Excellent 3 Part Article on Contest Prep for Natural BBers

[Sesshomaru]

This article was written by a friend of mine. This is how Ive worked with getting people in shape during dieting (not just contest prep) in the past, Im just glad that he wrote it out. I think many competitors could learn from nats and apply it to their own training to making things easier.

Contest Preparation: Boiling it Down for the Natural Bodybuilders – Part 1

by Matt Perryman

Getting ready for a bodybuilding contest is easily one of the most stressful, mentally challenging, and downright difficult things a person can do. This is really unavoidable no matter how you go about it; any way you shake it, you’re intentionally depriving the body of food and then adding in exercise on top of it.

One of the last things people need while preparing is misinformation. Unfortunately contest preparation has classically been the domain of Bro-science. In fact, it’s where Bro-science lives and thrives; since so many things can affect how you look, and getting into contest shape is the definition of training to look good, it only makes sense. The biggest and leanest obviously knows the score.

Nevertheless, you can still apply rationalism and science to the process. In fact, if you’re a natural bodybuilder, you’d be well advised to do just that.

A Note on Natural Bodybuilding
This article is primarily aimed at would-be natural bodybuilders. I say this not because I have any issue with drug users; quite the contrary in fact. I’m writing this for the naturals because they’re at a truly spectacular disadvantage when it comes to information.

Because of the utterly Bro-tastic nature of contest prep, it’s sometimes made out to be some secret or mysterious process only known to a few select gurus. When you see this going down, 95% of the time there’s a simple answer: drugs.

Seriously. This is a reality that most people ‘in the game’ don’t want to face, or will flat-out lie about. Let me explain why you, the would-be natural competitor, have to take this into account.

Much of the difficulty in getting contest lean is not losing fat, in and of itself – it’s keeping muscle mass while you do it. If you’ve got the chemical ability to hang on to muscle while in a significant calorie deficit, then you’re already one leg up. This is the benefit of anabolic steroids. Even in low doses, they’ll assist in hanging on to muscle tissue.

This is compounded by fat-metabolizing drugs like clenbuterol, thyroid hormone (T3), and even the infamous DNP. With these, the fat will literally melt off. Add in some other trickery to manipulate water balance for the show itself, which will help with that ‘dry’ or ‘tight’ look that’s highly sought after, and you’ve got a combo. Muscle is maintained, fat is metabolized, and water is eliminated. With the right drugs, you can literally sit on the couch while building muscle and losing fat; throw in some exercise on top of that and you’ve got a recipe for success that has worked for decades.

The problem is that a great many people who aspire to remain natural don’t realize the level of pharmacology involved in the success of high-level physique competitors. This isn’t just bodybuilders, either; it’s prevalent in any physique-related sport, to include figure and even things like sports modeling. You don’t just have to be on a dose of steroids to count as a drug user, either. Even someone using clenbuterol or a powerful diuretic has an advantage that you simply won’t have.

If you want to compete effectively as a natural, you don’t necessarily have to listen to what I’m saying. You may well be one of those genetic wunderkind that can succeed and look amazing regardless of what you do. However, if you want an edge, it couldn’t hurt you to pay attention to what I’m going to suggest.

Strength Training
Traditionally, strength training is largely abandoned during contest prep. I don’t mean weight training per se, as almost all bodybuilders stay on a workout schedule. What I mean is that the strength- and muscle-building training normally done is dropped in favor of higher reps – say 12-20 – to get lean. This usually coincides with dropping any ‘big lifts’ (your squats, presses, rows, etc.) and instead moving to a lot of body-part isolation exercises.

Note that just because that’s what is done doesn’t mean it’s for the best, or even a good idea.

The research has told us a few simple facts about muscle tissue: primarily, it grows in response to high levels of tension. In other words, in order to see gains in muscle mass, you have to train with heavy weights and make some attempt to get stronger over time.

But you’re not trying to build muscle on a diet, right? After all, you diet to drop body fat, and it’s very difficult to build muscle while in a calorie deficit (drug-free). This is true, but there’s more to think about. Muscle is in a constant state of building up and breaking down. Even if you want to just maintain the muscle you have, you still have to lift weights to hang on to it. If you don’t, the muscle will atrophy. You don’t even have to diet to see this – just stop going to the gym for a few weeks.

