We’ve resisted and fought against this day for a long time. I’ve never been one to believe too much in the hype surrounding supplements and such, believing that the best approach (and all that was necessary in fact) was to eat sufficiently and eat well with ‘normal’ foods. And that’s pretty much all I did for last year’s training, and even with the ridiculous amount of exercise that I was doing towards the end (cycling, running, weights, intervals, etc) I didn’t resort to anything ‘unnatural’. In fact, I didn’t pay much attention to my diet much at all (besides being generous with what I ate normally).
However, a few things have made me question whether there wasn’t something missing in that – First has been my tendency to get quite ill if I’m not paying attention to my diet. This has happened numerous times before and it’s made me consider that perhaps my ‘normal’ diet is lacking, especially in protein. I have also wondered perhaps ‘what if’ in terms of training for the last Tough Mudder, and that if I had paid more attention to my protein intake perhaps my strength and performance might have been better by the time I got there… Which leads me to #2: That we live a largely vegetarian diet, or at least one which minimises the amount of meat we consume. So the concept of sitting down to a chicken breast or steak at dinner is pretty uncommon for us. (This is combined with the fact that protein tends to either be expensive, time-consuming to prepare, or something our kids won’t eat (lentils, soy, etc). Carbs we have no problem consuming, but protein less so. Thirdly is an issue of timing – Much of my training seems to be at awkward points in the day, so our trainer’s post-workout encouragement to ‘take some protein within an hour’ is hard to manage when I then have to hop on the bike and spend the next hour riding home. As much as I’d like to have a bacon sandwich before cycling (who wouldn’t!?), it just isn’t practical. Whereas a protein-supplement of some form is a lot easier to manage in those narrow windows of opportunity when it’s not a ‘meal time’ per se.
Still, even with all of those reasons I resisted it. It felt unnecessary, expensive, and unnatural.
However, then my wife returned home after a session with her trainer saying that he’d encouraged her to take some form of supplement. I’m not entirely sure why – Partly it’s the low-carb, high-protein diet he wants her to follow (her goals are somewhat different to mine), but perhaps she was also aware that she might not be consuming enough protein for the same reasons as me, and we weren’t about to start eating meat every night of the week. And then when we sat down and did the sums, we realised that the protein powders (bought at a sensible price) were actually cheaper than many other options. About 80 cents a serving with this lot, which is probably better bang for buck (in protein terms at least) than regular peanut butter sandwiches, boiled eggs or tins of tuna, not to mention more convenient.
And now with two of us in the same boat, we decided to bite the bullet and go for it. I still can’t call myself a ‘believer’ in this stuff (and I’m still appalled by the level of obsessiveness which goes on around supplements – It gives wine-snobs a run for their money!) but I’ll be curious to see how it helps in terms of recovery and improvements in muscle strength. I’ll still be limiting myself to no more than one serve a day, and making sure that the bulk of my protein comes in ‘food’ form, along with lots of carbs and other good stuff, but it will be interesting to see.
A quick tally of today’s food intake gives me only about 60g or so, when I should be on about 100… So I feel a bit more comfortable that we truly are taking protein as a ‘supplement’ (Ie. “making up for a deficiency in your diet”) rather than as pointless ‘extra’, in the assumption that more protein = more muscle. And we'll see how we feel about this stuff once the 10kgs is gone - Which may take a while!!!
