Determine your personal energy and macronutrient needs based on your body composition goals (fat loss, weight or lean mass gain, or weight maintenance) within the overall context of optimising your training, recovery, and performance.
By now you’ve learned why calories are so important, you’ve learned how to properly track your calories, and you should have put it into action by actually tracking your calories for the past few days.
First, congratulations for making it this far. I hope you’re enjoying the process and learning along the way. Now that you’re ready, I want to introduce you to what we call the SPC Energy Coach.
The SPC Energy Coach took me countless hours of development to make and is an extremely effective tool that I personally use myself and with athletes. If you make this tool your best friend it’ll become your secret weapon as you progress through the nutrition program.
The athletes who experience the most success with our program time and time again are the ones who commit themselves to the SPC Energy Coach.
I’ll show you how to actually set up and use this powerful tool in a moment, but first, I want to explain how it works and why I created it in the first place.
Sports nutrition is all about coaching you on how to fuel your training, recovery, and performance.
Meeting your energy needs is the cornerstone of sports nutrition recommendations. Also known as Energy Availability, which is eating enough to support your cycling and everything else you do on a daily basis. It is critical to maintain adequate energy availability for optimal health and exercise performance.
So while total calories in / calories out is important for weight loss. We need to go a step further and divide your energy requirements into macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, and fat) to support your training.
And this begins with tracking, which we have already discussed, but it is equally important to calculate the calories required to support your training and health.
So, how do you determine the breakdown of your energy intake on any given day?
So, you know how I keep stressing the importance of calorie intake?
To maintain your weight, your body requires a certain number of calories each day. This is what's known as your "maintenance calories". If you eat less than this, you will lose weight. If you eat more than this, you will gain weight.
The issue here is that this could lead to long-term issues with your performance and health. This is where Energy availability helps guide you to stay in a 'safe zone'.
After deducting the energetic cost of exercise, energy availability (EA) is defined as the amount of dietary energy available to sustain physiological function. When it comes to matching calories to body composition goals, EA is our main guide.
To guide your energy intake needs, there are clear recommended EA levels per FFM Kg. When adjusting calories and macronutrients, we use these as a guide to stay within safe ranges. We can use these ranges for maintenance (calorie matching), muscle building (calorie surplus), or weight loss (calorie deficit).
The SPC Energy Coach can help you get all of these things in order.
It assists you in calculating your energy intake requirements and obtaining some starting numbers for various types of training days. Then, to determine which EA (and macro) numbers work best for you, keep track of your daily calorie intake and body weight to see how this range affects your weight.
You'll also be able to track and see how your weight changes over time.
In order to truly take advantage of its power, I need you to fully understand how it works, get it properly set up, and then I need you to start using it consistently.
Alright you’re officially ready to get your SPC Energy Coach set up. Pay close attention to every word as it’s extremely important that you get this setup correctly and understand how it works.
After you set it up, it’ll take just 1 minute out of your day to fill out but in return will guide you every step of the way throughout your journey.
First, you’ll need to simply download your SPC Energy Coach.
The software is run on Google Sheets. To download your copy, you must be on a computer or laptop. It does work on your phone, but you need to first download it on a computer or laptop before you can access it on your phone.
Once you’re on a computer or laptop, click the link below. Then, click the “make a copy” button. You will now have your very own sheet to use.
After you’ve done that, if you’d like to be able to access it on your phone, you’ll have to download the Google Sheets App. Below this video I’ve left links to the Google Sheets app for both iPhone and Android. After you download the app, login to it using the same email that you used to access the sheets on your computer or laptop. Once you’ve logged in, your Energy Coach should be there waiting for you.
Google Sheets Download for Android Users
Google Sheets Download for IOS Users
When you open the spreadsheet, you’ll see the “STEP 1” table on the left. This is where you start. You need to enter the following:
It’s important that you get this value right. It MUST be your morning weight, taken before you eat or drink anything and after you use the toilet. So if you don’t know this number, then weigh yourself tomorrow morning to get it instead of estimating. And if you don’t have a weight scale, as mentioned in the “getting started section”, you absolutely DO need one and you need one that has at least one decimal point!
