Research
Micronutrients & recovery
Adding protein to carbohydrate beverages during endurance exercise does not improve performance but suppresses markers of muscle damage and reduces feelings of muscular soreness.
If you are doing long endurance events, stick to carbohydrates for fuel. You can add a small amount of protein (0.25 g/kg/hour) to help reduce muscle soreness the next day, but do not expect it to make you faster or last longer.
GoodQualifiesMEDIUM confidence
added protein does not appear to improve endurance performance... adding protein to a carbohydrate beverage/gel during exhaustive endurance exercise suppresses markers of muscle damage (creatine kinase) 12 to 24 h post-exercise and decreases the endurance athletes’ feelings of muscular soreness
Why this rating
Based on multiple studies cited, though the number of investigations is noted as limited.
Source
International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise
Ralf Jäger et al. · Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition · 2017
DOI 10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8
narrative_reviewCited 809×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- For healthy, exercising individuals, an overall daily protein intake of 1.4–2.0 g/kg body weight per day is sufficient to build and maintain muscle mass, with higher intakes (2.3–3.1 g/kg/d) only necessary during hypocaloric periods to maximize lean body mass retention.Strong
- Pre-sleep ingestion of 30–40 g of casein protein increases overnight muscle protein synthesis and metabolic rate without influencing lipolysis.Good
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