What are macros?
“Macros” is short for macronutrients.
They’re the three main nutrients that provide your body with energy:
Protein
Important for building and maintaining muscle.
Carbohydrates
Your body’s primary source of readily available energy, particularly useful for training.
Fat
An essential part of your diet that supports a range of normal bodily functions.
Each macro contributes towards your overall calorie intake.
Protein and carbohydrates contain approximately 4 calories per gram, while fat contains approximately 9 calories per gram.
Your calorie target determines the overall amount of energy you’re consuming.
Your macros help decide where those calories come from.
Calories vs Macros: What actually matters?
If your main goal is changing your bodyweight, your overall calorie intake is the biggest piece of the puzzle.
But calories alone don’t tell the whole story.
Imagine two people both eating 2,500 calories.
One eats enough protein to support their training and structures their food around performance and recovery.
The other barely eats any protein at all.
Same calories.
Very different diet.
Tracking macros gives you more control over the composition of your diet rather than focusing purely on a calorie number.
How many calories do I need?
Your calorie needs depend on several things, including:
- Your age
- Sex
- Height
- Weight
- Activity level
- Training
- Your current goal
The calculator estimates the amount of energy you use each day and then adjusts your intake depending on whether you want to lose weight, maintain weight or gain weight.
It’s an estimate — not an exact prescription.
Use it as a starting point and adjust based on what actually happens to your bodyweight, performance and recovery over the following weeks.
Choosing your goal
Lose Body Fat
To lose weight, you generally need to consume fewer calories than your body uses.
That’s known as a calorie deficit.
The aim isn’t necessarily to eat as little as possible.
A sensible deficit should still leave you able to train, recover and consume enough protein while gradually reducing bodyweight.
Maintain
Not every phase of training needs to involve gaining or losing weight.
Maintenance calories aim to roughly match the amount of energy your body uses each day.
This can be useful if you’re happy with your current bodyweight and simply want to focus on training performance, strength and body composition.
Build Muscle
Building muscle requires hard training first.
Nutrition supports it.
A modest calorie surplus can provide your body with additional energy to support training, recovery and muscle growth.
More food isn’t automatically better.
The aim is to eat enough to support progress without unnecessarily increasing the rate of fat gain.
Nutrition is only half the equation
You can calculate the perfect macros.
You still have to give your body a reason to adapt.
Train hard.
Recover.
Eat appropriately.
Then gradually ask your body to do more.
One extra rep.
A little more weight.
A better-controlled set.
That's progressive overload.
And when the next jump on the machine is bigger than the progress you're ready to make?
Make a smaller one.
The OFFSET Increment Pin lets you add smaller amounts of weight to gym machines to help you keep progressing when the standard weight stack jumps are too large.
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