About a year and a half ago I started having a protein “shake” (scoop of protein powder, a bit of hot coco mix, 12oz skim milk, 40-45g protein) after my last workout every day. I feel that it really helped my recovery. I’m thinking about adding a second one after my first workout of the day. Can anyone tell me what the effects of too much protein would be, and what the guidelines are for high volume (~25 hours per week) endurance athletes? I’ve seen the recommended ranges for the general population, which are in general useless.
Excess protein - nitrogen groups are cleaved and excreted - rest of the molecule gets stored as fat.
You can find recommendations for endurance athletes’ protein intakes in numerous books - I’d look it up for you but don’t have a text handy - and beyond that, it will get stored as fat (from there possibly converted to glycogen via gluconeogenesis)
At that level of training you should look at gCHO per day, gFat, those as percentages of total calories - the first specifically.
About a year and a half ago I started having a protein “shake” (scoop of protein powder, a bit of hot coco mix, 12oz skim milk, 40-45g protein) after my last workout every day. I feel that it really helped my recovery. I’m thinking about adding a second one after my first workout of the day. Can anyone tell me what the effects of too much protein would be, and what the guidelines are for high volume (~25 hours per week) endurance athletes? I’ve seen the recommended ranges for the general population, which are in general useless.
thanks,
-Colin
Milk by itself has been proven to be one of the best recovery drinks out there. If the rest of your diet is up to snuff, not really sure you even need the scoop of protein powder, and you can save $45 every few weeks for the tub.
protein is just food. ironman world champs exist who have had high protein high fat diets, and entirely plant based diets.
my advice is it doesn’t matter. the protein shake is not likely to help or hurt. measuring “recovery” would be hard in a clinical study and impossible to do by ‘feel’ alone =)
About a year and a half ago I started having a protein “shake” (scoop of protein powder, a bit of hot coco mix, 12oz skim milk, 40-45g protein) after my last workout every day. I feel that it really helped my recovery. I’m thinking about adding a second one after my first workout of the day. Can anyone tell me what the effects of too much protein would be, and what the guidelines are for high volume (~25 hours per week) endurance athletes? I’ve seen the recommended ranges for the general population, which are in general useless.
ditto about gaining weight, although I know that my best recovery occurs when I ingest liquid calories (sans beer) post-workout within an hour. Be it milk (chocolate milk!) or cherry juice or ice cream, research has proven it helps. I’d have a protein shake with peanut butter in it after workouts (45-55g/shake), I’d only have one a day, but it would replace a meal for me (typically breakfast) and I lost weight, which probably contributed to my race day performance (which was positive).
