How Much Protein Intake While Cutting Or Bulking? | And Gain Strength!

Find Out What Is Your Body Fat Percentage?

If you don’t know how to measure your body fat percentage, check out this article where I discuss 3 methods of how to do it.

So why is this the first step? You need to know your lean body mass to define your protein intake. Using your total body weight as a reference has its disadvantages, as mentioned above.

Probably the 2 most important measurements you need when cutting and bulking are tracking your macros (calorie input and output) and checking your body fat percentage to see your progress.

What Is Your Current Status?

This could be classified into many categories, but for simplicity, we will use 4 options.

• Sedentary – No exercise
• Light Activity – 3 Times Per Week
• Moderate Activity – 5 Times Per Week
• High Activity – 7 Times Per Week

Are You Cutting Or Bulking?

First of all, I just want to get this out of the way, but it’s important to understand that when you are cutting, you are cutting fat. When you are bulking, you are bulking muscle.

So now you basically only need to decide if you should be on a caloric surplus or deficit.

Sounds easy, right? Well, kind of…

So the easy part is:

• Bulking = Calorie Surplus.
• Cutting = Calorie Deficit.

The not-so-easy part is:

• How much protein when in calorie surplus?
• How much protein when in calorie-cutting?
• How will exercise affect my protein intake?

Protein Intake When Cutting (For Weight Loss)

How much should you be consuming when cutting fat?

The upper half of the recommended protein intake using the lean mass would be 0.9 – 1.2 grams of protein per pound. Using the example at the beginning of the article, we would multiply 140 lbs of lean body mass by 0.9 and 1.2 (126 – 168 grams of protein).

Why would you go with the upper half?

• When you are on a calorie deficit, you want to avoid losing muscle. If you lower too much your protein intake, your weight loss will be fat and muscle. For this reason, it is important to stay on a high protein intake.
• Another reason is because of its satiety properties. When you are on a calorie deficit you need to eat less. So if you want to avoid hunger and keep the calorie deficit, protein is a good way to accomplish the goal.

Now that we know the amount, we need to define how to take the protein daily.

For this, we will need to answer a series of questions that are frequently asked.

Let’s start with the most common one.

Is 50 grams of protein a day enough for weight loss?

Yes and no.

50 grams of protein a day is enough for weight loss; the problem is that you will lose fat and muscle.

So what could be the problem if you are not eating enough protein while cutting? The answer is – muscle loss.

If you want to keep your lean body mass, you should try to eat at least 35 grams per meal.

So the follow-up question would be.

Can your body take more than 30 grams of protein per meal?

According to a study from the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, the optimum amount of protein absorption the body can take is between 20 – 25 grams per sitting. A sitting would be considered between 1.5 – 2 hours apart.

This means that technically if you only eat 3 meals a day, you would not absorb more than 75 grams during a day.

This is where splitting meals into 4 or 5 meals a day comes in handy.

You would be able to add another 50 grams a day, and you could reach 125 grams.

But the study said that to maximize the amount of protein, it should be split into 20-25 grams portions. That doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to absorb it by eating more per sitting.

What the study did find was that eating more than 40 grams of protein per sitting started to decrease muscle protein synthesis.

So the recommendation to reach the protein intake would be to eat at least 35 grams per meal, and depending on your weight goals, eat the meals necessary.

How to split your macros when cutting?

In this scenario, we will assume a person with a resting metabolic rate of 2,000 calories a day, and this person chose to take 155 grams because he is doing a moderate activity (At the end of the article, we provide a table for this calculation).

We will also consider 200 calories a day of exercise and a calorie deficit of 500 calories. This means that

• Total Calories Burned Are: 2,200 (Resting Metabolic Rate + Exercise)
• Calories To Consume: 1,700 (2200 – 500 calorie deficit)

If protein accounts for 4 cal/ g. This means that protein intake will be 620 calories in the day.

How should you split your carbs and protein?

If you are not doing any specific diet, you should try to do a balanced diet.

That means that every macro should be around 30% – 35% of calories.

Protein is already 620 calories which accounts for 36.4% (620 cal / 1,700 cal). So to make it simple, we only subtract 1700 – 620 to know how many calories we have left. We get 1,080 calories.

To keep it balanced; we only divide the result by 2. We get 540 calories for carbohydrates and 540 calories for fats.

But remember, carbohydrates have 4 cal/gram, and fats have 9 cal/gram. So the number of grams will vary for each macronutrient.

What are the final results?

• Protein grams: 155, Protein Calories: 620, Protein %: 36.4%
• Carbohydrate grams: 135, Carbohydrate Calories: 540, Carbohydrate %: 31.76%
• Fat grams: 60, Fat Calories: 540, Fat %: 31.76%

Protein Intake When Bulking (For Muscle Gain)

Use the middle of the recommended protein intake (0.9 – 1.1) grams of protein. Using the same example, we would multiply it by * 140 lbs (126 – 168 grams of protein).

Why not the lowest? This is usually for maintenance purposes.

So how does everything we have said summarize to?

Detailed Chart

Here is what you need to know in a simple chart.

Just multiply your lean body mass (in lbs) by the number in the chart according to your activity level (rows) and goals (column).

	Maintenance	Bulking	Cutting
Sedentary	0.5	N/A	0.9
Light Activity	0.6	0.8	1.0
Moderate Activity	0.7	0.9	1.1
High Activity	0.8	1.0	1.2

Bottom Line

Everyone has different results and trying different methods can help you see what works best for you.

Try this approach and see if you get any improvements.

Let me know your thoughts on the comment section.