I just got back from a long(ish) run and caught up on tracking my food intake for the day and once again got annoyed by how mediocre MyFitnessPal is for the task for athletes in particular.¹ Most importantly: its design vocabulary starts and stops with losing weight. (It can be bent into supporting for people who want to maintain their current weight, or who need to gain weight, but as a key example of its design vocabulary’s limitations: it will not offer congratulations on anything but being “under your goal.”) For athletes, the fit is even worse.

My primary goal is not to lose weight, but instead to make sure I eat appropriately for my overall health and fitness. I would like to weight 5 – 7 pounds less than I do right now at the end of the year, mostly because I race better that way, but if I maintain exactly the weight I am at today for the rest of my life that would be perfectly healthy and good. My use of the app is focused instead on matching my eating to my workouts — and I do not mean macro-counting which it does support (…though only because of the constant fads of macro-oriented diets).

No, I mean things like this: I have discovered through long experimentation over the years that it is fine and in fact very helpful for me to do some degree of caloric restriction on off days or days when I am doing some kind of aerobic base building work, whether running or cycling. Indeed, most days right now that is what I should do given my goal of being back at my optimal weight for race performance. At the same time, I have also found that I should not do any caloric restriction on days when I have done a hard workout — speed work, tempo runs, fartleks, long runs, etc. If I do, I feel terrible the next day. MyFitnessPal understands none of this, and comes near to chastising me for being over my caloric restriction goal on those days, even though I need to eat more to be healthy.

A meal-tracking app absolutely could support that kind of differentiation. It would simply need a design vocabulary expansive enough to capture different kinds of days. Preferably, in fact, it would come with some good defaults, but would support you as a user defining your own vocabulary if that were useful. (MyFitnessPal actually supports this for meal names… indicating that this is doable even for an app which is barely trying.) With that capability in place, I would define rest days, base training days, and hard workout days, with slightly different rules and targets for each. I could imagine that going even further, too: focusing on different macros based on my schedule, up to and including knowing what the next day’s schedule is.

An app focused on supporting athletes this way could integrate with APIs from Strava (or other fitness tracking apps),² letting your actual activity inform what the day’s targets should be — in terms of calories and/or macros. For example: given even Strava’s simple system of tagging activities as “workout” or “long” or “race”, it would be straightforward to associate it with your existing rules for different kinds of days. Heck, MyFitnessPal could build this, though I would rather they start by fixing the basics in the app.

I would absolutely pay money for this feature. I have no idea how many other people would, of course — “There are dozens of us!” might be the extent of it — but I would guess that a lot of other serious amateur athletes would appreciate it, and actual pro athletes even more so.