Calculate Your Macros for Better
Endurance Performance
Calculate your own personal macros here.
Full Transcription
There are about 1 million nutrition calculators that are free and that they’re online, but there is approximately zero for the endurance athlete. Until right now. So in this video, I’m going to show you exactly how I calculate my account, my macros for my own training, and also the macros for the athletes who I coach.
[00:00:23] And real quick about what macros are. Macros are macro nutrients. These are your three calorie sources that you will get from food, which is protein, carbohydrates, and fats. And these are important because each person needs a different amount based on their size and their activity level. And like I said before, most of the macros calculators that are available online are all geared toward the general population who are in it for fat loss and who might be a little more sedentary.
[00:00:52] But as an endurance athlete, you have specific needs. You work a lot more, you burn a lot more calories. Your protein intake needs to be higher, your carbohydrate intake needs to be a bit higher, higher, and plus you have body composition goals and performance goals that need to be addressed that are specific to you.
[00:01:07] And one other thing that is very, that has been very frustrating when trying to find how to give people what they need based on their nutritional needs, is that it doesn’t take into consideration what. You’re like, how much you’re going to be doing, how much running you’re going to be doing. It’s always kind of a big general thing.
[00:01:24] Like, Oh, I’m, I’m semi-active. It’s like, okay, what does that mean? Does that mean three miles? Does that mean 40 minutes? Does that mean 15 miles is like very active? So there is nothing that has been very customized. As to how to get the most out of your nutrition, which is the, in my opinion, the biggest game changer when it comes to your performance.
[00:01:44] So let’s take a look at the process of how I determine macros for endurance athletes. So you can see right here on the page there. Are a couple of different things that are going to help individualize the training. So the first thing is your age. So I’m just gonna use myself as an example here and going to show you exactly how I figure out these numbers and also the, the calculations behind this.
[00:02:07] And if you wanted to grab this nutrition calculator for yourself, I dropped the link down below. You can just hit the link and this will get sent straight to your inbox. So, um, as we start, so I’m going to take a look 34 years. Of age and about six foot tall, five foot 11 and three quarters. But on my license it says six feet.
[00:02:29] So that’s what we’re going with. I’m about one 63 as of this morning. And your work activity. This is really important when it comes to calculating your ma, your, your macros. Most of the day you are spent doing other things. Then exercising. So your work activity needs to be considered because that’s really where you’re, what you’re doing most of the day.
[00:02:48] So, uh, on the side here, that’s. Kind of a breakdown of what I mean. So if you’re, if you’re mostly sedentary for sitting at a desk, you’re going to go desk job. Light active is if you’re at a desk, sometimes you get up, sometimes you move around or you make a conscious effort to get some more steps in.
[00:03:03] Moderately active, um, active and very active would be on the manual labor end. Or if you are working in, uh, healthcare as a nurse, where you’re going from down the hallways, Florida floor thing, things of that nature. So for me, I’m more on the light active side of things these days. A body type is going to be pretty straightforward.
[00:03:24] If you’re a hard gainer, that means that you don’t put on weight very easily, so you can kind of eat meat and meat and never really seem to put on weight, easy gainers the opposite. So if you feel like you gain weight fairly easy, and mesomorph is, is both. So if you put on muscle. Based on your training, if you lose weight based on your training, that’s, that’s kind of the, the, the deal with that.
[00:03:44] So I’m writing at this point. So my particular goals right now are to improve performance. So to get the most out of my training meals per day. So this is based on mealtime. And how many meals have you today? I’m typically around six. And when you work out, which, um. Usually is right around lunch hours. Um, and then here is the big part is the running, biking, and, and strength training hours spent.
[00:04:06] So the running, so say I’m on a doing a day where I’m running eight miles and maybe I’m doing, um, 45 minutes of strength training in there as well. So three quarters of an hour and Marie right away, when you see things change, we’re going to come over to our. Macro is for the day and um, and it’s going to show me exactly what I need to eat.
[00:04:27] So it’s going to be about 163 grams of protein, 438 grams of carbohydrates, and 73 73 grams of fat. And how we get this is based off of our, the information that we plugged in before on this end here. So when it comes to protein, typically we want the protein to be at about one gram per pound of body weight.
[00:04:52] And this might seem like a lot, especially if you’ve never tracked protein intake before. But as an endurance athlete, we were highly in a catabolic state, which means we are breaking down tissue to help with the energy of, of what we’re doing. So when we’re out for run, we’re constantly kind of breaking down, uh, energy.
[00:05:10] And if we can get through all the carbohydrate stores, we’re going to start getting into that muscle and trying to break that and make that into glucose for, uh, to keep the energy, energy production rolling. So it’s really important that we keep that. Protein is high so that we can rebuild that muscle and we can spare that muscle.
[00:05:26] And so it doesn’t get soaked up during the, during the run. So getting that protein number up is very, very important. One gram per pound per pound of body weight is a really safe bet. If that seems to be too much, you can go 0.8 and that’s about as low as I would go for an endurance athlete who is training.
[00:05:46] Um, you can definitely go up 1.2, 1.5, uh, but get that protein up that nuts. Biggest number because when we lose muscle tissue, it’s going to hurt our performance. So we want to have that good power to weight ratio and to generate power, we need that muscle mass. So getting that protein up is a, is a, is definitely a crucial, so for the carbohydrate numbers, so this is going to be our, our primary fuel source.
