How Much Protein Can be Used in a Single Meal for Muscle Growth? 

There's a HUGE problem with the studies that suggest 30 grams per meal... every study that only says you're gonna absorb 30 grams used whey protein and or milk which completely bypasses the digestion process. You can only absorb 30 grams or so per hour because of nitrogen however... You're forgetting the huge problem If you eat 10 ounces of chicken with 100 grams of protein within.. It'll take four hours for the chicken to turn into chyme before it even hits your digestive tract. It takes on average at least 10 hours for that chyme to make it through your intestines. So on average you're only absorbing 10 grams of protein per hour. If you eat not drink your protein you can eat it all at once and it'll absorb the same even though you can't absorb more than a certain amount at a certain time Lastly every study that ever suggested that you only can absorb 30 grams of protein per meal never suggested what a meal meant. Can you eat a meal once an hour? How often is a meal? It takes about two hours for your nitrogen to restore its levels while breathing

I think the results are vague because it doesn't matter in the big picture, since there are bodybuilders both natural and enhanced that eat only one meal per day. The human body is very good at adapting to its circumstances, be it meal frequency, nutrient partitioning or starvation, and it is one of the reasons we became the apex. Adaptability. This was a great video.

Freaking love this channel

Ive been grappling with this exact issue for a few months. Great breakdown.

This is such a great video. Breaking down studies without bias

Thanks bro I needed this

Great job and AMAZING content!

Great great video! Answered so many questions

Would love to see a video on muscle mass increase/ protein synthesis on a caloric deficit. Maybe also including optimal protein intake

This is an answer i have needed for a long time, I went from 277 - 160 doing one meal a day and I have began lifting a lot over the last 4 months. I have been doing research on how much protein i should be eating a day but I've been eating it all in one meal a day. I might need to rethink my eating strategy.

Hey man, just wanted to say that this channel is great. You produce such high quality content consistently, a channel like this deserves more views and subscribers. Wishing you all the best. Keep up the great work.

Truly amazing content. The only thing missing for me were similar studies of people that were already training for, say, one year. There probably would be bigger differences and more conclusive for people that already work out

Bro you are so amazing...respect your efforts for making us understand all the topics with that much details and informations❤❤❤

Good content 🙏🏻

I have been doing OMAD (one meal a day) for 5 years and I swear that my gains did not change that much from the 4 meals a day I used to do back in my college day. But you need to be careful for what you consume since going directly to isolated whey or supplement won’t yield a very good result. For example, my diet consists of 184 g protein, 120 g fat and 230 g carb which totally amounts around 2800 kcal and only 27 g of the protein comes from isolated whey (I like its flavour). I usually consume complex carb like oats, sweet potatoes and yam and rarely binge on any non-complex carb. My protein and fat come from both meats and veggies, and of course, no vegetable oil and highly processed meat. The meal is usually taken right after I wake up and believe me, it stays in your digestive track for a long long time. I work out in the evening and I still feel it in my stomach. I do not see any problems with my recovery either. FYI, I used to do OMAD in the night and I gained a lot of fat so I do it in the morning instead. Circadian rhythm may also affect your body composition in this way.

Great video

Extremely informative video👌

Great video!

The vegan vs omnivorous diet paper and it's main author are closely affiliated to Marlow Foods Ltd which pushes highly processed vegan meat.

Current lean body weight is 150# @ 5’6” around 10% bf. I eat 3 x day each meal contains 60g total protein. Equally 180 g per day

I've been taking shakes with up to 130gs of protein for about a year now and it hasn't impeded my growth at all lol.

Excellent 👍

Could you make a video about hypertrophy stimuli, how long is the muscle stimulated after exercising? For example if i trained Monday, skipped a day or two, should i still eat a lot of protein on Thursday or it won't go towards muscle synthesis?

@2:33 I ordered a Luecine powder supplement and mix 5g of Luecine with each scoop of Whey Protein and [anecdotally] it works pretty well for me.

Very useful video. It’s hard because some of us do intermittent fasting, so how else am I to get enough protein than from one meal, a double protein shake with the meal and another double shake before bed?

great vid as always. Just wondering how protein intake changes on rest days? Should have more protein on training days for MPS or more on rest days for recovery? Side note, should overall calorie intake change on rest days (due to less calories burned)?

you say the women's study on the feeding window yielded similar results across groups. However, from your graph, it seems that the women who eat in a restricted setting lost fat and gained muscle, while the women in the 13 hours eating window gained both muscle and fat. This would be significant for many people.

I dunno if this video covers it, but the idea that you have to be exact with protein intake is just wild and unbelievable to me. Sure there may be some optimization here or there, but 95% of the job is do shlt, eat less, and ingest adequate protein. The other 5% is massive micromanagement that i just dont have the patience to do. I mean Im still gaining muscle and losing fat doing it the way i been doing. Sometimes people make things harder than they have to be. The only real supplements i take is creatine, multi vitamins, and sometimes ashwaganda. I may not be getting as optimal gains most likely, but i am a lot more content and happier. Then again I do full body workouts 3x a week with 48 hours between(and 72 over the weekend) and not bro splits. I also make sure to get plenty of rest and sleep with some cardio on offdays(low intensity)

Solid material

Ty bro

you are a master... thank such a good job. so if i do intermittent fasting: 20:4 its for building muscle the same good?

