How Much Protein Is Needed to Build Muscle?

So we’ve been told our whole lives like 50 grams of protein recommended by the American Medical Association, that’s a tragic joke. You need at least one gram of protein per pound of body weight, high-quality protein, so not vegetable sourced. This is just animal sourced or Fortagen of course, or eggs, those are the efficient sources of protein your body can absorb.

If you’re serious about muscle growth, you might even want to err on the side of caution and try and go over the one gram per pound of body weight, which is what I do. I weigh 240 pounds and I target like 250. So that’s like two and a half pounds of steak, or it might be four doses of Fortagen and half a pound of ground beef at the end of the day.

Now, if somebody is overweight, how do they calculate that one gram per pound of bodyweight? So if somebody is 400 pounds, but they’re 50% body fat, which happens, unfortunately, that happens. So what you want to do is recalculate your body weight based on 20% body fat instead of 50% body fat.

So you just cut 30% off of that number, and then you have a new number for the target you should have because those recommendations were driven by an average of 20% body fat. You got to look at the research that we’re basing this on. And so that one gram per pound of body weight, the average was 20%. So you want to make your new number, new target, adjusted for 20% body fat, and then you’ll have a more reasonable number to deal with.