Protein intake and recovery: how much do you actually need?

Your daily target, by body weight and training type

The single most useful thing you can do with this article is find your row in this table. It converts the research ranges above into an actual number of grams for two common body weights, so you don't have to do the multiplication yourself.

A few things worth noticing in that table. The endurance-athlete range overlaps almost entirely with general activity — cardio-heavy training doesn't demand dramatically more protein than moderate resistance training does, despite what a lot of running-nutrition content implies. And the older-adult range sits meaningfully above the sedentary baseline for younger adults, which is the opposite of what many people assume happens to protein needs as we age.

Why "more protein is always better" doesn't hold up

Muscle protein synthesis — the process that actually rebuilds tissue after training — is a saturable process. Ingesting protein triggers a synthesis response that rises, peaks, and plateaus; past a certain point in a single sitting, more protein doesn't push that plateau any higher. Several controlled feeding studies have found that roughly 20-40 g of high-quality protein in one meal (about 0.25-0.4 g/kg) maximizes the response for most adults — doubling that amount in the same sitting hasn't shown a proportional additional benefit in the studies that have tested it directly.

The same pattern shows up at the daily level. Once total intake reaches the 1.6-2.2 g/kg range that the International Society of Sports Nutrition's position stand identifies as sufficient for most people trying to build or maintain muscle through resistance training, pushing further generally shows diminishing returns for muscle size specifically. The partial exception is a calorie deficit: several studies on resistance-trained people cutting fat found that higher intakes, in the 2.3-3.1 g/kg range, helped preserve more lean mass than the standard range did — likely because being in an energy deficit itself blunts the anabolic response, and extra protein partially compensates.

How much to trust this: the "hard ceiling" framing is a simplification worth being honest about. The classic single-meal studies measure synthesis over a few hours after one dose, which is a narrow window. At least one more recent analysis of the postexercise anabolic response found no clean upper limit in how long or how strongly the body kept responding to protein — which complicates the tidy "40 g is the max" story that gets repeated online. The safest practical takeaway isn't a rigid per-meal cap; it's that once you're consistently hitting your daily g/kg target across three to four meals, chasing an even higher number is unlikely to be the thing holding your recovery back.

Distributing it across the day

Because a single meal has a practical ceiling, hitting your daily total is easier with three to four protein-containing meals spaced roughly three to four hours apart than with one or two very large meals. The ISSN's general guidance — about 20-40 g per serving depending on body size — lines up with typical meal sizes anyway, so this isn't usually a hard behavior change; it's more a reason not to skip protein at breakfast and try to make it all up at dinner.

The old advice about a strict post-workout "anabolic window" — the idea that protein has to arrive within 30-60 minutes of finishing a workout or the benefit is lost — has softened considerably in more recent research. Eating a reasonable amount of protein sometime within a few hours of training, as part of your normal meal pattern, captures most of the benefit. If you're curious whether meal timing affects your recovery score itself rather than muscle repair specifically — for example, whether eating close to bedtime hurts overnight HRV — that's a related but distinct question we cover in our guide to meal timing and recovery score.

Older adults need more protein, not less

One of the more counterintuitive findings in this area is that protein requirements go up, not down, with age. Aging muscle becomes less responsive to a given dose of protein — researchers call this anabolic resistance — so the same 0.8-1.0 g/kg that's adequate for a sedentary 30-year-old is now considered too low for a healthy adult past roughly 65. Position papers on aging and muscle health generally recommend 1.0-1.2 g/kg for healthy older adults and 1.2-1.5 g/kg for those who are more active, recovering from illness, or already showing signs of sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss). This matters for lean body mass, which tends to decline with age independent of body weight and is one of the quieter drivers of long-term functional health.

The kidney question

This comes up in almost every protein discussion, so it's worth addressing directly rather than dodging it: in people with healthy kidney function, the research does not show that higher protein intake causes kidney damage. Some observational studies have found associations between high protein intake and kidney function decline, but the more carefully controlled evidence — including in resistance-trained populations eating well above the RDA for extended periods — hasn't reproduced that as a causal effect in healthy people. The clear exception is anyone who already has chronic kidney disease, where a doctor-supervised lower-protein diet is a standard part of management. If you have a diagnosed kidney condition, or any other condition that affects how you metabolize protein, treat the ranges in this article as general population guidance and get a personalized target from your physician or a registered dietitian — not from an article.

Putting a number on your own plate

The table above gets you close, but body weight alone doesn't capture everything — someone carrying more body fat at the same total weight generally needs less protein per kilogram of total weight than someone leaner, since protein needs track more closely with lean mass than with total mass. If you want a starting protocol:

1. Pick your row from the table based on your current training pattern, using your actual body weight.
2. Divide that daily target across three to four meals, aiming for roughly 20-40 g of protein per meal rather than one large dose.
3. Track for two weeks using whatever method is sustainable — a food log, a habit of reading labels, or photographing meals.
4. Adjust based on trend, not a single day. If you're consistently landing 20%+ below your target range, that's more actionable than a single low day.

Vita's meal logging can help with the tracking step specifically — describe, photograph or barcode-scan a meal and it estimates the macro breakdown and flags the protein gap against your target, so you can see roughly where you're landing without manually logging every gram. It won't replace a dietitian for a medical condition, but for the everyday question of "am I in the right range," pairing a rough estimate with a two-week trend beats guessing.

The bottom line

There isn't one universal "right" number — 0.8 g/kg, 1.6 g/kg and 2.2 g/kg are all correct answers depending on who's asking and what they're training for. What's consistently true across the research is that the sedentary RDA understates what most active adults need, that older adults need more rather than less, and that past roughly 2.0-2.2 g/kg for most goals, additional protein is safe for healthy people but isn't doing much additional work. Find your row in the table, hit it consistently across a few meals a day, and treat any further increase as a matter of preference rather than necessity.