Calculator · Nutrition
TDEE calculator for muscle gain
Performance education — not medical advice. Stop and seek professional care if you have sharp pain, dizziness, chest pain, or unexplained symptoms.
Estimate maintenance calories with Mifflin–St Jeor × activity factor. Use as a starting point, then adjust from weekly weight trend.
Your result
Notes
Activity multipliers are coarse. Prefer trend weight over any single estimate. Pair with the protein calculator and macros estimator.
How to read this TDEE estimate
Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) estimates combine a resting metabolic prediction with an activity multiplier. This page uses a common adult equation path for education: compute basal needs from age, sex, height, and weight, then scale by lifestyle. Results are rounded planning numbers for healthy adults — not calorimetry, not clinical dietetics, and not advice for eating disorders or metabolic disease.
Activity multipliers are coarse. “Moderate” assumes some structured training plus daily walking; “very active” assumes high weekly training volume or a physically demanding job. If you sit most of the day and train three evenings a week, start nearer the light-to-moderate band and adjust from scale trends over two to four weeks rather than from a single day’s hunger.
Energy availability interacts with training quality. Chronic under-fueling can flatten strength progress and recovery even when protein is high. Conversely, large surplus calories do not automatically produce better hypertrophy if sleep and progressive overload are poor. Use TDEE as a starting range, then let weekly average bodyweight and gym performance guide small calorie edits of roughly 200–300 kcal.
Worked reading: if the tool returns about 2,600 kcal and bodyweight drifts down while lifts stall, nudge intake upward or reduce non-training stress before blaming the program. If weight climbs quickly with soft midsections and recovery feels fine, a modest deficit or higher daily steps may be enough. Recalculate after meaningful weight change.
The noscript table preserves example profiles for crawlers and offline readers. Combine with the protein and macros calculators when you need gram targets, and open the nutrition and sleep pillars for context on recovery-linked energy needs.
Example Mifflin–St Jeor style static outputs (illustrative)
| Profile | Approx. BMR | Approx. TDEE |
|---|---|---|
| Male · 30y · 80 kg · 178 cm · moderate | ~1,780 kcal BMR | ~2,760 kcal TDEE |
| Female · 28y · 65 kg · 165 cm · light | ~1,390 kcal BMR | ~1,910 kcal TDEE |
| Male · 40y · 90 kg · 180 cm · very active | ~1,860 kcal BMR | ~3,250 kcal TDEE |
| Female · 35y · 70 kg · 170 cm · sedentary | ~1,420 kcal BMR | ~1,700 kcal TDEE |