TrakMac builds your targets in two moves. First it estimates the energy your body burns from your height, weight, and age, then scales that by how you actually train instead of a vague activity slider. Then it sets a protein floor from your bodyweight and training load and builds calories and the other macros around it. Protein first.
That is the whole idea, and it is worth understanding because the number the app hands you decides what you eat for months. You should know where it came from.
How does a macro calculator normally set your targets?
Almost every free calculator online runs the same equation. It is called Mifflin-St Jeor, and it estimates your resting energy from four inputs: weight, height, age, and sex. That part is fine. Resting burn is mostly a function of how much of you there is, and the formula is a decent guess.
The problem is the next step. To turn resting burn into a daily target, the calculator multiplies it by an activity factor you pick from a dropdown. Sedentary. Lightly active. Moderately active. Very active. Athlete. You choose one, it does the math, done.
Here is where it falls apart for a woman who trains. “Moderately active” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. It is trying to describe you after three heavy strength sessions a week and also your coworker who parks farther from the door. Those are not the same output, but the dropdown treats them as one. Most women, told to be honest, pick “lightly active” out of caution, and end up with a target several hundred calories below what they actually need. Then they wonder why the training feels flat.
A slider cannot know what your body does. It only knows what you clicked.
How does TrakMac turn your training into a number?
TrakMac keeps the sensible part (the resting-burn estimate) and throws out the guessing part. Instead of asking you to rate yourself on a five-point vibe scale, it asks what you can do.
During setup you answer a handful of concrete questions. How much you bench or press. Roughly how fast you cover a mile, or whether you cover it at all. Where you are with muscle-ups or hard bodyweight work. Your cardio preference. None of these are tests you pass or fail. They are signals. A woman who benches near her bodyweight and finishes a mile quick is carrying and moving more muscle, and burning more, than the resting formula alone would predict. The training answers pull the estimate up or down accordingly.
The output is a calorie band rather than one precise figure, because one precise figure is a lie anyway. Your real burn moves day to day. A band you can hit most days beats a single number you miss by twelve calories and feel bad about. If you want the reasoning behind estimating instead of chasing decimals, we wrote about tracking macros without weighing every meal, and the same logic runs underneath your targets.
Why does TrakMac build everything around protein?
Because protein is the input with the most leverage and the one most easy to shortchange. So it gets set first, as a floor, not squeezed in as a percentage of whatever calories are left over.
The floor comes from your bodyweight and how hard you train, not from a demographic table. The research consensus is clear on the range. The International Society of Sports Nutrition’s position stand on protein (Jäger et al.) puts the useful zone for people who train at roughly 1.4 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day for building and holding muscle, with the upper end favored when you are eating fewer calories to lean out. TrakMac places your floor inside that range based on your inputs, then treats it as the non-negotiable part of the day.
Everything else flexes around it. Carbs and fat fill in the rest of your calorie band in a split that supports training without micromanaging you. On a day you eat light, protein is the thing you protect. On a big day, protein is already handled and the extra room is yours. That is what “protein as the floor” means in practice: it is the last thing to get cut, not the first.
Is this just a black box that spits out a number?
No, and that matters, because a target you do not trust is a target you will quietly ignore.
Nothing here is hidden. The calorie band comes from a known resting-energy estimate adjusted by your own training answers. The protein floor comes from your bodyweight and a published range you can go read yourself. If two women the same height and weight get different targets, it is because they answered the training questions differently, and you can see exactly which answers moved the number.
You are also not stuck with it. Change your goal from holding to leaning out and the band shifts. Update your bench after a strong training block and the estimate follows. If your own tracking says you hold weight at a different intake than the app predicted, override it and TrakMac recalculates around your real data. The equation is a starting point, not a sentence. For the fuller picture of how the app fits together, the app and our FAQ lay out what each input does, and if you are comparing options, our tracker for women who strength train covers where this approach beats a generic calculator.
You do not need to love math to trust your targets. You just need to know they came from how you actually train, and that you can move them.
Download TrakMac
Voice-first macro tracking that builds your targets from how you train, not a dropdown. Say what you ate, confirm the estimate, and protect your protein floor without the logging becoming a second job.
Download TrakMac free. iOS, free to download.