Body recomposition, or body recomp, is the process of building muscle while losing fat simultaneously. Unlike traditional bulking and cutting cycles, body recomp focuses on optimizing your diet and training to achieve both goals at once. Our Body Recomposition Calculator simplifies the process by calculating your calorie and macro targets for training and rest days, taking the guesswork out of your journey.
Try it below to fuel muscle growth and burn fat effectively, without the math!
Calculate Your Body Recomp Calories and Macros
Example plan: 180 lb man, 30, moderately active, 4 training days
2,752calories a day, weekly average
Your week averages 2,752 calories a day, 200 less than your 2,952 maintenance, to lose about 0.4 lb (0.18 kg) a week.
You chose both equally: a 200 calorie daily deficit, well under the roughly 500 calories a day at which lean mass gains stopped in a 2022 meta-analysis of strength training in a calorie deficit. Fat comes off slowly while your training builds muscle. Enter your own details above to replace this example.
Training days
2,951 calories
Protein 147 g, carbs 384 g, fat 92 g.
Rest days
2,487 calories
Protein 147 g, carbs 257 g, fat 97 g.
| A meal, at 4 meals a day | Carbs | Fat | Protein |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training days | 96 g | 23 g | 37 g |
| Rest days | 64 g | 24 g | 37 g |
| How we set your calories | Calories |
|---|---|
| BMR, calories at restMifflin-St Jeor equation | 1,783 |
| MaintenanceModerately active; 2023 National Academies equation | 2,952 |
| Deficit, 6.8% of maintenance | -200 |
| Lowest target we setThe higher of 1.2 x your BMR or 1,500 calories; your target is above it | 2,140 |
| Daily average | 2,752 |
| Training daysUp to 10% above the average, capped at your maintenance while you are under it | +199 |
| Rest daysThey give the extra back | -265 |
- Next stepCarb cycling calculatorThe same idea by carbs: high, moderate and low carb days around harder sessions.
- Next stepMacro calculatorOne steady day instead of training and rest days, with fibre and a day of foods.
- Next stepProtein calculatorYour 147 g of protein a day, step by step.
We start from your maintenance calories, from our TDEE calculator's equation. The pace you pick sets the daily deficit: 400 calories for losing fat, 200 for both equally, 0 for building muscle. If the deficit would take your daily calories below the lowest target we set, we make it smaller. If your maintenance is already at or under that lowest target, there is nothing to take off, so you eat at maintenance. Training days get up to 10% more calories and rest days give them back, as on our TDEE calculator. While you are in a deficit, no day goes above your maintenance. Protein follows our protein calculator's rule for people who lift, the same every day. Fat stays near 30% of calories, a little higher on rest days, and carbs fill the rest. All three paces keep the deficit under the limit from Murphy and Koehler's 2022 meta-analysis.
Read also: Body Recomposition: How to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle
What is The Body Recomposition Calculator?
The Body Recomposition Calculator is designed to determine how much you need to eat to build muscle while losing fat. It produces two sets of dietary targets, one for training days and one for rest days, so you can achieve your body recomp goals quicker and easier.
Hitting these targets will provide you with the energy and nutrients you need to train, recover, and build muscle without accumulating excess body fat.
It is customizable, so you can select things like meal frequency and primary training goal, choosing whether losing fat, building muscle, or both equally matters more to you.
You can also add your body fat percentage if you know it, and your number of weight training days. Protein is set for you, the same every day, by our protein calculator’s rule for people who lift.
In short, it provides all the data you need to build muscle while losing fat.
How to Use the Body Recomposition Calculator
Our body recomposition calculator is very straightforward to use. Follow these step-by-step instructions to determine your calorie and macro intakes for training and rest days.
- Enter your weight and choose pounds or kilograms, then enter your height: feet and inches with pounds, centimeters with kilograms.
- Enter your age and select your sex.
- Pick how active you are in a normal week, counting your workouts.
- Choose what matters more to you: losing fat, building muscle, or both equally.
- Choose how many days a week you lift weights, from 3 to 6. Other exercise counts toward your activity level; our calorie burning calculators show what a session burns.
- Select your meal frequency, from three to six meals per day. Your results show whole days and one meal.
- Tell the calculator if anything changes your needs, such as pregnancy or kidney disease.
- If you know your body fat percentage, add it with the link under the button.
- Press “Work out my recomp plan” and read off your results.
How Does the Body Recomposition Calculator Work?
While our body recomposition calculator is very straightforward to operate, it uses a lot of hidden moving parts to determine how much you need to eat to lose fat and build muscle.
These are the steps and formulae behind the body recomposition calculator:
- Work out your maintenance calories for your activity level, as our TDEE calculator does. For adults 19 and over, that is the 2023 National Academies energy equation; under 19, it is your Mifflin-St Jeor BMR times an activity factor.
- If you enter your body fat percentage, calculate your BMR from your lean mass with the Katch-McArdle formula instead, and multiply it by your activity factor.
- Take 400 or 200 calories a day off maintenance, or none, depending on what matters more to you. Then give training days up to 10% more calories.
