How much protein you need per day is set by your bodyweight and how hard you train — not by a number printed on a tub. If you lift, run, or you're eating in a deficit to lose fat while holding onto muscle, the working range most coaches use is roughly 0.7 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. The low end is where the evidence points: a 2018 meta-analysis of 49 resistance-training studies in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found no further muscle gain from protein above about 1.6 g per kilogram a day, roughly 0.73 grams per pound. The baseline for a sedentary adult is much lower: the Recommended Dietary Allowance of 0.8 g per kilogram, nearer 0.36 grams per pound. For a 170-pound lifter, that's about 119 to 170 grams a day. That's your number. The rest of this page is how to actually land on it.

Last updated: September 2026

Nobody ever turns "eat more protein" into a number for you

Ask five people at your gym and you'll get five confident answers, none tied to your bodyweight. If you're tired of being told to "just eat more protein" by people who never say how much, that's fair — the advice stops one step before the part you needed. You got the direction and not the destination.

The second gap is bigger. Once you have a number, you still have to find out whether you hit it, and that means logging food. Most people struggle here, and not for lack of discipline: a burrito bowl is nine ingredients, a curry you cooked yourself is fifteen, and typing all of that into a form after dinner is a chore nobody keeps up for two weeks. So the honest version of this is two problems. What's my number, and how do I find out what I actually ate without turning every meal into paperwork?

What you want is a target that survives a normal week

Imagine the version that works. You finish lunch, you say what you had out loud or type one line, and the running total moves. No kitchen scale, no scrolling a database for "grilled chicken thigh, skin off." By mid-afternoon you can see how far short you are with dinner still ahead of you, so you make one different choice at dinner instead of finding out on Sunday that you missed all week.

That's the whole job of a protein target. It isn't a grade handed out once the day is over. It's a nudge in the middle of it, while you can still do something about it.

AllStrong's nutrition tracking is built around that. You log meals by typing normally, speaking, scanning a barcode, or photographing the plate; the app breaks a mixed dish into its ingredients and estimates the macros against USDA FoodData Central data. Your calorie and macro targets move on a progress bar as you log, adjusted for your activity level and your TDEE. Typing or speaking a meal and the live calorie and macro targets are on the free plan. Barcode scanning and photo logging are Premium, which every member of a gym on AllStrong gets automatically.

The little-known part: your protein number moves, and most targets don't

Hardly anyone brings this up, and it makes a real difference over a year.

Most protein advice hands you one figure and quietly assumes you'll use it forever. But the input to that figure is your bodyweight — and if the entire point of your training is to change your bodyweight and your body composition, the figure is out of date by design. Lose twelve pounds and keep the target you set in January, and you're eating more protein than your own plan calls for. Add muscle across a year and you're eating less than it calls for.

Most people don't realize their target is a moving number. They set it once, drift, and wonder why the thing that worked in spring stopped working. The fix isn't dramatic: recalculate when your weight has moved enough to matter, and let the target follow you rather than the other way round. Once you have the number, how to hit protein goals without supplements covers reaching it with ordinary food.

This is also where body composition data earns its place. Bodyweight alone can't tell you whether the pounds you lost were fat or lean mass — and protecting lean mass is most of what your protein intake is doing. If you get an InBody, DEXA, or BIA scan, AllStrong reads the printed results sheet: you photograph the printout and it pulls the numbers off the page, so your body fat percentage and lean mass sit in the same history as your food and your training.

Hitting the number on an ordinary Tuesday

None of this is effortless, so here's the practical shape of it.

Anchor the protein first, then build the meal around it. Decide the protein source before the sides. It's a smaller decision, made earlier, and it's the one that carries the day.

Spread it across the day. Three or four protein-anchored meals tend to add up more reliably than two enormous ones. Appetite runs out before the total does.

Log the awkward meals, not the obvious ones. You already know roughly what's in a chicken breast. The meals that wreck your estimate are restaurant food and anything you cooked from a recipe.

Judge the week, not the day. Consistency does more work here than precision. Five days in range beats two perfect days followed by giving up on Wednesday.

If the logging habit itself is the thing you're building, the habit tracking app page covers streaks and daily tasks. Once your number is settled, Protein Goals: How to Actually Hit Them Daily goes deeper on the food side — what to keep in the fridge, what travels, what to order when someone else picked the restaurant.

The words you'll keep running into

Nutrition writing is full of terms that sound technical and mean something ordinary:

  • Macronutrients — protein, carbs, and fat. Protein is one of the three.
  • TDEE — how many calories you burn in a day, all in. Your protein target comes from bodyweight; your calorie target comes from here.
  • Caloric deficit — eating fewer calories than you burn. This is when protein matters most, because it's what stands between "lost fat" and "lost fat and muscle."
  • Body composition — your body fat percentage and muscle mass, rather than what the scale says.
  • Body recomposition — losing fat and building muscle at the same time.
  • Hypertrophy — training aimed at making muscle bigger. Protein is the raw material and training is the signal, which is why How Many Sets Per Muscle Group Per Week matters as much as this page does.

Common questions about daily protein

How much protein do I need per day to build muscle?

The same bodyweight-based range applies whether you're gaining or losing — the figures at the top of this page. What changes when you're building isn't the protein rule of thumb, it's your total calories. Eat at maintenance or a small surplus, train with progressive overload, and protein is the raw material while training is the stimulus. Neither covers for a shortfall in the other.

Can I get enough protein without shakes or supplements?

Yes. Shakes are a convenience, not a requirement — they exist because drinking protein takes seconds and cooking it takes longer. If whole food gets you into your range without making you miserable, you don't need the powder. The target is what matters; how it arrives doesn't.

Is there such a thing as too much protein?

The International Society of Sports Nutrition's position stand puts the everyday range for people who exercise at 1.4 to 2.0 g per kilogram, and notes that higher intakes can help hold on to lean mass during a calorie deficit. For healthy adults, the practical cost of going over is that protein crowds out carbs or fat you wanted for training energy. If you have an existing kidney, liver, or other health condition, ask your doctor rather than a fitness app.

How do I know whether I'm actually hitting my target?

Measure before you change anything. Log what you already eat for two weeks, look at the daily totals, and the gap usually turns out to live in one specific meal — breakfast, most often. Fixing one meal is a far smaller project than overhauling your diet, and it's the change most likely to still be in place three months from now.

Set the number, then stop renegotiating it every week. The people who get somewhere aren't the ones with the most precise target — they're the ones whose target is roughly right and who keep showing up to hit it. You're building something. Give it room to show.