It all boils down to chemical signals: lifting weights and eating (especially protein) tend to signal growth, while not exercising and fasting tend to signal atrophy. Note that by fasting, I don’t necessarily mean fasting in the sense of ’stop eating for days’. What we see is that whenever there’s a shortage of nutrients, muscle atrophy increases through several factors. Obviously our goal is to minimize any muscle atrophy; this means it would be a good idea to keep some heavy training in your routine, just to signal your muscles to hang on to mass. Effectively you’re telling your body that it still ‘needs’ that tissue, so it won’t break it down ( at least not quite so easily).

We know that there’s a dose-response relationship between resistance training and its effects on your muscle. That is to say, for any amount of work you do, we can expect a certain amount of gains in response. For example, while bulking, you might find that 5-6 sets gives you the best gains. While dieting, you might have to drop that to just 2-3 sets (or possibly less) due to limited recovery ability; when bulking, you’ve got the calories to spare, and your body can put them to use.

The good news is that while dieting, you can get away with less sets. Because of the dose-response effect, it doesn’t take nearly as many sets to maintain muscle as it does to build it. While it might take 5-6 sets to maximize muscle gains, even as few as 1-2 sets can be enough to maintain muscle assuming you keep the weights heavy enough.

What’s heavy enough? As a rule of thumb, anything 80% of your 1RM or higher. If you’re using rep-maximums as a guideline, probably no lighter than your best set of eight (8RM). You don’t necessarily have to focus on this kind of heavier loading, but you need to keep some in your weekly routine.

High reps to cut up

This is quite possibly the single biggest mistake people make when switching to contest training. For the reasons I just mentioned, you need some amount of heavy lifting in your routine if you want to keep the most muscle while dieting.

You can see it happen in naturals, too. A guy that’s already reasonably lean switches to purely high reps and pays no attention to heavy strength work. He gets really lean, sure, but he also drops a ton of muscle. It’s normal to shrink on a diet for sure, but there’s no need for it to happen to that degree, when you could avoid it with a couple of heavy sets each week.

It’s an old myth that you do high reps to ‘cut up’ or ‘get definition’. Frankly this just isn’t true; you don’t make a muscle more defined by just working it. There is no spot reduction. To increase definition and ‘cut up’, you have to drop body fat.

That said, there is something to higher reps, though it’s just due to glycogen depletion and metabolic effects. While higher reps don’t actually tone you up or whatever, they can potentially affect fat loss. When you do the high-rep stuff, you’re burning up stored muscle glycogen, which is the muscle’s energy store. When glycogen is depleted below a certain point, the muscle starts to increase fat burning in order to make up the difference. This increases insulin sensitivity as well, so that the muscle is more likely to ’soak up’ any glucose in your blood and use it to replace the depleted glycogen.

Obviously if you do this enough, it would create a positive effect on fat metabolism and your overall energy burn, which is a good thing. Indeed, this metabolic action is probably the rationale for the high-rep/short-rest stuff to begin with. The problem is, while it may certainly help out, you still can’t completely drop your heavy strength training in favor of pump/depletion training. If you choose to start including higher reps, you can’t forget your heavy stuff. While high rep work may help with fat loss, it’s not heavy enough to send that signal to maintain muscle mass.

Struggling to get stronger

On the opposite side of the coin, people that try to keep some heavier strength training in the mix can tend to push too hard. While you get points for keeping heavy work in there, also remember that pure strength training can take its toll on you. While dieting, you’re on lowered calories, which will impact your recovery ability.

Remember this simple rule: a diet is not the time to chase after PRs. When you’re dieting, you’re just trying to maintain muscle mass, not build it. Likewise, while neurological factors can help increase strength over the short-term, you’re not really going to get that much stronger over the course of a diet.

What’s the solution? Instead of straight linear progression, or adding weight to your lifts each workout, as most people tend to do, I’d be more conservative. You can use what’s called step loading, where you spend two or more workouts with the same working weights before trying to put more weight on. This has the effect of slowing down your progress.