I always notice if I eat too much protein per meal I crap it out a few hours later. So yeah definitely believe in a 20-30g range per meal is all you need.

My diet is usually 3 meals. Each meal around 80gr of protein. And there is huge gap between meals. For example breakfast at 6:00 while lunch at 15:00 and dinner is around 22:00. It's better that way for me because I feel light during this hours

they say no more than 30g per serving but forget to say that the body uses 20-30% of the protein to process it.

By the way, would love info on whether fasting for 1-2 hour after weight training in a fastest state does indeed burn another 10-15% of fat, as some RU-vidrs claim?

Is there a significant benefit to consuming protein spread over three meals per day compared to four or more meals? Additionally, should the strategy of evenly distributing protein intake throughout the day also be applied to carbohydrates, particularly in relation to timing around workouts? Is it more advantageous to include carbohydrates in post-workout meals along with protein?

@14:31: You wrote it correctly, but said 1.5 kg/day (rather that 1.5g/kg/day). PS: I love your videos!

thanks a lot for talking about vegan diet 👍

My view on protein intake has evolved and I now find Stanford professor Chris Gardner’s take on it more compelling: consider 10kg of pure muscle mass gain per year - about the best case a newbie can expect - of which 70% is water, so the rest is 3000 grams of amino acids or less than 10 grams/day over maintenance or perhaps 20 additional grams/day if we double it to account for repairing muscle fiber damage in addition to new growth; and just about any “food” suffices for maintenance for the average non-weight-training person. So I find the research showing hypertrophy gains even up to 3 gm/kg body weight difficult to believe or at least explain, even for intermediate or advanced lifters, and suspect all that extra protein is simply being converted to adipose tissue if not used via gluconeogenesis.

Could you do it on a muscle gain and intermittent fasting?

How much protein do you think someone needs if they are only doing 1 to 4 sets to failure of each body part a week. So pretty casual but full intensity. I'm not trying to max my gains by getting extra calories. Because I am already over thirty percent body fat and want to lose weight pretty fast I am 5'8 inches tall and 220. I've heard you can get just a 100 g of protein. Do you think this is sufficient? I work a factory job where I use medium intensity.

For the intermittent fasting discussion, why does he say the 2 groups experienced similar body composition changes when the fat gain/loss and body weight gain/loss comparisons looked as they did?

May any one give us the final answer please? Which one is better dividing meals to 6 or eating 3 large meals?

I just read a Japanese study that shows triggering hypertrophy requires 29 to 30 g of protein

I'm eating 1,5kg protein every day now thank you FHP!

Long ago have dieticians dismissed the idea that one must mix and match amino acids at each meal to achieve a "complete protein". For whatever reason, the human body seems to do a good enough job accounting for varying amino-acid levels over time. Probably because muscle growth is a slow process, with no single meal having much significance.

I ❤ FHP..

Name of song ... Love the beat

I only eat one meal a day but always get over 200g protein, should I split this in two for more gains ? I’m usually full for the day aswel so does the protein not release slowly into the body as the day goes on ?

Quick comment before watching to check am I correct. Separate protein intake as protein might being buried as fuel rather than building and recovering muscle.

this is awesome🤩

So suppose one needs 100g protein per day for muscle growth, they need to split their meals into around 30-35g for 3 meals or is there a better example of how meals should be distributed for that individual?

How much protein do I need for muscle gains without working out though?

.8 grams per pound of body weight is all anyone needs whether bulking, cutting, or maintaining.

i mean.. after the 4 hours the protin synthesis goes down or not? as i can see on the graph 1:38

14:27 Are you sure that 1500 gram protein per day is really enough? Seems a bit low to me.

First they say you have to eat every few hours. Then they say meats stay in your gut for days. Which is it? (likely neither)

10:30 Both saw similar changes? how? If one group lost fat and the other gained....?

@ 14:30 "minimum of around 1.5 kg per day". That's a lot of protein!

Bro not gonna even mention the differences in bf loss with restricted feeding, and with the rugby players. 10 kg of muscle gain with low bf will gonna look way more impressive than a High bf gain.

By the way fasting is scientifically confirmed to aid fat loss. If you eat one meal a day, even at the same calories as usual, you will lose more fat.

in the study is shown that 4 meals vs 6 meals but nut 1 or 2 meals vs 6 meals

I don't think it can be wholly true, because even people who do intermittent fasting are able to get most of the benefit from the protein they consume, even though they have consumed it in a smallish window of time. Obviously that isn't 100% optimal, but the downsides of doing that are not so great, so presumably there is no hard limit to the amount of protein your body can utilise within a short period.