- Give the extra back on rest days, so the week averages your target. While you lose fat, no day goes above maintenance.
- Calculate protein intake at 1.8 grams per kilogram (0.8 grams per pound) of body weight while you lose fat, and 1.6 grams per kilogram at maintenance.
- Calculate fat intake at about 30% of daily calories, a little more on rest days.
- Calculate carbohydrate intake as the remainder of calories.
Thankfully, you don’t need to do all this math as we’ve built each of these stages into our body recomposition calculator. You’re welcome!
Interpreting Your Results
Once you have entered your details and pressed “Work out my recomp plan”, the first number you see is your weekly average: the calories a day your week comes to after the deficit you chose, and the weight change it should give. Below it, you get these results:
Training Days:
These results represent how much you should eat on the days that you work out: more than on rest days, with a slight calorie surplus when you choose building muscle. When you choose losing fat or both, training days stay at or just under maintenance.
Calories: how many calories to eat across a training day. The meal table splits one meal into carbs, fat and protein for the number of meals you chose.
Carbohydrate, protein, and fat: grams for the whole day, and per meal in the table.
Rest Days:
These results represent how much you should eat on rest days. They include a slight calorie deficit to facilitate fat loss and reflect that you’ll be less active.
Calories: how many calories to eat across a rest day. The same table shows a rest-day meal.
Carbohydrate, protein, and fat: grams for the whole day, and per meal in the table.
If you are unhappy with your results, go back and change things like meal frequency, training days, or what matters more to you. This will fine-tune your results to ensure that you make the best possible progress during your body recomp.
Strategies for Maximizing Your Progress
Knowledge, they say, is power. However, that’s only true if you put that knowledge into practice. After using our body recomposition calculator, you’ll have targets for how much and what you should eat to lose fat and build muscle simultaneously. However, you also need to use this information correctly, otherwise it’s just empty words.
Use the following strategies to help you maximize your body recomp progress:
Create a Consistent Workout Routine
Consistency is the cornerstone of any successful body recomposition plan. You need to work out regularly and frequently to achieve good results. Strength training (lifting weights) is crucial for building muscle while losing fat, and the calculator asks for at least three strength training days a week.
You can work out with freeweights, machines, kettlebells, or your own body weight. However, whatever you choose to do, make sure you can stick to your program religiously. Missing workouts will hurt your progress.
You can design your own program or choose one of the hundreds of workouts in our archives.
Cardio can also help you lose fat, but you should avoid doing too much. Excess cardio can make it harder to gain/retain muscle.
Short, high-intensity interval training workouts are probably your best option. However, if you stick to the nutritional guidelines generated by the calculator, you should be able to lose fat without doing lots of additional cardio.
Track Your Calories and Macros
While you can guess your way to a successful bulk, body recomposition requires a much more precise approach to nutrition. Using our calculator means you know how many calories and macros you need to eat to lose fat while building muscle. So, make sure you align your meals to these targets.
Doing this means you’ll need to track both your calories and macros. You can do this with pen and paper, but using an online food-tracking platform or an app is much easier.
You’ll also need to plan your meals in advance to ensure you consume the right amount of calories, protein, carbs, and fat each day.
While this is time-consuming initially, it gets easier the longer you do it. Once you’ve calculated the values for a meal, you can save it and make it again without having to do all that adding and subtracting. After a week or so, you should have a good menu of meals tracked, and you won’t need to calculate calories and macros for them again.
Monitor Your Progress and Adjust Accordingly
Your body recomposition results are based on your nutritional requirements right now. In a few weeks, when your muscle mass and body fat percentage have changed, your dietary needs will have changed too.
So, to avoid progress plateaus, make sure you monitor your progress and adjust your food intake accordingly. For example, if you lose body weight, your total daily calorie requirements will decrease slightly.
You can also use these progress checks to ensure everything is going in the right direction. For example, suppose you are not noticeably losing fat. In that case, you may need to subtract an additional 100-200 calories from your daily intake.
Get Plenty of Sleep
Believe it or not, the amount of sleep you get per night can have a significant impact on your body composition results. Too little sleep inhibits fat burning, can interfere with workout recovery and muscle building, and rob you of the motivation and willpower you’ll need to train and eat consistently.
Most people need seven to nine hours of sleep per night. That’s EVERY night, and not just at weekends.
Sleeping enough ensures your body gets the time it needs to maximize muscle growth and burn fat.
Read more about how sleep influences fat loss and muscle building here.
Supplement Wisely
While you can build muscle and lose fat without supplements, a few well-chosen products may help things go more smoothly. Good options worth considering include:
- Pre-workout: for an instant energy boost and longer, more intense workouts.
- Protein powder: to make getting enough protein easier.
- Creatine: a proven muscle-builder, energizer, and muscle cell volumizer.
- Amino acids: to preserve muscle mass and promote recovery and muscle building.
- Multivitamins and multiminerals: to make sure all your micronutrient bases are covered.
