Increase Muscle Mass & Strength

By Ingesting Protein Before Bedtime

As many of you have probably discovered, the more you train, the harder it becomes to put on muscle. Bodybuilders have to constantly change their routines, boost their intensity and shock the body in the gym, while maintaining a strict routine of regular eating outside the gym. Understanding nutrient timing is critical to recovery from training and optimizing muscle growth. Having protein post-workout and before bed is critical to your success.

Eating, Sleeping and Growing

In my books, The G.A.I.N. Plan and The Leucine Factor Diet, I review the science behind eating at regular three-hour intervals to deliver the essential amino acids your muscles need to grow in a five meal-a-day diet. Furthermore, each of those meals needs to deliver adequate amounts of leucine to turn on your muscle protein synthetic machinery. For good reason, I don’t mention anything about extending those three-hour intervals during sleep. Sleep is very important in recovery from intense training, and disrupting it to eat doesn’t make sense.¹ Sleep is a very restorative process. Deep, slow-wave sleep is hard to obtain in this stressful world, full of chemically dependent wakefulness and multimodal connectedness. Deep sleep is the time when anabolic hormones are boosted, tissues are repaired and your metabolism is reset. The importance of sleep can be best illustrated in those who have sleep apnea or shift-work sleep disorder. These individuals have metabolic dysfunction, with hypertension, insulin resistance and obesity as a consequence of their lack of deep sleep.

Many bodybuilders have sleep apnea, where many short episodes of suffocation occur during sleep. This causes multiple awakenings and an inability to attain a slow-wave sleep pattern. This results in daytime sleepiness, fatigue, lower testosterone, lower growth hormone, and insulin resistance. As a result, these bodybuilders find it hard to build muscle. Just ask Tad the diet coach how much better he feels when he has his CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] device on at night. The next day he feels more rested, stronger and his muscles grow like weeds.

The reason I mention all this about sleep cycle disruption is that it doesn’t make sense to me to disrupt your sleep with an alarm every three hours to eat extra protein. Our bodies are designed to experience a brief period of fasting every night, in order to reset our minds and our hormones. Growth hormone is better released in a state of fasting. Our testosterone levels rise after the last of our longest slow-wave sleep cycles before waking. Taking the time to wake and eat can disrupt this process.

All that being said, if you are chemically enhanced and you want to grow faster, then have a whey protein shake sitting on your nightstand. If you are taking the risk of type 2 diabetes (via growth hormone) or cardiovascular disease (through excessive anabolics), then you probably don’t have to worry too much about a little lost sleep to get more calories and protein in for growth.

Protein and Carbs Before Bed

Now let’s say you’re dieting for a contest and your bro-scientist friend says, “Dude, you can’t eat after 8:00 p.m. or you’ll turn all those calories into fat while sleeping.” Is this really true? Does this go for just carbohydrates? Does protein before sleep help?

First of all, let’s address this issue of carbs before bed. The truth is that there is no truth to the idea that eating carbohydrates before bed will cause you to convert more of these nutrients to fat. In fact, when you eat carbohydrates, they stimulate insulin release, which limits muscle protein breakdown and restores muscle glycogen. Knowing that, it is also important to note that eating excess carbohydrates at any time of the day can potentially lead to the excess being stored as fat. Research in obese individuals on a calorie-restricted diet even supports that consuming most of your carbohydrates at dinner results in more weight loss and better metabolic parameters.²

One of the most interesting studies about protein feeding and excess calories was recently performed by Dr. Jose Antonio of the ISSN. He showed that consumption of up to five times the RDA of added whey protein, in caloric excess, resulted in no significant increases in fat mass in weight-trained individuals.³ Therefore, eating added amounts of whey protein would not be expected to induce fat gain, even if eaten at night.

Dr. Bob Wolfe recently made it very clear at the 2015 ISSN Conference in Austin, Texas that excess protein intake may not enhance the muscle protein synthetic machinery any more, but may help muscle grow in other ways. There is a constant balance between muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein breakdown. Intense training induces muscle damage and breakdown, or “turnover” of proteins. Eating a protein meal not only turns on muscle protein synthesis, but also reduces muscle protein breakdown, almost dose dependently. Thus, all the research that says eating 20-30 grams of protein is all you need to grow, is grossly misinterpreting the science behind muscle tissue acquisition.

Meal Timing and Thermic Effect of Food

There is some evidence that the timing of your meals does affect the “thermic effect of food.” This is how much your food turns on your metabolism, such that more energy is burned rather than stored. When identical meals containing nearly 550 calories and 50 percent carbohydrate are consumed for breakfast, dinner or at 1:00 a.m., the thermic response to the meal is lowest a 1:00 a.m.⁴ Furthermore, the satiety of meals decreases as the day goes on, so people have a tendency to eat more than they need in the evenings.⁵ Studies also suggest that non-obese individuals with night eating syndrome, consuming the majority of their calories after dinner, have impaired metabolism and sleep disturbances.⁶ But do we really need to consume an additional 550 calories or 225 calories as carbohydrates?

If your goal is to build muscle without storing calories as fat, why not have some protein before bed? A study by Res and colleagues, published in the ACSM’s Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal, demonstrated that consuming an additional 40 grams of casein protein before sleep elevated plasma amino acids, turned on more muscle protein synthesis and netted a positive protein balance overnight.⁷ Another study even suggested that the slowly absorbed casein, although theoretically more satiating, didn’t really improve satiety better than whey protein.⁸ Unfortunately, that study didn’t examine muscle growth differences between the two proteins, but resting energy expenditure was the same.

A recent study of 44 men in the Netherlands enrolled in a 12-week weight-training program examined the effects of a protein and carbohydrate supplement given before bed.⁹ The supplement contained 13.75 grams of casein hydrolysate, 13.75 grams of casein and 15 grams of carbohydrate. When compared to a non-caloric placebo drink, the protein drink showed remarkable results. The subjects fed the protein supplement achieved greater increases in strength and muscle mass. Unfortunately, the study didn’t include a group that received the drink at an alternative time of day. Perhaps the added protein in the daily total was additive to muscle growth, and limited muscle breakdown regardless of when it had been consumed? Nonetheless, according to a review by Dr. Mike Ormsbee, it seems that small meals of 150 calories before bed may improve muscle protein accretion, and even cardiometabolic health.¹⁰

I am a fan of anecdotally avoiding carbohydrates before bed in the dieting bodybuilder. My reasoning is that I often recommend an evening cardio session, followed by a whey or casein protein meal before bed. This allows for some glycogen depletion that adds up in the overnight fast. Upon arising, my clients will do another fasted morning cardio session, followed by a high-quality egg or whey protein-supplemented breakfast. This allows for limited glycogen stores available for burning in the morning cardio, and thus more mobilization of fat stores. Since added protein only seems to help build muscle, have a pure whey, casein or egg 40-50 gram shake/meal before bed to optimize your muscle mass.

Dr. Victor Prisk is a board certified orthopaedic surgeon and IFBB professional bodybuilder in Pittsburgh, PA. Dr. Prisk is an active member of the GNC Medical Advisory Board and creator of the “G.A.I.N. Plan.” He is an NCAA All-American gymnast, champion swing dancer and NPC Welterweight National Champion.

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