How to track macros for bodybuilding

Short answer: to track macros for bodybuilding, set them by phase. On a bulk, eat about 10 to 20% above your maintenance and aim to gain 0.25 to 0.5% of your body weight a week. On a cut, lose about 0.5 to 1% a week. Either way, keep protein high, spread it over your meals, and track it precisely. The ranges come from Iraki et al., 2019 for the bulk and Helms et al., 2014 for the cut. The tracking is where most lifters lose time, and where Fabee helps most.

I’m Nico, and I made Fabee. Bodybuilding is my thing: I love the practice, the training, the discipline and the food that goes with it. Fabee is the app I wanted for it. So this one is personal.

How to set your macros for a bulk

The off-season is where you build. A review of off-season nutrition for bodybuilders (Iraki et al., 2019) suggests:

If you’re advanced, go slower: a smaller surplus and slower gain. The closer you are to your limit, the more of a fast bulk ends up as fat you’ll have to cut later.

Example: an 80 kg lifter with a maintenance of 2,800 calories eats about 3,100 to 3,350 a day, with 130 to 175 g of protein, and gains roughly 200 to 400 g a week. Work out your own maintenance here.

How to set your macros for a cut

Prep is where precision matters most. For natural competitors, the contest prep review by Helms et al. (2014) suggests:

• Lose about 0.5 to 1% of your body weight a week. Faster costs more muscle.
• Protein: 2.3 to 3.1 g per kg of lean mass. Higher as you get leaner.
• Fat: 15 to 30% of your calories.
• Carbs: the rest. Keep as many as you can around training.

The leaner you get, the smaller your margin. A few unlogged spoons of peanut butter a day can erase a week’s deficit.

Protein: how much per meal

Muscle gains level off around 1.6 g per kg a day for most lifters (Morton et al., 2018), so on a bulk 1.6 to 2.2 g per kg covers it. Higher during a cut, as above.

Spread it out: 0.4 to 0.55 g per kg per meal, over three to six meals (ISSN position stand, Jäger et al., 2017), with one within an hour or two before and after training. For an 80 kg lifter, that’s about 30 to 45 g per meal. The protein calculator splits it for you.

Meal timing matters much less than hitting your daily total. Pick the number of meals that fits your day.

Track it like a bodybuilder

Small, repeated errors are what stall a bulk or a cut. The ones to watch:

• Raw vs cooked. 100 g of raw rice is roughly 360 calories. 100 g cooked is about 130. Chicken loses water as it cooks too. Always know which one you weighed.
• Batch cooking. Cooking for the week? Weigh the whole cooked batch, then weigh your portion, or note what share of it you ate.
• Oils, butters, sauces. 10 g of olive oil is about 90 calories. Weigh them, or at least spoon them.
• Same scale, same routine. Weigh yourself in the morning, after the bathroom, and go by the weekly average. Daily swings are mostly water.

Where tracking apps slow you down

Most apps make you search a database for every food, choose between twenty entries for “chicken breast”, type the grams, then repeat it all for the rice and the oil. Build a recipe for your batch cook and it’s ten more minutes. Multiply by five meals a day, for a twelve-week prep.

How Fabee fits a bodybuilder’s diet

• Exact grams in one message. Type it the way it’s written on your plan: “250 g cooked rice, 200 g raw chicken thigh, 15 g peanut butter.” Each food is logged at that weight, raw or cooked.
• Batch cooking, the easy way. Tell it what you cooked and how much of it you ate.
• Protein per meal, at a glance, and what’s left for the day.
• Fix it in one sentence. “That was 200 g, not 250” and the card updates.
• It remembers your rules. No dairy during prep, a nut allergy, training at 6 pm. Tell it once.
• It’s a coach on top. Ask how your week went, or why the scale stalled, and it answers from your real log next to your weight trend.

Now in Fabee: a barcode scanner, and Apple Health (sleep, activity, weight, glucose and cycle). Coming next: vitamins and minerals.

Fabee is iPhone first, with Android planned. Download it on the App Store.