Should Protein Be Spread Throughout the Day?
Fuel Your Strength
Steph Gaudreau
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By now, you have probably heard me talking about the importance of protein intake, especially for female athletes over 40. But it is much more nuanced than just hitting your protein numbers. Spreading your protein intake throughout the day will help you trigger protein synthesis and avoid operating in a state of protein breakdown.
If You Want to Spread Your Protein Out Throughout the Day, You Should:
- Work with a coach who understands how much fuel you need to support your training and goals
- Understand how protein synthesis and protein breakdown work in the body
- Pay attention to your amount of protein throughout the day and properly fuel for your training
Why Balanced Protein Intake Matters
When it comes to triggering the process of muscle protein synthesis, ending with a positive muscle protein balance, or being in an anabolic building state, how you spread out your protein throughout the day does really matter.
When there is not enough energy available to your body, the overall net balance of your system is shifted towards protein breakdown and puts you in a negative balance state. As female athletes over 40, we are already more susceptible to struggling with losing muscle mass over time, which is why it is key to align our fueling, nutrition, and training for optimal results.
Putting Knowledge Into Action
Understanding the science behind this matters, but it is also equally important to know how to navigate all of this information. I want to help you think about your own daily habits and patterns so that you can make the changes in real life, which is not always so easy to do.
The point is not to be perfect or to be stressed out about every single gram of protein. I understand the technical pieces, performance nutrition pieces, and mindset pieces around eating more, fueling differently, and rethinking the way you view your training and nutrition. My goal is to equip you with the knowledge and know-how to implement these systems into your life and build habits and processes around them.
Are you ready to rethink the way you view protein intake and include more opportunities in your daily life to get your muscle synthesis going? Share your thoughts with me in the comments on the episode page.
In This Episode
- Learn about positive protein balance, and why it is a foundational understanding you need to have (6:05)
- The two main phases of building muscle that takes place in a trigger threshold system (11:05)
- Why you need to understand muscle protein synthesis to comprehend the importance of specific amino acids (14:08)
- What a skewed distribution of protein can look like, why it is not optimal, and how to do it better (21:50)
- Practical ways that you can implement your protein knowledge (28:34)
Quotes
“It is important that we understand, especially as women over 40, that we need to strength training, and we need to eat enough, particularly enough protein so that we keep ourselves in as much of a positive protein state or an anabolic state as possible.” (9:12)
“When it comes to the muscle protein synthesis process, we really need to think about getting enough of a very specific and very special amino acid.” (13:40)
“Protein distribution here is a close second to total protein in terms of how important it is when it comes to protein energy balance.” (17:39)
“This isn't just about vanity muscles yall. Okay, it's like cool to feel strong and badass and lift heavy shit and have muscles and flex your biceps, that's all great. But it's also about the quality of life, independence, longevity, metabolism, metabolic health; this is so so critical.” (21:42)
“The best time to make a change, if it wasn't 10 years ago, if it wasn't six months ago, the best time to make change is now.” (33:08)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you're listening to this podcast, you're an active athletic woman over 40 who is trying to pack on as much muscle as possible. Increase your strength and improve your performance both in and out of the gym. |
| 0:13.0 | So a lot of people ask me, does it matter how I spread my protein intake across the day, as long as I'm getting enough in this podcast, which is one of a multi part series on protein intake. |
| 0:27.0 | We're going to be answering exactly that question and reviewing as we go along. What are the biggest priorities with protein intake and what are the things that you probably don't have to worry as much about as you're trying to sort all of this out for yourself. |
| 0:44.0 | If you're an athletic 40 something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself and doing hard shit, the fuel your strength podcast is for you. |
| 0:57.0 | You'll learn how to eat, train and recover smarter so you build strength and muscle, have more energy and perform better in and out of the gym. |
| 1:07.0 | I'm strength nutrition strategist and weightlifting coach, Steph Goddrow, the fuel your strength podcast dives into evidence based strategies for nutrition, training and recovery and why once you're approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s. |
| 1:26.0 | We're here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. |
| 1:34.0 | If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app and let's go. |
| 1:43.0 | Welcome to the show. I'm so glad that you're here with me today. Thanks so much for tuning in to the fuel your strength podcast today on the show. |
| 1:51.0 | We're going to be diving into this question, which I get a lot, frankly, from people in my community, which is, can you help me understand all of this protein stuff that everybody keeps talking about, like what are the things that really matter when it comes to protein intake, what is less important and how you can start reading through all of this information. |
| 2:12.0 | Now, if you haven't yet listened to the previous episode, we really went into looking at daily total amounts of protein for active athletic women who are trying to build muscle increase their strength and performance with that context given. |
| 2:31.0 | So if you haven't yet heard that show, definitely go back and listen to that one first because it's really going to give you some overarching broad brush strokes that you should understand first before you really dive into this second tier priority, which we're going to look at today, which is protein distribution across your day. |
| 2:51.0 | Now, before we go any further, if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, hit that subscribe button. And if you're watching on YouTube, hello, I had to record this episode three times. And I think I've finally sorted out what's going on with my camera and the podcast mic. And you know what, I might have, I might be a 10 year entrepreneur at this point, running my own online business, but there are still things that I'm learning. |
| 3:20.0 | So I'm glad to be back on YouTube. I'm posting more videos there. So if you would prefer to watch and listen and see my ridiculous facial expressions, then definitely head over to my YouTube channel, hit subscribe there and ring the bell for more notifications. |
| 3:38.0 | Let that call to action, right? I hope so. |
| 3:41.0 | All right. So before we do anything else as well. Remember, strike nutrition unlocked is my signature program. It is here to help you, especially if you are over 40 and you're trying to make heads or tails of all of this stuff and really put it in a cohesive system that gives you the most important things to work on. |
| 4:01.0 | It all goes together. So if you're like, I'm trying to figure out how to fuel for the kind of training that I do. And I am not the same body that I was when I was in my 20s and I know I can't do that stuff anymore. |
| 4:15.0 | Then head over to stuff got your calm slash apply. We will love to chat with you more about if you're a great fit for the program and hopefully see you inside. |
| 4:24.0 | All right. So let's go ahead and dive into this episode here all about protein distribution across your day. So remember, in order to understand protein totals, we had to go back to the previous episode where we looked at what is current research say about active athletic women who are trying to build muscle to increase our strength, right. |
| 4:47.0 | We want to make sure we're engaging in muscle protein synthesis enough. And so, of course, if we're not getting enough total daily protein. |
| 4:56.0 | This stuff is less important how we divided up throughout the day. However, it does matter. It does matter. That's the TLDR of this episode and we're going to be getting into that. So before we just dive into the rest of this, it's important to understand protein distribution, particularly when we're talking about |
| 5:16.0 | muscle protein synthesis, contrasted or compared to muscle protein breakdown. So we say I'm going to say these terms a lot here on this episode. |
... |
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