As a fitness lover, your efforts need to be broadly split into three areas: exercise, rest, and nutrition. If any of those starts to suffer, your fitness will decrease, your risk of injury will likely start to rise, and you’ll just generally start to feel less able to do the sports and activities you enjoy doing.
A key part of this puzzle consists of getting enough protein, but how do you make sure you’re actually achieving this? From figuring out your fitness goals to finding some fun sources of protein, here’s how you should go about setting and then meeting your protein targets.
Figure out your goals
First of all, you’ll need to get clear on what your fitness goals are. Are you trying to get stronger, as a powerlifter or doing lots of explosive sprints? Or are you more focused on endurance-based activities?
Recommended protein intakes tend to be between roughly 1.2-2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. If you’re very active, and putting your body under a lot of stress through intense workouts, you’ll want to aim towards the upper end of that range.
If, on the other hand, you’re doing more casual, slow-tempo runs, and focused more on endurance based activities, you can ease up slightly on the protein, and focus more on getting healthy carbs to fuel those longer activities.
Keep it fun, keep it consistent
The most important thing when it comes to fitness is consistency. This applies to the exercise that you do, but it applies equally to the way that you feed yourself before, during and after that exercise.
It’s no good having a great week of meeting your protein goals, if you then decide it’s too much work and slack off for the next week and a half. To make it work in the long term, you need to make sure that meeting your protein goals is fun, not something that turns into a chore.
That means that the majority of your protein needs to come from tasty, affordable, and simple to prepare sources, not from expensive, barely palatable supplements.
Easy protein sources
The good news is that protein is found in a wide range of different foods, many of which are easy to integrate into a bunch of tasty meals. Eggs, for example, are relatively cheap, incredibly versatile, and provide one of the most bioavailable sources of protein you can get.
Tinned tuna from somewhere like John West is also incredibly bioavailable, easy to store, affordable, and can be integrated into everything from tuna salads to cheese toasties.
Getting enough protein shouldn’t feel like a chore, if you take the right approach. So long as you can figure out roughly how much you need to be getting every day, and then identify some quick, easy and tasty sources to get that protein from, you’ll be able to build up a collection of meals that help you feel fit and ready to go out and remain active.