Excerpt on Strategic Protein Use from ACSM's Nutrition for Exercise Science book:

"So one of the strategies that the book tries to follow is how can we satisfy nutritional requirements in real time not in some abstraction of time that the body doesn't actually work in.

We could look at protein.

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The protein requirements are based on a certain amount per kilogram of mass so a typical requirement for an athlete let's say would be 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of mass, but that piece of information by itself is not enough.

So the book tries to help people understand not just how much you need over the course of a day but what's the best strategy for distributing the protein during the day so that you can maximize cellular utilization of the protein.

"...what's the best strategy for distributing the protein during the day so that you can maximize cellular utilization of the protein"

And we've come to find out that it if you give more than 30 grams of protein at one time you do exceed its cellular capacity. The protein isn't used as protein. It's actually denitrogenated, and you use the excess as an energy substrate so you lose its anabolic potential.

"...you use the excess [protein] as an energy substrate so you lose its anabolic potential"

We have a lot of examples of professional athletes who consume a huge amount of protein, but they actually have a protein deficiency because of the way it's consumed.

They tend to back-load the protein at the end of the day. They have too much at once, and a lot of that protein that they're consuming isn't really protein it's just used as a source of energy and cells can't use it to repair tissue, to build tissue, to do all of the other things that protein does."

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