Disclosure: This is an independent review. Roadman Cycling has a partnership relationship with Hexis but this review is editorially independent. The opinions, numbers and criticisms are my own, based on 12 months of personal use. The Roadman fuel planner implements the same underlying methodology and was verified independently against live Hexis accounts.
Why this review matters
Search for "Hexis review" and you will find product pages, press releases, and a handful of forum threads. What you will not find is an independent, long-form review from someone who has used the app daily for a year, understands the science behind it, and can tell you where it falls short.
This is that review.
I have used Hexis every day for the past 12 months. I have logged thousands of meals, tested it against my own training across rest days, threshold sessions, long endurance rides and race weekends. I went from 86 kg to 79 kg in 12 weeks while eating more food than I have ever eaten in my life. And I built a fuel planner on the same methodology to verify whether the numbers actually hold up.
They do. But the app is not perfect, and pretending otherwise would not be useful to you.
What Hexis actually is
Hexis is a periodised nutrition app. That single word — periodised — is the entire reason it exists and the entire reason it costs money when MyFitnessPal is free.
Here is the problem it solves. Most cyclists eat roughly the same thing every day. Monday rest day, Tuesday threshold session, Wednesday recovery spin — same breakfast, same lunch, same dinner. Maybe you eat a bit more on the day of a long ride. Maybe you skip a meal when you are trying to lose weight. But the macro targets stay flat.
This is wrong. Your body needs fundamentally different fuel on different days. A rest day for an 82 kg male cyclist requires around 1,750 kcal and 123 g of carbohydrate. A zone 2 training day with a moderate session pushes that to 1,953 kcal and 157 g of carbs. A competition day — same rider, same body — needs 2,309 kcal and 219 g of carbs. Those are not arbitrary numbers. They come from the Fuel for the Work Required methodology, verified against live accounts.
Hexis adjusts your targets every single day based on what training you have scheduled. It syncs with TrainingPeaks and your wearables, reads your planned sessions, and recalculates your carbohydrate, protein and fat requirements meal by meal. If your coach moves a threshold session from Wednesday to Thursday, your Wednesday macros drop and your Thursday macros rise. Automatically.
That is what you are paying for. Not a food database. Not a barcode scanner. The intelligence to match your nutrition to your training.
The science behind it
Hexis is not a tech startup that hired a nutritionist to add credibility. It is the other way round. The app was co-founded by Dr Sam Impey, whose PhD research at Liverpool John Moores University produced the Fuel for the Work Required (FFTWR) framework that the entire platform is built on.
The FFTWR methodology was published in 2016 and has since become one of the most influential papers in sports nutrition. The core idea: strategically match carbohydrate intake to training demands rather than applying a flat daily target. High-carb meals around intense sessions support performance and recovery. Lower-carb meals around rest days and easy rides promote metabolic flexibility and fat oxidation. You are not restricting food. You are redistributing it.
Professor James Morton, Impey's collaborator at LJMU, took this research into elite sport. As performance nutritionist for Team Sky between 2015 and 2019, he applied it to Chris Froome and the squad across five consecutive Tour de France victories. That is not a marketing claim. That is published, peer-reviewed science implemented at the highest level of the sport.
Today, Impey serves as lead nutritionist at British Cycling and works directly with riders including Tom Pidcock and Filippo Ganna. The Hexis platform is used by Q36.5 Pro Cycling and, according to the company, roughly 40 per cent of Tour de France riders and half of Premier League football clubs. The methodology is real. The credentials are real. The question is whether the consumer app delivers on that science.
The setup experience
When you sign up, Hexis asks for the standard inputs: weight, height, age, sex, activity level, body composition goal, training schedule. It syncs with TrainingPeaks or you can enter sessions manually.
What happens next is where it diverges from every other nutrition app. Instead of spitting out a single set of daily macros, Hexis generates a different plan for every day of your week. Open the app on a rest day and you see one set of targets. Open it on a threshold day and the numbers shift. Open it on a competition day and they shift again — meaningfully.
The setup itself takes about ten minutes. The learning curve is steeper than MyFitnessPal because you need to understand why your targets change day to day. There is no hand-holding tutorial — you either grasp the concept of periodised nutrition or the daily fluctuations will feel random and confusing. This is a real barrier. I have spoken to riders who set up Hexis, saw different numbers every day, assumed the app was broken, and deleted it within a week.
It is not broken. It is doing exactly what it should. But Hexis does a poor job of explaining this to new users.