Next, you need to estimate your current body fat %. Estimate your body fat % with the pictures below. Don’t overthink it and don’t worry too much about pinpointing your body fat down to the exact %.
In the next 2 cells you will see your lean body mass (Fat-Free Mass) and your estimated resting energy needs in kilocalories which is calculated based on your lean body mass using the Cunningham Equation. The Cunningham equation can be used to calculate your resting metabolic rate (RMR; the calories you burn while you're at complete rest). The Cunningham equation has been found to yield acceptable estimates in muscular physique athletes (Tinsley et al., 2019).
Before we get into how you use this table to target your body composition goals - I am going to cover why we are taking this approach and what all the comments are, including which parts you can change.
This is how many grams of carbs, protein and fats you should be eating. Remember what we mentioned earlier though? Total daily calories and protein are the two most important factors for body composition. The amount of carbs/fats you intake don’t matter nearly as much for (Gardner et al. 2018). But carbohyrates are the most important macronutrient for performance.
3-12 g/kg
This is the first place we adjust for energy needs and to meet body composition goals. The total here will include the carbohydrates needed to fuel your training sessions and everyday life. You will see recommendations for g/kg based on the overall intensity of the training day. These are used as a guide because the best thing about cycling with a power meter is the accuracy of the energy expended on the bike. We will plug this directly into the sheet in the EEE section to calculate EA.
1.6-2 g/kg
1-2 g/kg
Your recommended calorie and protein intake are already set in the spreadsheet but can be changed in the calculation.
Daily Exercise Energy Expenditure
The amount of energy used in exercise (activity). This is where you plug in your training calories burn from TrainingPeaks (converted from kJ)
Energy availability (EA) is defined as the amount of dietary energy available to sustain physiological function after subtracting the energetic cost of exercise. EA is our main guide when matching calories to body composition goals. There is a risk versus reward when manipulating Energy Intake to alter physical and structural characteristics (e.g., reduce body fat or body mass and/or gain muscle mass). Accordingly, energy manipulations should be strategically integrated into training plans to minimise the effects on training quality or competition performance, and strategies should aim to maintain sufficient EA to reduce the acute and chronic issues associated with the development of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S).
In the next section is a table with recommended EA per FFM Kg guides, but a reason understanding and regulating EA is so important, is because rigorously controlled laboratory trials in women have shown that optimal EA for healthy physiological function is typically achieved at an EA of 45 kcal/kg FFM/day (188 kJ/kg FFM/day) (Loucks & Heath, 1994; Loucks & Thuma, 2003). Meanwhile, although some caveats are noted in relation to differential responses of various body systems (Burke & Deakin, 2015), many of these systems are substantially perturbed at an EA < 30 kcal/kg FFM/day (125 kJ/kg FFM/day). Therefore, it seems logical that an EA assessment could serve as a diagnostic tool in the prevention or management of RED-S.
Nutrition goals and requirements are not static. Athletes undertake a periodised program in which preparation for peak performance in targeted events is achieved by integrating different types of workouts in the various cycles of the training calendar.
Nutrition support also needs to be periodised, taking into account the needs of daily training sessions (which can range from minor in the case of “easy” workouts to substantial in the case of high quality sessions (eg, high intensity, strenuous, or highly skilled workouts) and overall nutritional goals .
We will focus on two types of body composition goals, fat loss and maintenance.
When actual loss of body weight is required, it should be programmed to occur in the base phase of training or well out from competition to minimise loss of performance, and should be achieved with techniques that maximise loss of body fat while preserving muscle mass and other health goals.
Such strategies include achieving a slight energy deficit to achieve a slow rather than rapid rate of loss and as discussed must include sufficient dietary protein intake. In this regard, the provision of a higher protein intake (2.3 vs 1 g/kg/d) in a shorter-term (2 w), energy-restricted diet in athletes was found to retain muscle mass while losing weight and body fat (Mettler et al., 2010).
