It’s evident that athletes, especially combat sport athletes like to dial things in and push themselves harder when approaching competitions or fight night.

If the process is harder, if more sacrifices are made, and if the struggle is greater, their success will taste even sweeter.

Well, Rocky I, II, III, and IV was no different…

Today, we examine whether or not Rocky’s nutrition plan when facing Apollo Creed was necessary, or optimal for accelerating post exercise recovery.

Therefore we answer the question: Raw eggs or cooked eggs – did Rocky get it right or wrong?

A recent study by Fuchs et al (2022) recruited 45 participants to ingest either 5 boiled eggs, or 5 raw eggs after completing a full body workout.

The current guidelines to maximise muscle protein synthesis (MPS – process of building muscle) is to consume approx. 0.4g/kg of protein per meal. Therefore, if you weight 80kg, this is ~32g of protein on a per meal basis.

In this study, both groups consumed the same 30g protein hit (1 x egg = 6g protein) post training, therefore, any differences in rates of MPS was a result of the cooking process.

Unsurprisingly, differences in MPS between raw and boiled eggs were not significant. So, if you consume the same amount of protein/amino acids, the cooking process doesn’t have any real meaningful importance.

This means that Rocky didn’t get it wrong, he was still doing things optimally from a post exercise recovery perspective, but needless to say it wasn’t necessary (but still better than Drago’s extracurricular supplements, lol).

My conclusion: If you wish to make life very hard for yourself and increase your level of struggle, eat raw eggs. But if you wish to whisk these eggs and pop them in a pan to live the good life….this is also fine.

Both roads lead to Roam, just one of them tastes a bit better…