Yeah, I hear this “you must eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day” stuff all the time. It’s cobblers.

You actually need to eat very little protein over what you’d usually eat to build muscle. Granted you need to eat a bit more than Average Joe, but it’s nowhere near the amount a lot of people swear by.

You build muscles by stimulating them in the gym. In order for them to grow, you need sufficient calories first and foremost.

You need protein as a raw material granted, but with a Western diet it’s extremely likely you’ll be getting enough already. There’s no need to go out of your way to eat protein.

Let's talk numbers

If you want maximum muscle growth, current unbiased research suggests that you should start seeing an effect if you eat up to 1.4g per kilogram of body weight.

It's also regularly bandied about that the current reccomendary dietary allowance - RDA for short - of 0.8g per kg of bodyweight didn't take athletes into account.

But it does. To get the RDA figure, scientists estimated a baseline for a 68kg person and adjusted it for different body weights. The new figure was boosted by 30% because not all proteins are absorbable. Then, to be on the safe side, they boosted it by another 30%.

Enough of the theory, how does this help us? Well, it gives us a range to play with.

The RDA is the minimum you can get away with – 0.8g of protein per kg of body weight – and the max muscle growth figure above – 1.4g per kg – is the maximum.

If you do a lot of extra aerobic work – so you’re on the treadmill a lot, or the bike, or rower - you may benefit from boosting that up to 1.8g per kg of bodyweight, but it's still a far cry from the kind of figures you see quoted in the supplement catalogues.

The more meticulous among you can use these figures to calculate the right amount of protein for all sorts of body sculpting goals.

But if your goal is just to bulk up – to gain as much lean muscle mass as you can without any aspirations for fat loss at all – then all you need do is just eat enough calories a day.

Do this and you’ll have ample protein without even trying.