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provide guidance on proper form and choosing appropriate weights. Instead, motivation and the willingness to tackle ambitious goals seem to be the differentiating factors. As Ratamess points out, these are the kinds of benefits that an enthusiastic training partner can also provide. For less experienced exercisers, the educational role of the personal trainer takes on greater importance, he cautions. But beyond that, simply having someone there watching you—whether it’s a personal trainer or a workout partner—seems to confer an additional benefit. Certainly, he says, “both have advantages compared to training independently.”

Do I need extra protein to build muscle?

It’s a pretty safe bet that the guy at the gym who is built like a tree trunk and bench-presses the entire rack also has an enormous barrel of protein powder tucked into his gym bag. This, you might think, is a pretty good endorsement of the “you’ve got to eat muscle to build muscle” school of thought. But correlation is not the same as causation. “It’s hard to argue against years of practice that apparently works,” says Stuart Phillips, a McMaster University researcher who studies protein needs in athletes. “The real question is, do they gain muscle because of what they do, or in spite of what they do?”

On this basic question, athletes and scientists remain deeply divided. At McMaster and elsewhere, researchers have spent years conducting careful studies of how much protein exercisers can actually use. By tracking nitrogen, which is found in protein but not in carbohydrates or fat, they can determine whether their subjects are building muscle, losing muscle, or holding steady. “We monitor the food going in and collect the poop, pee, and sweat going out,” explains Mark Tarnopolsky, one of Phillips’s colleagues. Surprisingly—but consistently—the results show that even serious athletes process only marginally more protein than their sedentary peers, and far less than the megadoses recommended by muscle magazines. Novice weightlifters use the most protein, since they are adding muscle most rapidly, while veteran bodybuilders use less despite their enormous muscles.

That leaves would-be bodybuilders with a choice: Do you take the advice of the egghead in the lab or the muscle-head in the gym? Given that current research techniques aren’t perfect, a middle path is likely most appropriate, Phillips says. Although current dietary guidelines in Canada and the United States suggest consuming 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight (g/kg) daily, there is reasonable evidence that 1.1 g/kg is appropriate for serious endurance athletes and 1.3 g/kg for serious strength athletes. (One g/kg is equivalent to about 1.6 ounces of protein for each 100 pounds of body weight.) Even those amounts are below the 1.6 g/kg that average North Americans tend to eat daily when their diet is unrestricted, Tarnopolsky says. That means an ordinary, balanced diet should easily meet your needs—unless you’re restricting calories to lose weight. In that case, higher protein intakes (35 percent of calories instead of 15 percent, for example) combined with resistance training appear to help maintain muscle mass while overall mass drops.

Timing also matters: you’ll build muscle more effectively if you take in protein within about an hour of finishing your workout. The optimal post-workout dose is about 20 g (0.7 ounces) of protein, according to a 2009 McMaster study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. That’s equivalent to about 20 ounces of skim milk, four medium eggs, or three ounces of cooked beef. Powders, shakes, and bars offer a convenient way to get this right after a workout—but then again, so does a tuna sandwich.

In the end, if you decide to side with the gym rats and supersize your protein shakes, it’s unlikely to do much harm. “The extra protein will, for the record, not pack your kidneys in and will not destroy your bones,” Phillips says. The main drawback is that, by taking too much protein, you might end up not getting enough of the carbohydrates that are crucial