How taking in more protein can make you better than the rest

The journey of an aspiring athlete is a long and tenacious one, fraught with many difficulties and rewards.

Identifying or predicting if you or anyone is going to become a professional athlete is incredibly difficult to do and there is no one thing or a “silver bullet” so to speak that will catapult you to stardom.

But there are things you can add to your daily routine that will have more impact on your development and performance than others.

It is very important to remember to build a success framework where the sum of all the impactful things you do daily will give you the best fighting chance to stardom.

One of the most import aspects to any athlete’s career is good hydration and great nutrition.

What happens when you have both and what could you add to your game plan that will add additional value? The answer lies in your protein intake through supplementation.

Great nutrition requires discipline and most of your protein intake can be found in food sources, but there will come a time where you can’t eat more than you are currently, your sport finishes late into the evening, you are training twice a day or five days a week and then a game.

There are just not enough hours in a day to replenish and under these circumstances do you look to “supplement” your diet with protein shakes and protein snacks?

The main reason as to why you need additional protein during high training demands is for muscle retention, muscle growth, muscle recovery and increased performance gains

In times of high activity it’s important to take in more protein to build muscle. Picture: iStock

Growing in physical size does not mean you are going to be faster or more explosive, as you have noticed with the lack of athleticism body builders have.

They are not functional, nor are they fast, but they most certainly look the part.

It’s important to understand what protein sources are made of and understand why protein is so important for you.

Protein is made up of amino acids that are easily absorbed within your bloodstream and in return, triggers muscle protein synthesis.

Vitamins B12 and folate are also required to kick-start the process and that is why most protein powders contain it.

Protein for Recovery

During exercise and training, your muscles and muscle fibres contract and relax thousands of times and these fibres are place under load, tension, and reactivity.

The longer you train, the more energy and nutrients the muscles require to function.

Depending on the type of physical activities and demands required of your muscles, will depend how much recovery time and nutrients your body needs. If you eat a steak after a match, your body takes about six hours to start extracting the amino acids needed for the protein synthesis and can take up to two days to fully exit your system.

This simply takes too long for you to get the necessary nutrients to repair your muscles. This is one of the reasons you will see a rugby player during a post-match interview sipping on his protein shake. The quicker he gets nutrients in his body, the faster the recovery process will be.

Protein for Performance

Each sport requires a certain type of body.

Football is lean and mean while rugby you need different sizes based on your positions, but one thing all athletes need is more functional strength and more maintenance of what you already have.

The more you train, the more muscle is used and broken down to give you energy. It seems counter-productive but all bodies will revert back to lean status. Like a few hundred years ago, hunters did not need size to find food, they needed distance, speed, agility and functional strength to hunt.

The body sees additional muscle size as a waste and sheds it first. It was only since the evolution of sport that the demands changed. A hunter’s body in today’s time will get bounced from pole to pole in a modern rugby game because he is not built for rugby. The way muscles should be built has evolved over time. As you grow muscle size, you need to train it to be more flexible, agile, and reactive.

Then, once you have achieved high-performance status on that muscle level, you grow it a bit more and repeat. Athletes on steroids skip the developmental process of muscle size progression and performance and grow artificially quicker, but lack the functionality needed for the sporting demands.

Joint and tendons need time to adjust to load and weight demands, and this cannot be rushed.

This is one of the reasons why athletes on steroids get hurt more often than athletes that have developed properly over the years.

Your body absorbs 25–35 grams of protein per meal and since meat takes too long to digest, athletes look to supplement their protein intake to maintain or increase their muscle size and functionality within 30 minutes of post-exercise.

You can now see how important protein is, whether you are an aspiring athlete or professional athlete, and you need to make this a part of your daily game plan and success routine.

This will have a massive impact on your sporting gains if done properly.

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