[00:06:07] When it comes to our training. For most runners, this is going to be our bread and butter. This is where we’re really going to feel that energy. So for carbohydrates, it’s four calories per gram of carbohydrate. So. As we come over here, this is what it’s really going to look like. So if we’re running that, so if we are running, what’d I say, seven miles?
[00:06:24] So if we’re running eight miles in a day, it’s going to be about. 948 calories burned. And we determined that by taking our body weight and multiplying it in kilos, so edit it, dividing it in kilos. So it’d be our body weight divided by 2.2 times. The amount of miles that we run, we converted two kilometers and that gives us our calories.
[00:06:50] So that’s a kind of a strange calculation and that’s really the bread and butter of this is figuring out how much. We are spending while we are training and taking our, our body weight and the amount of training that we’re doing. And. Putting it in in terms of how, how much that means. So when we get that number, then we are going to take based on what we want to produce and since we are looking to improve performance, we want to replace the calories burned with carbohydrates and we trained a little bit less.
[00:07:20] So we’re only going to get about 183 calories burned in 45 minutes of a standard weight training. Now this is not high intensity weight training. So that’s a, that’s a different, that’s a different side. So if you are just going in and you’re getting some streets at some weight training, then um, that would be more on about 183 calories burned based off of the, um, 45 minutes of training.
[00:07:42] So we replaced that with the carbohydrates because that is going to help refuel our, our storage. It’s going to help shuttle those amino acids to. Our muscles to help us recover faster and make us feel better and bounce back quicker for the next time around. And then on the fats end, so there’s really kind of a floor when it comes to fats and we take the, the number, uh, of how much we weigh.
[00:08:02] And then if that has to do with our daily activities. So when we are at lower level of activity, we usually are spending most of our energy, our fat source. And so the more that we are doing at a low level of energy, so if we’re walking around a lot, work. Typically burning fat. So we want to keep those fat levels high.
[00:08:19] Um, if we continue to dose with carbohydrates and we eat so many carbs when we are at a very low level of training, those, we’ll start to see the carbohydrates you’ll get. You’ll fill up your glycogen stores, which is your muscle tissue and your liver. And then once we get there, they’ll kind of start storing as fat.
[00:08:37] And that’s really where carbohydrates kind of get that bad rap is when you eat too many carbs, they’ll store a stat, but if you’re using your carbs, there’s, there will be enough storage. Um, so this is why it’s important to keep those fat numbers in, in a proper place based off of your daily activity. So my case, that would be 73, um, grams of fat, and that’s to improve performance.
[00:08:59] So my total caloric out output that day is going to be about 3000. Calories. So to help manage your intake that I provided some meal timing and, and a lot of that is based around your workout. So in pre and post workout, you’re gonna want those carbohydrates to be higher and your fats a little bit lower just to help you.
[00:09:19] Um. Utilize those carbohydrates and to make sure that you are, um, getting the most bang for your buck. But again, this is the secondary to the total amount of macros and calories. Then this is just a bonus. So we’ll make a different video based off of meal timing. And this can change on how many meals you eat a day and when you work out.
[00:09:42] So if you work out right in the morning before I grabbed a breakfast, you’ll have a whole different customized plan here. And then when he would go, if we go into loose fat, so this is how things change. We’re going to take, we’re going to strip off mostly carbohydrates and keep this fats floor, keep these fats at a relatively stable number.
[00:09:59] And when we get to this point, we want to make sure we’re taking off a. Um, a sufficient amount of calories that will put us in a deficit. So as you mentioned before, our replacement would have been about, uh, so he wants it to eat about three 30, 100 calories that day. So it was a kind of put us in a, uh, 350 to 400 calorie deficit, which will help you sustain fat loss while improving your performance.
[00:10:24] If you get. In that 500 or below, it really starts to take a toll on your performance. We want to make sure that we can train well and, and not feel awful all the time while we are in a caloric deficit. So that’s why important to not dip things into a thousand calorie deficit or 1500 calorie deficit. So if I was burning 3000 calories and eating 1800 calories.
[00:10:44] That would screw up my training, that would screw up my sleep, that would screw up my hormones. So it’s important to have this level here, and this is, this is where these fat loss calculators really miss the Mark. They don’t consider the amount of energy that we are putting out, and it puts us in a massive deficit that is not sustainable and also semi dangerous.
[00:11:01] And that puts us in a really bad position for. A harsh rebound and kind of putting us in a place where we would be more susceptible to binge on things like carbohydrates or, or fats. So doing, eating too much pizza, eating too much tacos, because we’re just hungry. So we want to make sure that we are fueling that performance so that we can sustainably lose fat.
[00:11:22] Without going well overboard. So this calculator is really a game changer when it comes to performance and fat loss for the endurance athlete, it puts us in a really good sustainable place without taking it overboard and will be a. Customized approach, which is really hard to get for the endurance athlete when it comes to nutrition.
[00:11:44] So again, you can grab your copy of this nutrition calculator with the link directly below in the notes, and if you like this video, hit a thumbs up to get more information on nutrition for the endurance athlete. Hit subscribe, hit that bell, get the notifications so that you can never miss a video when we’re bringing out new nutrition sources to you.
