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Millions of marketing dollars are spent each year telling you that you need protein drinks to grow massive like the mega-star bodybuilding athletes.
Well let me tell you the truth, protein powders and protein drinks don't work. Here's why....
Most bodybuilders go on high protein diets and add protein drinks and protein powders to increase their protein intake. They start to drink their additional food, looking for the easy way out. Like training in the aerobics area of your gym only using the multistation machines - because they are easier. Guess what? Neither will give you optimal growth.
Over the years I have tried many variations of diets, many extreme so I could judge the effects. Several times in the last 20 years I have gone onto high intakes of protein powders for various reasons and each time I have I have found that I could maintain weight and maintain my training strength but I could not make gains, now let me remind you that I have done this several times over the years with the same effect each time.
It helps when you can order your protein powder in large 20kg bags of whey protein powder
I stopped drinking protein drinks and went back to eating food proteins and I start growing again, the reason for this is that natural food protein sources contain a lot of other ingredients besides the basic protein chains that makes you grow.
There are all your trace minerals, vitamins, there are still living organisms in the fresh produce, there are a hundred different scientific names and reasons that you don't need to know, and I am not going to tell you (because I read them got the gist of it and promptly forgot them - I am a weight trainer not a food analyst).
There are a ton of micronutrients that supplement companies are just starting to identify and extract to sell at high markups, undoubtedly these work but you can get all this cheaper by eating real food - red meat especially. (Creatine, HMB, etc)
Beside the fact that eating protein rich foods (meat, eggs, fish) is a
far better source of protein despite the claims of the nutrition
companies, protein powders do play an important part in an overall
supplementation program - for me that is before training and after
training.
THERE ARE SPECIFIC TIMES THAT A PROTEIN DRINK IS OF A SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGE
I take a protein drink right before I leave for the gym (15 minutes travel) and as soon as I get home. I want to flood my body with proteins and carbs as much as possible during this initial recovery stage when your muscles are screaming out for sugars and proteins.
The second time I have protein drinks on a daily basis is the middle of the night. I get up and I just need some food quickly, I do not want to cook, I want to go back to sleep. Sleep time is when your body recovers the most, a hit of protein drink in the middle of the night will help recovery. I throw in a full egg or two into this drink to add some natural fats that will slow down the digestion a bit to help prevent a blood sugar spike (and associated fat gain).
This is when protein powders can make a noticable difference.
The rest of the time concentrate on your diet and eating natural unprocessed protein sources instead and save the protein drinks for the time that they really work, or for when it is just impossible to cook something.
For a list of Protein Drink recipes click the link and if you suffer from protein farts then you better read this article: Protein Farts
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