Instead of adding 5 lbs or struggling to grind out one more rep, stick with the same weights for 2-3 sessions before attempting any increases. In fact, depending on how you respond and how strict your diet is, you could go as far as to just sick with the same working weights unless they become easy. If your weights are still challenging to you, there’s no real reason to try and force gains while you’re on a diet. That’s my other rule of thumb: allow strength gains to happen, don’t force them.

Not lifting often enough

This is more a result of poor program design than anything else. On the usual bodybuilder workouts, you’re doing “chest”, “back”, “legs”, “arms” and what have you. That’s great, but the problem is some of those routines are specifically designed to work each muscle infrequently, with the rationale that you’re allowing for recovery between each workout.

Why is that a problem? Don’t you need to recover? Based on the research into muscle growth, we see that muscle groups in most people respond best to two sessions each week. This is often enough to allow for recovery, but more importantly, it’s enough to keep all the ‘growth chemistry’ active. Remember, you want to maximize all the growth signals you can, and getting regular ‘hits’ from workouts will help that process.

Now you may be wondering how you can get away with this; after all, doesn’t the muscle require a week to recover? Not exactly. The way most people workout, it might require a week, but as I’ve already mentioned, you don’t have to do that. Go in, hit 2-3 sets per part, and call it a day. By doing just enough to maintain, you can hit the gym more often and help hang on to your muscle.

 

[Sesshomaru]

Part 2:

Contest Preparation: Boiling it Down for the Natural Bodybuilders – Part 2

by Matt Perryman

Back in part one, I talked about why natural bodybuilders can’t always follow the advice handed down from drug-using competitors. There’s no ethical or moral judgment involved, but there are very real physiological concerns for a natural that can be minimized or eliminated in drug users.

If you want to do your best as a natural, you need to be aware of these differences. In the first section I covered strength training needs and common misconceptions. In this section, I want to talk about conditioning, aka cardio, and nutritional factors.

Conditioning
Conditioning is a wide term that I’m using to encompass any kind of activity done for the purposes of ‘getting in shape’ – your ability to be active and to stay active over time. Most people associate this with steady-state aerobic exercise, whether it’s running for a couple of miles or just spending an hour or two on the treadmill.

Indeed, the staple of the bodybuilder’s arsenal is spending 1-3 hours a day on the treadmill. This no doubt came from the 1980s, when exercise research was almost exclusively focused on aerobic training. It’s also compounded by the drug factor. When you’ve got no concerns about losing muscle, and your metabolic rate is already significantly increased, spending a few hours on the treadmill is the quickest way to get the fat off. This isn’t necessarily true for the naturals.

Much like strength training, conditioning has different degrees of intensity and difficulty. Aerobic steady-state work is the lowest level. In this state, your body is actively using oxygen to burn (oxidize) fat for energy. The problem is, aerobic oxidation is only ‘fast enough’ for low-intensity exercise. The more difficult the exercise becomes, the more rapidly your body will need energy.

That’s where the anaerobic pathways enter the picture. Instead of using oxygen to burn fat, your body resorts to other, faster methods. Anaerobic (’without oxygen’) metabolism can support much higher intensities of work, but the trade-off is that you’ve only got so much fuel to go around. This puts a limit on the length of any anaerobic activity.

You’ve certainly felt this happen. The burning you feel in your muscles during a set of 20 reps, or the burning in your legs when you climb a long flight of stairs, is a direct result of anaerobic glycolysis – the breakdown of sugar for energy. Glycolysis can occur both with and without oxygen, depending on how difficult the exercise is.

This is where it gets interesting. While it might seem at first glance that aerobic exercise is superior, since it uses fat for fuel, that’s not necessarily the case. For one, you’re never using any one fuel source exclusively; even a brisk walk will involve some degree of anaerobic activity. It’s a matter of dominance.

The biggest thing is the long-term effect of anaerobic metabolism. What we notice is that while ‘hard exercise’ will burn sugars during the activity, fat oxidation is actually increased after the fact for as much as 24 hours. There’s a lot of biochemical reasons for this, but let it suffice to say that your body is concerned about maintaining energy balance. When you deplete glycogen (the stored sugar in your muscles), the body is interested in getting that glycogen back, so it makes that a priority.

