Most people need between 0.6 and 0.8 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass to maintain muscle, with active individuals benefiting from up to 0.9 grams per pound. These numbers shift depending on your goals, your activity level, and whether you’re eating in a calorie deficit. Using lean body mass instead of total body weight gives you a more accurate protein target, especially if you carry significant body fat.
The General Range for Most People
Research on effective protein intake has identified a range of roughly 0.38 to 0.8 grams per pound of lean body mass (0.83 to 1.77 g/kg LBM). That’s a wide window because individual needs vary so much. A sedentary person maintaining their current body composition sits comfortably at the lower end. Someone who trains regularly, wants to build muscle, or is over 50 needs to aim higher.
For context, these numbers are well above the U.S. RDA for protein, which is based on total body weight and set at a level designed to prevent deficiency rather than optimize body composition. If you’ve been using the standard 0.36 grams per pound of total body weight guideline, basing your intake on lean mass will almost certainly push your target up.
Targets for Strength Training and Muscle Growth
The International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends that exercising individuals eat between 1.4 and 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. For strength and power athletes specifically, the recommendation narrows to 1.6 to 2.0 g/kg/day. Converted to pounds of lean body mass, that works out to roughly 0.7 to 0.9 grams per pound.
If you weigh 180 pounds with 20% body fat, your lean body mass is about 144 pounds. At the higher end of the range, you’d aim for around 130 grams of protein daily. At the lower end, about 100 grams. Most people focused on building or maintaining muscle land somewhere in the middle, around 115 to 130 grams in this example.
Higher Protein During Fat Loss
When you’re eating fewer calories than you burn, your body doesn’t just pull energy from fat. It breaks down muscle tissue too. Protein intake becomes the main lever you have to limit that loss. A study on resistance-trained athletes put this into sharp relief: those eating about 1.0 g/kg of protein during a calorie deficit lost 1.6 kg of lean mass in two weeks, while those eating 2.3 g/kg lost only 0.3 kg. That higher group was eating roughly 1.0 gram per pound of total body weight, or even more per pound of lean mass.
If you’re actively cutting, pushing to the top of the range (0.9 to 1.0 grams per pound of lean body mass, or even slightly above) is a well-supported strategy. The calorie deficit itself means some of that extra protein gets burned for energy rather than used for muscle repair, so you need more to compensate.
How to Estimate Your Lean Body Mass
Lean body mass is everything in your body that isn’t fat: muscle, bone, organs, water. You can estimate it with a simple formula or measure it directly with a DEXA scan.
The Boer formula is one of the more accurate predictive equations compared to DEXA results, with a correlation of about 0.96. For men: LBM = 0.407 × weight in kg + 26.7 × height in meters − 19.2. For women: LBM = 0.252 × weight in kg + 47.3 × height in meters − 48.3. These formulas lose accuracy at very high body fat levels, particularly above a BMI of about 37 for women and 43 for men.
A quicker approach: if you have a rough sense of your body fat percentage from a scale, gym measurement, or visual comparison chart, just multiply your total weight by (1 minus your body fat percentage). At 200 pounds and 25% body fat, your lean mass is approximately 150 pounds.
Why Lean Mass Works Better Than Total Weight
Fat tissue has minimal protein requirements compared to muscle. Someone who weighs 250 pounds at 40% body fat and someone who weighs 250 pounds at 15% body fat have dramatically different amounts of metabolically active tissue. Using total body weight would give them identical protein targets, which makes no sense physiologically. Basing intake on lean mass accounts for this difference and prevents overshoot for people with higher body fat or undershoot for very lean individuals.
Spreading Protein Across Meals
Your body can only ramp up muscle-building processes so much in a single sitting. Research suggests that roughly 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per meal, spread across at least four meals, is the target for maximizing muscle protein synthesis. At the upper end, that’s about 0.55 g/kg per meal. For a 180-pound person, that translates to roughly 30 to 45 grams per meal across four eating occasions.
This doesn’t mean protein eaten beyond that threshold is wasted. Your body still uses it for energy, immune function, and other processes. But the muscle-building stimulus plateaus, so front-loading 80 grams at dinner and skimping at other meals isn’t ideal if your goal is body composition. Distributing your daily target relatively evenly gives each meal a chance to trigger a meaningful anabolic response.
A Quick Reference by Goal
- Maintaining muscle, light activity: 0.5 to 0.7 grams per pound of lean body mass
- Building muscle, regular training: 0.7 to 0.9 grams per pound of lean body mass
- Preserving muscle during fat loss: 0.9 to 1.0+ grams per pound of lean body mass
- Older adults (50+), active: aim toward the higher end of your activity category, as muscle protein synthesis becomes less efficient with age
There’s no clear evidence of additional benefit beyond roughly 1.0 gram per pound of lean mass for most people. Eating more than that won’t cause harm for healthy individuals, but returns diminish. If you’re uncertain, starting at 0.8 grams per pound of lean mass covers most goals and can be adjusted based on how your body responds over several weeks.