Does anybody know if the 1.5 grams of protein per kg of body weight is total body weight or lean body mass? 14:12

You can't just take a single study and make assumptions from it. For instance, the Protein Frequency section. In the study quoted, participants were consuming over 2.5g of protein ber Kg of bodywieght. That's on the bery highest end of protein consumption. These guys were eating something like 200g a day, which is enough to create a constant surplus jn your body. It's obvious why it didnt matter if they had 3 meals or 6. We're looking for realistic results and studies, with levels around 1 to 1.5 g per Kg.

Evidence? Long term omad? Lifespan? Carnivore?

I practice time-restricted feeding. I only eat meals when I'm awake.

Regarding the protein distribution study, yheres actually some evidence from other studies that having a larger protein intake early in the day is actual beneficial due to the effects of the circadian rhythm on protein synthesis. If this is true then the study you mentioned which looked at protein distribution would have been swayed by this.

1.5 kg is 1500 grams of protein per day?

high amounts of protein, like 1.5g per kg of bodyweight, is generally not beneficial for health and longevity, so if you're going to argue that we should consume that amount of protein for optimal muscle growth, you might as well make the case that we should take steroids for maximal muscle growth. Personally I workout and don't worry much about protein intake. I focus on eating to satiety on healthy foods, because my health is more important than optimal muscle growth.

Great content but 2 major caveats: 10:30 the restricted feeding window showed major fat loss and only slightly less muscle gain. That’s gotta be noted. Awesome recomp testimony deserves a video by itself. 12:50 in theory yes, but in reality, matching gram per gram of protein in vegan diets in general costs much more than omnivorous diets. My diet is roughly 2k calories and 150g protein. To get the same protein in vegan diet, I either need expensive supplements, or high GMO soy, or need to eat a lot more than 2000 calories. Probably all 3. I used to get a mix of “organic” brown rice and pea protein powders but 1 day got an email from the manufacturer saying to throw it out due to melamine contamination. No refund offered. The “tested in domestic facility” was meaningless. Organic, non-GMO vegan protein was laced with freaking formaldehyde in China and everyone pretended it was healthy vegan until they got caught. So yeah, vegan’s a sham.

And when 220lb jacked men only eat once a day and it's 3lbs of steak how are they keeping that size on is the only question you have to ask

This entire topic can be easily circumvented by thinking about our hunter/gatherer ancestors. They would only get meat when they took down a large animal, and then the entire tribe would gorge in for one giant meal because there was no way to save meat without it spoiling. If they could only absorb 30g per successful hunt, we flat out would not be here today.

Especially when I started training, I often spoke to people, including "professionals", who advocated this 20-30g theory. I thought this idea was absurd even back then. Why would evolution put a barrier in place that would prevent us from absorbing nutrients? Anyway, it's nice to see that this was just another of those many gym myths.

There is something so bothering about the weightlifting community: at 6:41 we can see that those that spread out their protein intake GAINED bodyweight and lost LESS fat mass. Lean mass is not the only thing that counts!

10:30 I'm sorry but did those girls in the IF group not only gain a full kg of muscle in 8 weeks, but also lose almost a kg of fat at same time?

1.5 kg per day??? jk, I know it was just a mistake, it just caught me off guard 😅

Imagine for a moment it protein per meal and meal frequency mattered greatly - would the world and humanity as we know it, be as it is, if we assumed that to be true? No. It wouldn't. The idea is ludicrous to begin with.

11:03

Bro 8g protein for breakfast is like one egg... I eat like 4 or 6 eggs daily. I know its not the channels fault but some of these studies are wack.

Been doing one meal a day for over a year now, and I have built 10~ pounds of muscle. Funny thing is, I am not even going huge on protein intake. Getting anywhere from 90-120g of protein a day as a 185 lb, 5'10 man. I am not sure what is most efficient, but if we are talking about possibility, then people need to stop breaking this down to a science.

Thanks to the Creator, any body is different each other. What is good to ME might not be good for YOU. YOU MUST know what is better to you, experience yourself.

So basically that means you don't need more than roughly 30g of Protein right after a workout but over the day you just need a high number to have good muscle growth

Firstly... new studies and experiments have been taken which debunks the 20g per serving theory. It's been proved that whether you consume 180g per day over 6 meals or 3 meals makes no difference so long as you consume enough protein for muscle hypertrophy. Also, you only need to think logically about it. If an average sized male weighs 180lbs then he needs to consume 180g of protein for muscle growth, 1g per lb of bodyweight. That means, if you can only digest 20g per meal then at 180lbs you'd have to eat NINE meals per day. Imagine a bodybuilder who weighs 20 stone. He would have to consume 14 meals a day, not possible, your body simply wouldn't digest everything quick enough. You also have to include, carbs and fats into this. Nobody eats nine+ meals per day. Ive managed to gain 3 stone in solid muscle over the years by sticking to the 1g per lb rule over 3-5 meals per day

This is a myth

Why not use pounds and ounces? I have no idea what grams per kilogram is?

9:11 It does not support this theory. It shows that the body is constantly living and needs protein every second of ur life. If u dont eat for 12 hours straight you are obviously missing protein intake for 12 hours (and vitamins etc.). How the hell you come that conclusion. Use ur brain

I strongly believe the body does fuckal with regards to growing/healing until the mind is asleep,,, it's balancing the books,,