- Fat burners: to accelerate fat loss and control your appetite.
Be Patient
If you want to gain muscle or lose fat fast, you should follow a bulking or cutting program. Focusing on just one aspect of body recomposition at a time usually produces quicker results.
However, after a bulk, you’ll invariably need to do a cut to lose the body fat you’ve accumulated. Similarly, you’ll probably need to do a bulk to rebuild any lost muscle after a cut.
Concurrent body recomposition is slower than bulking or cutting, but that’s the price you’ve got to pay if you want to lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously. So, settle into the long haul as your body slowly becomes lean AND muscular. Your patience will be rewarded!
Body Recomposition Calculator FAQ
1. How accurate is the body recomposition calculator?
Our body recomposition calculator estimates your total daily energy expenditure, takes off a small deficit or none, gives training days more calories than rest days, and then sets protein for people who lift, fat near 30% of calories and carbs from the rest.
It does this using accepted formulae for these purposes.
Like all such formulae, this is an estimation of what you need to eat to lose fat and gain muscle and is not 100% accurate.
Because of this, you should monitor your progress and fine-tune your nutritional intake based on your results. For example, consume more calories on training days if you aren’t building muscle and fewer calories on rest days if you aren’t losing fat.
2. What should I eat for my body recomposition meals?
There is no set diet for body recomposition, so you are free to plan your own meals. So long as whatever you eat fits your calorie and macro targets, you should make progress. This is called flexible dieting, or If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM).
That said, you may make better progress if you eat mostly clean or natural foods. These tend to be the most filling, so you won’t feel hungry and tempted to break your diet.
Clean foods are also high in health-boosting micronutrients.
3. Am I allowed cheat meals while doing a body recomp?
Cheat meals provide you with a break from your diet. They usually involve eating foods you otherwise avoid during a restrictive eating plan. This can be psychologically rewarding and gives you something to look forward to.
However, too many cheat meals can sabotage your diet and put the brakes on your progress. Every time you miss your macro and calorie targets, the longer it’ll take to reach your body recomp goals.
So, enjoy cheat meals if you wish, but make sure you practice self-control to avoid doing more harm than good. Remember, too, that nothing tastes as good as being lean and muscular!
Use these strategies to stop cheat meals from ruining your progress.
4. What is the best workout for a body recomposition?
The aim of body recomposition is to build muscle while losing fat. As such, you need to do workouts that promote hypertrophy or muscle growth. Invariably, this means lifting weights and following a bodybuilding-style training program.
However, you’ll probably get the best results from a low to moderate-volume training program, as you won’t have the large calorie surplus normally need for a high-volume plan.
3-4 one-hour workouts per week should be sufficient for most people. Build your workouts around compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, bent-over rows, pull-ups, and military presses. These exercises generally provide the best bang for your buck.
In terms of splits, sets, rep range, etc., whatever you want to use will work fine, providing you train with sufficient intensity and consistency. Create a program you can stick to.
Read more about what makes an effective training program here.
5. How long does a body recomp take?
You should begin to see progress in 4-8 weeks of starting your body recomp. However, the length of your body recomposition depends on how much fat you want to lose and how much muscle you want to build. For example, if you are very overweight or need to develop a lot of muscle, you could be body recomp-ing for many months or even a year or more.
While your progress will probably be slower than you want, take comfort in knowing that body recomp is a one-way journey, and you won’t have to follow it with a bulk or cutting phase.
Body Recomposition: Wrapping Up
Losing fat while building muscle can be challenging, but, contrary to popular opinion, is not impossible. Bodybuilders and athletes have been doing it for centuries.
The trick to a successful body recomp is a small calorie deficit or none, with more calories on training days than on rest days, plenty of protein and steady strength training. This will allow you to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously.
Take the guesswork out of creating a body recomposition diet with this handy calculator. Plug in your details and then consistently hit the calorie and macro targets.
While you won’t lose fat or build muscle quickly, you will make slow, reliable, steady progress toward your body composition goals.
Hello,
I’m trying to use the calculator but feel I’m confused
on step 5. I understand that 3 days/30 mins are the baseline used for the calculator. I’m confused how to add my additional weekly calorie expenditure. I work out 4 days a week/45 mins. Without adding my body fat %, my TDEE is 2,109 and weekly expenditure is 14,765. Could you please help me understand?
Hi Alissia,
I think I see where the confusion might be coming from. Since your workout routine differs on training and non-training days, you’ll need to calculate two sets of figures—one for each.
1. Training Days: Your TDEE will be higher on these days due to the additional calorie expenditure from exercise.
2. Non-Training Days: Since you’re not burning extra calories from workouts, your TDEE will be lower.
To get a more accurate breakdown:
– Use the calculator to determine your TDEE on non-training days first (based on your baseline activity).
– Then, for training days, manually add the extra calories burned during your workouts.
Your weekly calorie expenditure is the sum of both training and non-training days, but breaking it down this way will give you a clearer picture of how many calories you should be eating on each type of day.
Let me know if you need help with the calculations!
Best,
Patrick