Load Console · three things to compute, two to read

Training is three hours.
The week is 168.

Almost every plan you have been handed budgets the three and leaves the other hundred and sixty-five blank — which is where the result actually comes from. These three calculators run off one set of numbers, print the formula next to every answer, and cover the whole week instead of the part you spend in the gym.

CH 01 Start here Train the Week,
Not the Workout Say what you weigh, how many days you will realistically show up, and what the rest of your day looks like. It lays out seven rows — what you train and what you eat on each — with training days sitting above the average and rest days below, so the seven add up to exactly the week total it shows you. 3 numbers + 4 choices 2 min · of 3 7 rows + week total Build my week

The other two channels

  1. CH 02 Where This Lands You Maintenance, deficit, protein floor and rate of loss — and then the part most calculators leave out: the weight your intake actually settles at. Maintenance falls as you do, so a fixed number of calories stops being a deficit at some point, and this says where. 3numbers + 4 choices 1min · of 3 26weeks projected
  2. CH 03 The Other 23 Hours Where a day’s burn comes from, drawn to scale. One step up in day job is worth about six gym sessions, and shuffling the same calories around the week changes nothing at all — both of those are uncomfortable, and both fall straight out of the arithmetic. 3numbers + 4 choices 1min · of 3 3parts of a day
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Nothing to compute

Turning Grams Into Meals A calculator hands you three numbers in grams and stops there, which is the least useful place to stop. This is the translation into food: the order to build a day in, portions measured with your hand instead of a scale, which foods carry protein cheaply per hundred calories, and what each of four meals is actually doing. Read it Why 2.2 and Not 3 The benefit of more protein stops climbing at about 1.6 g per kilo, and yet the plan here uses 1.8 when gaining and 2.2 when cutting. That is not a rounding error, it is a deliberate margin, and this is where the line flattens, why the cutting number is higher, and which popular claims about protein the evidence does not actually support. Read it

What the console can and cannot see

One set of numbers, three read-outs.

All three channels ask the same thing — weight, height, age, sex, goal, day job, sessions a week — and run it through the same resting-rate formula. That is on purpose. Three pages on one site quoting three different maintenance figures for one person is worse than any of them being slightly off.

Every figure is a population formula.

Mifflin-St Jeor and the activity multipliers around it were fitted to groups, not to you. Two people with identical inputs can sit a few hundred kcal apart, and nothing here measured anything about your body. Treat the output as a starting estimate to adjust against the scale over a few weeks, not as a reading.

Maintenance is a moving target.

It falls as you do, which is why a fixed intake stops being a deficit partway through and the loss flattens out. Most calculators never mention this. Channel 02 carries the projection out far enough that you can see where your own number settles.

This is general information, not medical advice.

Diabetes, kidney or liver disease, eating disorders, pregnancy and a long list of medications all change what is appropriate here. If any of those apply, the plan that counts is the one made with your doctor or a registered dietitian. Nothing you type is uploaded or stored — the privacy page lists what is.