Since it’s trying to conserve its supplies, the muscle won’t actually use glycogen for fuel; it relies on fat. This increases muscle insulin sensitivity – blood sugars will be more readily absorbed by the muscle. Further, it’s been observed that fat oxidation stays high even if you eat carbs.

Obviously there’s a rationale for using higher intensity conditioning in your routine if you’re interested in getting very lean. This is the source of the current High-Intensity Interval (or Intermittent) Training (HIIT) fad. For the purposes of this article, HIIT, interval training, and high-intensity cardio are more-or-less interchangeable. There are finer differences in all three terms, but just consider it anything that achieves the effects I just described.

Hours of low-intensity cardio

On the one hand, the pro-HIIT crowd has some good points. There’s a case to be made for using high-intensity conditioning methods. The gist of it is that to trigger changes, you have to force the body to change; this mandates some kind of high-effort work on your part.

As explained, low-intensity cardio works for drug-users because they have advantages. If you don’t have those advantages, you can’t expect to just sit on the treadmill for 2-3 hours a day and get shredded. Correction: you can, but don’t expect to keep any muscle in the process.

In large amounts, aerobic exercise is directly counterproductive for any kind of anaerobic adaptations – and that includes hanging on to your muscle tissue. While going for a 30 minute walk three times a week isn’t going to hurt you, spending 2-3 hours a day on the treadmill most certainly can if you’re a natural competitor.

In practice, large amounts of aerobic exercises are going to burn off muscle just as easily as fat – and this can only be made worse if you’re one of those that switched over completely to high-rep pump/depletion training. In that case, you’ve got no signal to change your body composition.

You may lose weight, but you won’t really affect your body fat percentage or your overall appearance. The comparison is always made to endurance athletes. This is only partially valid, because there’s more than just the exercise that goes into how they look (i.e., you don’t want to haul around a ton of body mass if you’re running or cycling ultra-long distances), but it is something to think about.

In comparison, the anaerobic exercise does create preferential effects on fat metabolism, and it does avoid some of the negative side-effects of aerobic exercise. If you want to actually create changes in body composition, you need to have some amount of higher-intensity exercise in your routine.

Too much high-intensity cardio

However the pendulum swings both ways. Now people hear that high-intensity cardio is good, so they start doing nothing but interval training four days a week, on top of a significant weight-training workout.

This is arguably worse than sitting on the treadmill. High intensity exercise of any kind represents a major stress on your body, and in that sense HIIT is not fundamentally different than a weight-training session. It requires fuel and it requires recovery time. Keep that up for too long and all manner of arcane chemical voodoo happens that will put your body into a state of full-time inflammation. Inflammation is bad; it impacts recovery, it impacts fat metabolism and appetite, and it will ultimately impact your mood and quality of life. In a bad way.

This is of course another call for moderation: some is good, but that doesn’t mean you have to go overboard.

Just the same way that marathon runners are used to ‘prove’ that endurance training makes you skinny, sprinters are always trotted out to display how super-awesome that interval training is.

Here’s the thing about sprinters: they do aerobic exercise too, and in fact most of their training is not high intensity. If you want to bring that comparison out, you might consider that a sprinter may only do a few ’speed’ sessions, which are very short high-speed runs with very long rest times. The majority of their actual conditioning work will be either low-intensity work or only moderately-difficult intervals called tempo runs.

In other words, while high-intensity stuff is important, you can’t simply rely on it exclusively. You have to account for recovery times, and for your strength workouts. However you can use low-intensity exercise and non-maximal tempo runs to get activity without blasting yourself to pieces.

The thing that people always forget about aerobic or steady-state exercise is that you don’t have to just sit there for hours at a time. There’s no reason you can increase the difficulty somewhat, enough to make it a little challenging and get you breathing a little harder. It’s not a matter of either spending 2 hours walking or maximal 400m runs that get your heart rate over 200bpm. There is a middle ground, and most of your time should be spent there.

Trying to get in shape

This is somewhat similar to what happens when you push too hard to get stronger on a diet. Your body has to adapt to endurance exercise, too, and when you push it past current limits, it takes resources – meaning calories and nutrients – to make that happen.

Guess what you’re lacking while dieting?

