't learn about it that way. So I'm very grateful that you're bringing it up that way. I realized we could probably drill into protein requirements ad nauseum, but- Think about it this way. The way I like to put it is total daily protein is the cake.

The specific timing of protein relative to the training bout, that is the icing on the cake. And it's a very very thin layer of icing on the cake.