At U.P., we understand that not everyone is a robot who can avoid eating out, travelling or simply needing a boost. Calorie banking is an effective strategy that, with some smart planning, can help you stay on track, while navigating the various commitments in your life.

Key takeaways

• We tend to look at calorie averages over time when assessing progress.
• Shifting calories between days can be an effective way to help you stay on track, when it may be more difficult to stick to the plan, e.g., socialising, travelling, etc.
• We can subtract calories from one day and add them to another, to create the same average weekly number.
• However, doing this too often or severely can increase the risk of non-compliance and reduce training performance.
• Where possible, avoid using “calorie banking” to make room for lots of junk food or alcohol.
• Try and keep healthy eating habits, with lots of nutrient-dense foods.

What is calorie banking?

Although it’s important to aim for your daily nutrition targets, it’s your average intake over a longer period that will determine your progress. This explains why you can include a higher calorie refeed day in your program and still make progress. It is also why one ‘bad day’ cannot undo several weeks of consistent dieting.

We typically prefer to aim for the same nutrition targets each day, as this simplifies meal planning and helps make it part of your routine. However, there can be times where shifting calories between days (while maintaining your target weekly average) can help you to stay on track. For example, having extra calories to navigate social situations.

Despite this, be mindful that attempting to restrict your calories too much on any given day can increase the chances of non-compliance. This will negatively affect your training performance and relationship with food.

As a result, we recommend:

• Not reducing a single day’s calorie allotment by more than 10%.
• Moving calories from a maximum of three days per week.
• Moving calories from rest days, rather than training days, if possible.

You can also use the above approach to correct for overeating on certain days. However, we recommend only doing this to balance out minor deviations of a couple of hundred calories. In all other situations, chalk it up as a refeed and refocus on meeting your normal targets.

Normal week

In this example, the client meets their 2,000 kCal target every day and does not shift calories between days. Calorie shifting is a useful tactic and if you plan, you should be able to account for a lot of events, like meals out within your normal target. From week 4 onwards, you can also use refeed days (every 7-14 days) to help navigate work and social events.

Calorie shifting week

In this example, this person spreads their calories between days, but they still average 2,000 kCal per day. As a result, they will achieve the same results as if they had consumed 2,000 kCal every day.

This person client trains on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and has managed to avoid reducing calories on all but one of these days. Limiting the reduction to 10% should stop this from having a negative impact on their performance. A common mistake to avoid is using the calorie shifting technique to free up extra calories for ‘junk food’ and alcohol. For best results, we recommend sticking to our guidelines for dining out.