Free TDEE calculator for lifters · no signupYour day.
In calories.

What this number is worth

Every TDEE calculator is a regression fitted to other people, and this one is no exception. Mifflin-St Jeor is the best validated of the common equations. It still lands within 10% of measured expenditure for only about four lifters in five, and for the fifth it can be out by several hundred calories a day.

So treat the output as a hypothesis. To find your actual maintenance, eat at the estimate for two or three weeks, weigh yourself daily, and average each week. If the weekly average holds flat, that is maintenance, whatever the calculator said.

That only works if the weigh-ins actually get recorded, which is where most people lose the thread. Athletes on Cleanpull log bodyweight in the same app they log training, and their coach sees the trend on the roster next to their current maxes. Two numbers moving together tell you more than either alone: bodyweight drifting down while the squat holds is a cut going well, and bodyweight flat while the top sets get harder is a different problem.

The equations

Katch-McArdle works from lean mass, which makes it the better fit for a muscular lifter. Mifflin-St Jeor treats a 90 kg lifter and a 90 kg sedentary person as the same input, so it tends to under-read for the lifter. The catch is that Katch-McArdle inherits every error in your body-fat figure. Feed it a guess and you are worse off than with the simpler equation. The FFMI calculator covers how unreliable those figures usually are.

The activity multiplier is the loose part

These multipliers are coarse. For most people the gap between "moderate" and "hard" works out to roughly 300 calories a day, which is a lot to hang on a dropdown. An hour of lifting also burns less than most lifters assume, often 200 to 400 calories, and the movement you do over the rest of the day varies far more than your training does.

When you are between two options, take the lower one. Adjusting up after a few flat weeks is easy. Discovering you have been in an accidental deficit for a month shows up as a stalled block.

Eating around a training block

Strength work and a steep deficit make poor company. Recovering from heavy loading is expensive, and the first thing a large deficit takes is the quality of your top sets.

• Cutting through a block — keep the deficit modest, around 0.5% of bodyweight a week, and expect to hold strength rather than build it.
• Maintaining — the sensible default through a heavy peaking block, where you want to express strength and leave body composition alone.
• Gaining — a small surplus goes further than a large one. Push past roughly 0.25–0.5% of bodyweight a week and most of the extra arrives as fat.

Protein

The figure in the panel is a floor: roughly 1.6 g per kilogram of bodyweight, which is about where the benefit for muscle retention plateaus in the literature. Going higher helps in a deficit, up to about 2.2 g/kg. If you carry a lot of fat, calculate from lean mass instead or the number comes out inflated.

What it does not account for

Medication, thyroid function, sleep debt, cycle phase, illness, and a long dieting history all move energy expenditure. None of them appear as inputs here. This is also not nutritional or medical advice. If you have a condition affecting metabolism, or you are managing weight under clinical supervision, a calculator is the wrong instrument.

What it does do is give you a defensible starting number for a block, so you have something to adjust from instead of guessing week to week. Cleanpull takes care of the rest: the block, the loads underneath it, and the weigh-in history you check the estimate against.