Daily use — what it is actually like
The daily experience has two halves: the intelligent part and the tedious part.
The intelligent part is excellent. You wake up, open the app, and see your macro targets for the day broken down by meal. Hexis uses what it calls Carb Coding — a colour-coded system that tells you whether each meal should be low, medium or high in carbohydrate based on your training proximity and intensity. Breakfast before a threshold session gets a higher carb allocation. Dinner on a rest day gets less. The distribution follows the science: protein stays constant at roughly 1.8 g per kilogram of bodyweight, carbs scale with training intensity, and fat fills the remainder.
The in-ride fuelling guidance is a genuine differentiator. For moderate sessions over 90 minutes, Hexis recommends around 50 g of carbs per hour. For high-intensity work, that climbs to 70 g per hour. For the truly brutal sessions — race-start simulations, sprint-maintain-sprint intervals — it prescribes 100 g per hour with the note to eat as many carbs as you possibly can. These are not generic recommendations. They are calibrated to your session type and fuel category.
The tedious part is the food logging. And this is where Hexis loses people.
The food database is smaller than MyFitnessPal's. The barcode scanner works perhaps one time in ten. Logging a meal cooked from scratch — say, a chicken stir-fry with rice and vegetables — requires searching for each ingredient individually, estimating weights, and building the meal manually. It takes longer to log the meal than to eat it. That is not an exaggeration. One App Store reviewer made exactly the same observation.
Hexis has improved here. The 3.0 redesign in May 2025 overhauled the interface, and subsequent updates added voice logging, better serving size calculations, and recipe handling. The energy and macro reallocation feature — which recalculates your remaining meals when you eat more or less than planned — is smart and useful. But the core logging experience still trails behind dedicated food trackers. If you are coming from MyFitnessPal, the difference in logging speed will frustrate you for the first few weeks.
I stuck with it because the periodisation intelligence is worth the friction. Whether you will reach the same conclusion depends on how much you value the daily macro adjustments versus how much you hate slow food logging.
What actually changed
Here is the part that matters: did it work?
I lost 7 kg in 12 weeks. I went from 86 to 79 kg. And I did it while eating more food than I have ever eaten in my entire life.
I did not download MyFitnessPal and start tracking calories. I did not skip meals. I did not do fasted rides and bonk 60 km from home. I ate to fuel my training, and my body composition shifted because the fuel was matched to the work.
On rest days, I ate less — around 1,750 kcal with 123 g of carbs. Not because I was restricting, but because my body did not need more. On training days, the targets rose. On competition days, they rose further. The protein stayed constant at roughly 148 g per day. The carbs moved. The fat filled the gap.
The result was not just weight loss. My power did not drop. My energy went up. I stopped craving junk food at 9 pm because I was actually eating enough during the day. The late-night fridge raids stopped because the daytime fuelling was right.
This is not a miraculous outcome. This is basic physiology applied correctly. When you fuel training days properly, your body does not scavenge for energy from other sources — including your own muscle. When you moderate intake on rest days, you create a natural deficit without compromising recovery. The maths works because the methodology is sound.
The Roadman fuel planner — we verified the numbers
I do not ask you to take any of this on faith. We built a free fuel planner on the Roadman site that implements the exact same Hexis/Impey FFTWR methodology. The calculation engine uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation for resting metabolic rate, a gross metabolic efficiency constant of 0.217 (the same default Hexis uses), and the same carb-scaling and calorie-restoration factors that drive the Hexis recommendations.
We verified our engine against three live Hexis accounts in May 2026. The test case: an 82 kg male cyclist with a sedentary off-bike activity level.
| Day type | Hexis target | Our engine | Carbs | |----------|-------------|------------|-------| | Rest day | 1,750 kcal | 1,750 kcal | 123 g | | Training day (20 min @ 200 W) | 1,953 kcal | 1,953 kcal | 157 g | | Competition day (same session) | 2,309 kcal | 2,309 kcal | 219 g |
The numbers match. The methodology is transparent. The protein target is 1.8 g per kilogram of bodyweight — roughly 148 g for an 82 kg rider — and it stays constant regardless of training day type. Carbohydrate scales from a base of roughly 28 per cent of rest-day calories, with additional carbs allocated proportionally to exercise intensity. On competition days, there is a full restoration of exercise calories plus a 40 g carb bonus for pre-race loading.
