“You need protein powder to build muscle.”
You do not need protein powder to build muscle; strength training and enough protein from any source do the job.
You can build muscle on regular food. Protein powder is a convenience, not a requirement, so use it only if it makes reaching your protein needs easier.
Keep a protein food you enjoy at each meal, and add powder only if that is hard to do.
Muscle growth depends on strength training and enough total protein. In supplement trials, people who trained without extra protein still gained muscle, and the added benefit of supplements was modest and seen mostly when protein intake was low.
You do not need protein powder to build muscle; strength training and enough protein from any source do the job. In a 12-week trial of untrained middle-aged men, the group that trained and took a placebo instead of protein still gained about 4 pounds of lean mass, and across 49 trials, protein supplements added only about two-thirds of a pound more than training alone.
Protein supplement trials compare different total protein intakes, not powder against the same amount of protein from food, so they do not show that the powder form itself matters. In those trials, extra protein stopped adding lean mass once total intake passed about 0.7 grams per pound of body weight a day.
- Morton RW, Murphy KT, McKellar SR, Schoenfeld BJ, Henselmans M, Helms E, Aragon AA, Devries MC, Banfield L, Krieger JW, Phillips SM. A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of the effect of protein supplementation on resistance training-induced gains in muscle mass and strength in healthy adults. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2018;52(6):376-384. DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2017-097608. PMID: 28698222. PMCID: PMC5867436. Correction: Br J Sports Med. 2020;54(19):e7, DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2017-097608corr1, PMID: 32943392
- Zdzieblik D, Jendricke P, Oesser S, Gollhofer A, König D. The Influence of Specific Bioactive Collagen Peptides on Body Composition and Muscle Strength in Middle-Aged, Untrained Men: A Randomized Controlled Trial. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2021;18(9):4837. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18094837. PMID: 33946565. PMCID: PMC8125453