When you start a diet and go from 3-4 lifting sessions and little (if any) cardio to full-bore 3-5 lifting sessions and 3-7 cardio sessions, guess what you’ve just done?

You’ve just sent a major signal for adaptation while simultaneously depriving your body of nutrients.

A big part of the “don’t do so much cardio” suggestion comes from this. There’s a big, big difference in maintaining an amount of work that your body’s used to, as opposed to trying to make your body acclimatize to an amount of work you’re not used to.

If you take somebody that’s already very in shape, with a good work capacity and cardiovascular fitness, and put them on that kind of cardio regimen, they might be just fine. After all, they’ve got the experience and his/her body is already adapted to that work load.

Take somebody without that conditioning background and put him/her on the exact same program, and you’ll have a crash in a few weeks. The solution here is the same as before: do enough to create changes and enough to be challenging. Your goal with cardio is to burn off calories; you’re not trying to get ready for a marathon. Trying to push yourself to a new level of fitness is going to require calories that you simply can’t spare. Keep the cardio in its place.

Reliance on activity over diet

Like it or not, you have to diet in order to see major changes in how you look. This is easily demonstrated with any athlete that doesn’t watch his/her diet – unless they’re handling truly amazing amounts of daily activity, what you’ll find is that there’s just no impetus for the body to be lean.

And I’m not talking about going for an hourly jog every day, either. The guys I’m talking about are the ones spending the better part of an 8 hour day doing some kind of activity. Since I’d imagine most of you have full-time jobs, or at least family/friend obligations, this just isn’t feasible. Getting in 1000 calories of activity will take a lot of work; not eating 1000 calories is easy in comparison.

From an athlete’s viewpoint, it’s not terribly relevant as long as they can perform. The relationship between body fat levels and fitness is something of a myth. There is something to it, as body fat obviously can’t be too high, but being in stage condition isn’t exactly going to help anyone’s performance, either. As much as it’s nice to imagine that the guy with bulging veins and a six-pack is an amazing athlete, the reality is that he’s probably so tired and carb-depleted that he barely wants to stand up. The athlete eats to fuel his/her training, with appearance as a secondary concern at best.

The would-be bodybuilder, however, is presumably eating to look good on stage. This means that there must be a compromise between diet and exercise – and diet is going to win that battle just out of practicality. The exercise has to adapt to the diet, not the other way around. If you do too much activity, especially challenging activity, the body is going to demand payment. Too much, too often, and you burn out.

The goal is a balance point. Enough activity to keep the process going, but not so much that you have to out-eat whatever calorie burn you create.

 

[Sesshomaru]

Part 3:

Contest Preparation: Boiling it Down for the Natural Bodybuilders – Part 3

by Matt Perryman

In parts one and two, I went over weight-training/strength training and conditioning methods for contest preparation. In this final segment, I want to take a look at arguably the most important bit, which is nutrition.

Diet and Supplementation
I shouldn’t have to tell you that diet is a critical part of ‘getting shredded’. You’ll often hear percentages trotted out like “diet is 80% of your gains” or “diet is everything”. In reality, it’s a bit naive to assign a relevant percentage; you either diet and see effects, or you don’t. There’s not exactly room for percentages there.

However you decide to go about it, you’re going to be restricting calories. You can do it intentionally, by counting calories, or you can do it by picking better food choices, but this is the key thing to remember: no matter what gimmick or rationale is offered, it’s always going to come back to calorie restriction.

The reason is simple: conservation of energy and matter, otherwise known as thermodynamics. Energy can’t be created or destroyed – it only changes forms. Your body is a closed system – energy comes in via food, and energy leaves via activity, metabolic life processes, and other avenues. As much as people have tried to handwave it and make this reality go away, you can’t change the reality of energy balance. Energy input will always equal energy output.

The problem comes in when people start trying to cheat the system. Insulin is often the number one factor trotted out as having the magical ability to violate thermodynamic equilibrium. Studies are often cited showing that insulin spikes can reduce catabolism and increase nutrient uptake by various tissues; this is used as a rationale for the idea that “a calorie is not a calorie”.

Well, no, in actuality it is. A Calorie (capital C, aka kilocalorie since I’m using proper terms here) is a well-defined unit of energy – it’s the amount of energy required to raise a gram of water by one degree C. In that regard, a (kilo)calorie very well is a (kilo)calorie.

