For sports, it is extremely important to have a sufficient amount of protein in the athlete's diet. This is an important building block for the whole body, which helps to improve athletic performance. In some cases, protein is used as one of the meals, regardless of sports. This article will tell you how to consume protein correctly.
Protein function
A large number of people are very wary of protein. They heard or even saw that protein negatively affects the liver, causes headaches and worsens well-being, so some will find it unbelievable, but everyone uses protein during their lives. There is no difference in age, weight or diet. Anyone can use protein.
This happens because almost all products have a certain amount of it. The word "protein" is translated from English as "protein", and this is the main nutrient for maintaining the vital functions of the body.
Friedrich Engels - a prominent philosopher of the XIX century - gave this definition of life:
Life is a way of existence of protein bodies, the essential point of which is a constant metabolism with their external nature, and with the cessation of this metabolism, life also stops, which leads to the decomposition of protein.
That is, for the body, this element is the most important, determining all the processes of life. That is why life itself cannot exist without it.
Therefore, any person lives only because he uses a sufficient amount of protein, that is, protein, to maintain his life.
Protein sources
The main sources of protein are: meat, poultry, fish, eggs, cottage cheese, legumes (vegetable protein) and various protein mixtures.
All of these protein sources can be combined with each other. It does not matter for the body whether you ate chicken with fish or eggs, and then cottage cheese. In any case, it breaks down the protein into its constituent parts and distributes them throughout the body.
When calculating the amount of protein, you can use the calorie tables on the Internet. They will indicate the approximate ratio of proteins, fats and carbohydrates in each product of your diet.
Protein intake
In order for a person to fully function, he must use a certain protein norm. On average, to maintain metabolism and metabolic processes, it is required to take about 1 gram of protein per 1 kg of body weight. For example, if your weight is 70 kg, then you should get at least 70 grams of protein in one day.
It is worth remembering that the protein norm can be typed not only from food, but also using protein shakes. They contain such an amount of protein that a person approximately consumes with one meal.
A decrease in the intake rate often leads to chronic fatigue, confusion of thoughts, memory impairment and attention. Often, those who decide to lose weight do not know how to consume protein properly, do not monitor the protein norm, therefore, their athletic performance worsens over time.
Another disadvantage of having a small amount of protein in the diet is a decrease in muscle tissue. This is due to the fact that the body uses protein stores in muscle tissue in the first place. Therefore, it is important with all responsibility to approach calorie reduction in sports and know how to consume protein.
Muscle protein
Exercising the body, you need to calculate how much protein you need to use on training days and rest days. The best option for obtaining the protein norm is a diet in which about 70 percent of the protein comes from ordinary food, and the remaining 30 from protein mixtures.
It should be remembered that for a training athlete, the amount of protein is recommended to be doubled, since in such a person the consumption of nutrients will occur much faster.
To find out how much protein to consume per day, you need to clarify a person’s weight. If the athlete's weight is, for example, 80 kg, then the norm will be the use of 160 grams of protein per day. Of this amount, approximately 100 grams should be obtained from ordinary food, and the rest from the protein mixture.
Weight gain with protein
It often happens that an athlete with a long training experience mistakenly believes that protein contributes to weight gain. But this information is incorrect, since consuming protein for mass gain is not the best solution. Protein is a building material for many cells of the body, including muscle cells.
But if the amount of protein exceeds 4 grams per 1 kg of weight, then the body can get poisoned, because it can not cope with the digestion of such an amount of protein.
For weight gain is an additive called a gainer. It contains a small proportion of protein and a large amount of carbohydrates. It is a complex of proteins and carbohydrates that allows the body to gain additional mass.
In this mixture, carbohydrates become the main energy component for training, nourishing the body, and protein at this time restores and builds muscle tissue.
Muscle gain
There is quite a lot of information about how to consume protein for gaining muscle mass, but they all boil down to the fact that an athlete should adhere to a high-calorie diet. This means that more calories must go into his body than he can spend.
As mentioned earlier, it is recommended to take a weight gainer for weight gain, since eating protein without carbohydrates, gaining weight, is only possible if you need to replenish the protein norm. It should be remembered that both complex and simple carbohydrates must be present in the athlete's diet.
Complex carbohydrates provide more satiety and are much healthier. With their help, metabolic processes in the body occur more smoothly, eliminating large releases of hormones into the blood. It is also recommended to increase the amount of complex carbohydrates for those people who suffer from diabetes.
The calorie content of complex and simple carbohydrates is the same, but with an increase in the number of simple carbohydrates, it can happen that excess calories quickly remain in the form of fat deposits, which will negatively affect both the athlete’s form and its results. Therefore, it is better to focus on complex carbohydrates.
Protein Instruction
Next, step-by-step information on how to consume protein will be indicated.
- You need to calculate the amount of protein in your daily diet.
- If the amount of protein is less than 1 gram per 1 kg of weight, then you need to increase its proportion in food.
- If you experience difficulties with increasing the protein norm with a normal meal, you should add a protein mixture.
If only the third point is suitable for you, then you need to contact the sports nutrition store, where you can find a variety of protein mixtures. They look very similar in appearance, but the portion weight and percentage of protein should be indicated on the label of each package with a similar mixture.
It is recommended to take those products in which the protein concentration is from 75% and above. In this case, you will receive the required amount, even with one reception.
In one portion of such a mixture usually contains 20-25 grams of protein. It must be mixed with water or milk, consumed about an hour before training or within two hours after training.
Kinds of Protein
For those who have not encountered the topic of sports nutrition, this information may seem too confusing, but if you delve into it, you will see that it is not very difficult to understand. Therefore, the next important point will be a listing of the types of protein.
The main types of protein by origin:
- whey
- soybean;
- casein;
- lactic;
- egg;
- meat;
- fish.
Each of these species has a certain structure, which determines the degree of its digestibility and the completeness of splitting.
For the human body, protein from whey, meat and eggs is much better. Their amino acid profiles are very similar, so they are absorbed by almost 100%. For training, it is much better to use any of these types of protein. But among them, whey has the highest absorption rate, mainly for this reason it is used in sports.
Amino Acids in Protein
Buying protein in a sports nutrition store or eating protein from food, a person always gets a certain amount of amino acids. Typically, a protein contains 18-20 different amino acids that perform the necessary functions.
Amino acids can be interchangeable and irreplaceable. The former can be synthesized in the body at different speeds, while the latter come only with food. That is why any diet should include a sufficient amount of protein, since the human body is not able to provide itself with all the necessary components.
In some cases, it is recommended to use amino acid complexes, which are protein compressed into tablets. This option is suitable for those who are allergic to flavoring and other additives in protein mixtures.