Another "How much protein?" thread
OK, so I'm 76 and still trying to do what I like to do and having some success. I also have one of those bathroom scales which uses impedance to give you numbers for percentages of fat, water, muscle, and weight of bone. I've been frustrated for years by my inability to increase my muscle percentage by more than one or two tenths of a percent. My tape measurements confirm this. I refuse to cut down on my real sports: cycling, hiking, and skiing. The gym is not my real sport. What to do?
I ran across this CTS blog post which got me interested in trying a much higher protein diet: https://trainright.com/masters-and-g...ning-mistakes/
My wife and I eat a modified Med diet, the modification being that we can't afford to eat that much wild caught fish. I weigh 70 kilos, so at 2g/kg/d that's 140g protein. I have no idea how much protein we get every day from our largely carb and veggie diet, but I have been supplementing with ~45g/day of whey protein for many years. The simplest thing was to increase that supplement to 120g/day of whey isolate with an extra 6g/day of leucine. I started doing that a little over a month ago, and with no change in my exercise program, I'm up 1.4% lean body mass and .67% body weight and don't have sore legs every day. The tape agrees. I'm like, "Really?? Decades of struggle and that's all it took?"
The issue and my issue seems to be that not everyone is equal in efficiency in moving protein into one's muscles, and aging considerably slows down that process. The data on this is confused because of a lack of folks like me for control and study groups. Here are some more links to protein studies:
https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/
https://2doctricoaching.com/triathlo...sters-athletes
https://www.mysportscience.com/post/...older-athletes
https://trainright.com/protein-why-a...-right-amount/
If you're under 50, ignore. If you're over 50 and especially well over 50, it might be worth experimenting with. I'm using a chocolate flavored whey isolate which costs ~$5:50/lb. in 5 lb. containers.
As we can see by looking at our contemporaries who are not into our particular aging-bod experiment, sarcopenia is a real thing.
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