You can use our calculator for free. It will give you the daily macro targets for any session type across 21 different training templates. What it will not do is the meal-by-meal distribution, the Carb Coding, the TrainingPeaks sync, or the in-ride fuelling guidance. That is what the Hexis subscription adds.
Limitations — what falls short
No review is useful if it only tells you what works. Here is what does not.
The food logging is a grind. I have covered this, but it bears repeating because it is the reason most people will quit. If you cook from scratch regularly, you will spend real time logging meals. The barcode scanner needs significant improvement. Custom food creation is functional but basic — it only collects rudimentary macros with no fibre or fat breakdown. Hexis has acknowledged this and continues to improve it, but as of July 2026 it is still the weakest part of the product.
The learning curve is real. If you do not understand why your macro targets change daily, the app will feel chaotic rather than intelligent. Hexis assumes a baseline understanding of periodised nutrition that most amateur cyclists do not have. Better onboarding would solve this, but right now the burden falls on the user to educate themselves.
It is not a meal planner. Hexis tells you how much to eat, not what to eat. The recipes feature launched in early 2025 and is growing, but it is not a meal prep service. If your problem is "I do not know what to cook," Hexis will not solve it. If your problem is "I do not know how much to eat on training days versus rest days," it will.
The cost is a consideration. Hexis runs at roughly £10 per month on an annual plan or £20 per month on a three-month commitment. That is not expensive relative to a sports nutritionist consultation, but it is a meaningful subscription for a rider who is not sure they will stick with food logging. There is no free tier to test the periodisation features before committing.
The App Store rating reflects growing pains. As of July 2026, Hexis sits at 3.2 out of 5 on the UK App Store from 56 ratings. The negative reviews cluster around early reliability issues and food logging friction. The positive reviews consistently praise the periodisation intelligence and the TrainingPeaks integration. The app has improved substantially — the 3.0 redesign, Garmin integration, voice logging and macro reallocation are all meaningful additions — but the rating has not yet caught up with the current product.
Who should use Hexis
You should consider Hexis if you meet most of these criteria:
You train with structure — a coach or a plan with periodised sessions, not just riding when you feel like it. You train six or more hours per week and the difference between a rest day and a threshold day is meaningful in your schedule. You have a body composition or performance goal that requires your nutrition to support your training, not work against it. You are willing to log food consistently, at least during focused training blocks. And you are prepared to spend £10 to £20 per month on a tool that makes the nutrition periodisation automatic rather than doing it manually.
If that sounds like you, Hexis is the best consumer tool available for the job. Nothing else matches training to nutrition at this level of specificity.
Who should not use Hexis
You should not subscribe if you ride casually two or three times a week with no structured plan. The periodisation features add nothing when every ride is roughly the same intensity and duration. You should not subscribe if you hate food logging and have never stuck with it for more than a week — the logging friction will defeat the periodisation benefits. You should not subscribe if you are looking for a meal planner that tells you what to cook — Hexis tells you how much, not what.
And you should not subscribe if you are a beginner who has never tracked macros before. Start with something simpler, learn the basics of protein and carbohydrate, and come to Hexis when you are ready for the periodisation layer.
The verdict
Hexis is the real thing. The methodology is peer-reviewed, World Tour-tested, and independently verifiable — we verified it ourselves. The periodisation intelligence is a category ahead of any generic calorie tracker. The in-ride fuelling guidance, the Carb Coding system, and the training-aware meal distribution solve a problem that no other consumer app addresses.
The food logging needs to get better. The onboarding needs to explain periodised nutrition to newcomers. The App Store rating needs time to reflect the improvements the team has made since the 3.0 redesign.
But here is what I keep coming back to. I lost 7 kg while eating more food. My power held. My energy was better than it had been in years. And the methodology behind those results is the same one that powered five Tour de France victories.
If you are a structured cyclist who wants your nutrition to match your training, Hexis is worth every penny. Roadman readers get 25% off with code CARBS25 — sign up here. If you want to try the methodology before subscribing, use our free fuel planner to see what periodised nutrition looks like for your training week. Then decide whether the full Hexis experience — daily macro adjustments, Carb Coding, TrainingPeaks sync, in-ride fuelling — is worth the subscription.
For me, after 12 months, it is.
Try the Roadman fuel planner — it uses the same Hexis/Impey FFTWR methodology, verified against live accounts. Free, no signup required. For a detailed comparison of Hexis against other nutrition tools, see our Hexis vs MyFitnessPal and Hexis vs Fuelin breakdowns.