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Comment by Itaxpica | Hacker News Reader

How much are you eating? I used to have similar troubles with recovery until I realized that I just wasn’t eating nearly enough to train at the volume I was. For me, adding two cups of Greek yogurt and a protein shake every day (so roughly 500 calories and 50 grams of protein over what I was eating before) made an enormous difference.

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I am eating 90 grams of protein @ 190 lbs body-weight with a pretty low fat %.

Way too low. Try doubling it (not kidding). If you’re worried about calories, reduce your carbs.

Everything I read says .5 - .75g protein / lb of bodyweight for lifters. Maybe I will do more research.

Your number may (may) be a bit low but the number I settled on after researching it extensively was 1g / lb of lean mass.

Yeah, that tends to be around the consensus.

This is what my strength coach recommends.

More anecdata: I aim for 125g per day, 1800 calory target, at 138 lbs/5’ 5” and can lift strong every day. I usually take a “rest” week (calisthenics and 3-7 miles of walking) every other month when I travel somewhere.

That seems crazy high to me, but maybe I am just too used to my own thing and should try upping it.

It depends on your goals. I’m trying to gain muscle. 90 isn’t bad for maintenance in my case. Some folks would say I’m low as the recommendation is as high as 1.1g of protein per lb to gain.

as others have said, that does seem pretty low. I am 220lbs (tallish at 202 cm) and was eating about 120g. When I increased it to 175g I found my recovery was much better and and even though I was increasing my weekly distances (I run ultras for fun!), I wasnt getting any nagging overuse injuries. I try to get most of my protein from food rather than powders, but found it hard not to cheat a bit with whey, hemp and pumpkin in the mornings mixed in with my coco-puffs :)

Protein powder is essentially powdered milk. I don't think you can really 'cheat' with it, it's just 'food' :)

Random pro-tip: unflavoured whey powder goes into just about anything (and is 150% less gross than I thought it was before I tried it).

I get the unflavored whey too, and personally, I can be quite mercenary / practical about my food when I need to :) But I am a bit suspicious as to the bio-availability of these powders. Are the proteins really as good (or even good enough) as compared to actual food sources ? Quality also seems to vary immensely from what I have read. My intuition tells me 30g of protein from chicken breast and not the "restructured" stuff which is jacked with soy[1] is probably better than 30g of whey.

1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-chicken-fast-fo...

Yeah, way too low. Shoot for at least 0.8g / lb.

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