<h2>Where the window came from</h2><p>The idea that you have half an hour after training to get protein in came from a handful of small studies in the late nineties, most of them done on people who had trained fasted. Under those conditions timing does matter. Under normal conditions, where you ate a few hours before the session, it very nearly does not.</p><p>The controlled work since then has been consistent and slightly boring: when total daily protein is matched, shifting when you eat it has a small effect at best. What moves the needle is how much you eat across the day and how evenly you spread it.</p><h3>The numbers worth remembering</h3><p>Somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day covers almost everybody training hard. Split across three or four meals of roughly thirty to forty grams, that is enough to keep muscle protein synthesis elevated throughout the day without any clock-watching.</p><blockquote>If you hit your total, the timing question mostly answers itself.</blockquote><h2>So why does a shake after training still help?</h2><p>Because it is convenient, not because it is magic. For most members the post-session shake is simply the easiest way to get one of their three or four protein feeds in on a day that is otherwise busy. That is a perfectly good reason to keep doing it. It is just not the reason people think.</p><p>The one case where timing genuinely matters is training fasted first thing in the morning. If that is you, eat reasonably soon afterwards. Everyone else can shower first.</p><h3>What to do this week</h3><p>Work out your target from your bodyweight, then count what you actually ate for three ordinary days. Almost everybody who does this discovers they are twenty or thirty grams short, usually at breakfast. Fix that and you have done more for your training than any supplement on our shelf will.</p>

Protein Timing Matters Less Than You Think

The thirty minute anabolic window has been oversold for two decades. Here is what the research actually supports, and what to do instead.

Dev Raman

Written by Dev Raman

Protein Timing Matters Less Than You Think

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