Furthermore, fat-free mass and performance may be better preserved in athletes who minimise weekly weight loss to <1% per week (Garthe et al. 2011).
When adjusting total daily calories for weight loss, the aim is to be in the range of 30–40 kcal/kg FFM for men or 30–45 kcal/kg FFM for women. This is after additional calories have been accounted for in the EEE column.
It is also recommended that being in this state may be tolerated for only short periods over approximately 3–6 weeks before returning to maintenance.
To find what EA (and macro) numbers work best you are going to record your daily calorie intake and body weight to track the impact of this range has on your weight. We will get to that part of the Energy Coach in a moment but first what type of real world KG loss per week are you looking at?
As for real world numbers to watch out for check out the example below.
Example: If an 81.8 kg athlete wanted to lose fat, using the <1.0% recommendations, that means this individual could lose between 0.4 kg and 0.8 Kg per week. This would translate to about a 450 to 900 calorie deficit per day.
In the event that you would like to simply maintain a weight, then you’d simply be eating at the number of calories required to maintain your current weight. This is also where you can still enter your energy expenditure on the bike to ensure you are in the Optimal range for EA.
Alright, now the important part. Once you have you recommended macros for a day. You need to note your total kilocalories and macro nutrients. These are the daily targets you’ll want to try to hit for that day.
I’d also recommend inputting these into the MyFitnessPal app if you’re using it to track your calories. To do so, tap the “more” tab, tap “goals”, then under the “nutrition goals” tap the row that says, “customize your default or daily goals” and then simply adjust your calorie intake to anywhere within the recommended calories we gave you. It may look different depending on future updates of the app, but you get the point.
Then, as you log your food throughout the day just double-check your macro intake to make sure you’re on track to at least reaching that minimum by heading over to the “more” tab and tapping “nutrition”.
Alright, now you’re ready to move on to the next step where you’ll learn how to give the Energy Coach your data so you can see if your intake targets match your goal.
Move to the 'Record Sheet' tab on the spreadsheet.
This should be the exact date when you start actually using the spreadsheet and start logging your daily morning body weight and calories. For example, if you were starting on “January 1st”, simply enter “January 1” into the data cell and it will automatically adjust for the year.
Do note that for the next step you will be needing your morning body weight, so if you don’t have that yet, set this for tomorrow’s date when you have it.
At this point, you’re ready to start giving your Energy Coach some data. To do so, you’ll need to track and log 2 things every single day. Your daily calorie intake and your morning body weight.
There is also room to enter your Exercise calories, and daily macros but there are optional.
But to make your entries as consistent as possible, for your morning bodyweight, make sure to take this every single morning with no clothes, after you use the toilet, and before you eat or drink anything.
You need to do this because your daily weight fluctuates A LOT. Even something as simple as weighing yourself before versus after breakfast can make a few kgs difference. That said, your weight will still fluctuate every single morning due to various factors.
This is why at the end of each week, the Energy Coach will calculate what your weekly average weight is. This will be a far more accurate representation of your true weight and is what you will use to accurately assess how you’ve been progressing.
As for your calories, I’d suggest logging this in at the end of the day after your full days’ worth of eating, or the morning after. Whatever is easiest for you.
On days where you forget to weigh yourself or don’t track your calories, however, you can just leave those days blank. Just realise that the more data and the more consistent you are with your logging, the more accurate your data will be to make decisions from.
It’ll take less than a minute to do every day but as you’ll see it will be essential for your success, so please try to be as consistent as possible.
Once you are up and running, setting, logging and tracking your intake and expenditure you will need to adjust your macronutrients based on a small change to your EA number if you are not moving in the right direction. I also suggest starting a new worksheet if you change weight by more than 5 kilograms.
But that is it for your Energy Coach! By now you should have everything set up, your daily targets ready to go, and you should be ready to start logging in it as early as today or tomorrow. If, however, you’re not quite set up yet, then please make sure to do this before moving on.
If you are ready, I’ll see you in the next lesson where we’ll discuss exactly what, and how you’ll be using carbohydrates to fuel your performance.
