How Much Protein Should You Actually Eat to Build Muscle

The honest range is 1.6-2.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day. Almost everything past that headline number is really about which end of that range fits you — and most generic advice skips that part entirely.

Why the range is so wide It's not really about your goal (bulk vs. cut vs. maintain) as much as it's about how your body actually holds onto muscle. Someone who's naturally lean and finds it hard to gain muscle needs to lean toward the top of that range — the extra protein is doing real work supporting growth that doesn't come easily. Someone with a build that holds muscle more naturally can often sit lower in the range and still make progress, with more room in the diet for everything else.

Neither is "better" — it's just what your build actually needs, not a number copied from someone else's plan.

What that looks like in practice For a 75kg person, that's roughly 120-165g of protein a day — genuinely a big range depending on where you land in it. That's the entire reason "just eat more protein" isn't useful advice on its own: 120g and 165g are very different days of eating, and picking the wrong end for your build means either falling short of what you need or eating more than you have to.

You don't need to track every gram forever Once you know your real number, hitting it becomes a habit, not a math problem — a portion of protein at each meal, one or two protein-forward snacks, done. The tracking phase is just to calibrate; it's not meant to be permanent homework.

The one thing worth actually knowing Your real target, tied to your real weight and your real build — not a generic "eat more protein" instruction, and not a number pulled from a program built for someone else's body. That's the whole difference between protein advice that works and protein advice you nod at and ignore.