Aches, Back Pain and Protein intake

The 3-month itch: Aches, Back Pain and Protein intake

I’m writing this article to address something I see in 75% of trainees. 3-6 months or so into barbell training they’ll present with one or more of the following:

· Back Ache

· Tendon Pain/General Aches

· Their sessions suddenly get much harder

And believe it or not most of the time this is due to one thing: Not enough protein.

To back this claim I need to step back and explain how strength training works.

How does Strength Training Work? - Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Cycle

The General Adaptation Cycle summarised: If an organism is exposed to a stress that it can overcome it will adapt to this stress therefore becoming more resilient to that specific stress.

In the training world this cycle can be reduced to 2 different things:

Stress/Recovery/Adaptation (henceforth SRA Cycle)

Or if we screw up

Stress/Inadequate Recovery/Exhaustion

This is pretty straight forward; in the gym we induce a stress, we leave the gym and recover, and if we have recovered correctly we become a stronger human. If we don’t recover we continue to pile up stress and fatigue until something breaks, this usually presents as a back ache, tendon pain or general fatigue in the gym.

The SRA cycle in more detail:

Step 1 - Stress:

We love barbells and we love compound movements that use the entire body – why? Because it allows us to stress the entire organism and it allows us to do so in very controlled increments. An organism will only adapt specifically to a stress (that’s why doing biceps curls don’t make your legs stronger) knowing this we need to choose lifts that stress the entire body so the entire body can adapt – this is why we love Squats, Deadlifts, Overhead Presses and Bench Presses. Barbells also allow us to control the dose of stress, we have weights as small as 0.25kg.

Strength Training is introducing a microtrauma or stress to the body triggering the SRA cycle.

Step 2 – Recovery

This step is easy in theory but where most of us screw things up, recovery is your life outside of the gym. In particular we are interested in: Sleep, Time between sessions (time to recover), Food.

Sleep is a God given miracle that regenerates us overnight, treat it as such! Aim for 8 hours sleep every 24 hours (a little more if you are a teenager)

Time: Time is rarely a problem unless you are an elite athlete or a very driven person, the programming we provide in the gym will mean that 99% of you will not have an issue with time between exercises and time to recover.

Food: Give your body the resources it requires to heal up.

Nail the above 3 and you get to move onto step 3.

Step 3: Adaptation – congratulations you are now a stronger human!

Your bodies baseline strength is now higher than is used to be, you have generated more useful tissue.

Ok so we understand now why we train, and how our body responds. I want to zoom in on food intake and in particular protein.

I am constantly asking “have you had enough protein” and the answer is always “yes”. I’ll then get a client to send me photos of every piece of food they eat in a day and they are usually 50% under what their protein intake should be.

So, what does an adequate day of protein consumption look like:

First up – males. We need to take in approximately 220-250g of protein a day when strength training.

This is a sample day eating 220g of protein:

Breakfast:

3 eggs on toast with berries and a coffee
Protein shake as you leave the house – 2 scoops 70g protein

Snack 1:

Chobani yoghurt small tub 11g protein

Lunch:

Chicken Burrito/Sandwich/leftover meat from dinner
Small tin of tuna 30g protein

Snack 2:

Protein shake – 2 scoops 48g protein

Dinner:

Steak 300g with vegetables 55grams

Snack 3:

Halo Top Ice cream 8grams

Females: There is more variance here because girls come in much more shapes and sizes, that being said on average girls should take in 120-150 grams of protein a day.

Breakfast:

2 eggs on toast with berries and a coffee
Protein shake as you leave the house – 2 scoops 62g protein