What they’re really trying to get at is that some kinds of food are actually causing fat gains in and of themselves; to these people, energy balance isn’t even relevant. What matters is what you eat, not how much. This argument is commonly cited by “aficionados of low-carb diets” (to be nice about it), and they like to justify their belief that carbs are bad and make you fat.

Well, actually, no. The research has been pretty equivocal; when controlled for energy balance and nutrient requirements, low-carb diets don’t really offer any physiological advantages. They may offer psychological advantages, such as appetite control or ability to stick to it, but there’s just nothing to validate the idea that carbs are inherently “bad” once calorie intake is taken care of. Indeed, what we see with low-carb/high-fat (ketogenic) diets like Atkins is that people simply eat less, because protein and fat are more filling.

These concerns are easily dismissed even without that data, though. There is no possible way that any chemical reaction, even as complex as those in your body, can violate thermodynamic equilibrium (energy balance). Energy that comes in will match energy going out, and it’s just not a matter up for debate.

In short, energy balance is king, and what you eat doesn’t matter nearly as much as how much you eat. This isn’t to say there are no concerns for the food you eat, because there are plenty of reasons to pay attention to your food. You do need a certain daily amount of protein and essential fats, for one thing, and not getting these can skew the results. It’s just that your ability to drop fat isn’t going to be hampered because you ate 150 grams of carbs.

What really goes on is that people don’t account for loss of body mass and decrease of metabolic rate. The body’s metabolic rate can vary somewhat depending on your activity level and your energy intake. In general, eating less food will tend to reduce metabolic rate, and likewise, a sedentary person will burn far less calories than a person working an active job or otherwise getting a good amount of exercise.

This isn’t changing the equation, though – all it means is that your body may be expending less energy. If you go from running six hours a week and lifting weights four hours a week, to sitting on the couch, and you make no changes to your diet, it should be no surprise to you that you put on 10 lbs in a week. People don’t make adjustments to their calorie intake, and thus it makes it seem like calorie restriction just doesn’t work.

Much of this metabolic variability is due to the hormone leptin, which is something of a master hormone governing both energy intake and metabolic rate. When you’re well fed and holding fat, leptin levels are high and everything works fine. When you’re not getting enough to eat, or when you diet down to very low levels of body fat, leptin levels will tend to drop accordingly.

When leptin drops, so does your metabolic rate. Further, low leptin levels tend to make it easier to drop muscle, while simultaneously making it harder to drop fat, due to effects on insulin sensitivity. This is a survival strategy; your body doesn’t care about being lean, it cares about being alive. In order to maximize the chances of that happening, it will try to conserve its energy stores – which would be the fat you’re holding. To read more about this, I’d suggest Lyle McDonald’s Ultimate Diet 2.0, where he covers this topic in detail.

This metabolic “crash” effect can make it seem like energy balance isn’t working; in reality, you just need to better match your food intake to your current metabolic rate. It may be tempting to assume that there’s some kind of metabolic magic at work, but we can rule this out just by Occam’s razor: if we assume that the content of your diet matters more than energy balance, then we’re also having to assume a violation of thermodynamics.

Don’t think that’s a big deal? If we had proof that energy balance was actually being violated, we’d have a solution to the world energy crisis. When you want to claim that you can violate thermodynamics, you’ve got a lot of well-established science to overcome.

Ideally, you’d have some way to raise metabolic rate, undo the drop in leptin, or both. As mentioned, metabolic rate can be increased somewhat by exercise; indeed, this is a good rationale for staying active when your goal is fat loss. While you can’t lift weights or run intervals every day, there is a good reason to not just sit around on the couch, either. Just moving around will create a higher calorie burn.

But what do you do about the decreased leptin and metabolic “crash”?

Cheat Meals, Refeeds, and Leptin

As mentioned, leptin is signaled both by energy intake (how much you eat) and by body fat. The more fat you hold, the greater the leptin signal. The less you eat, and the leaner you get, the less leptin you’ll have. From here you get the metabolic adaptations that we don’t want.

The bad thing is that, short of getting fat again, you can’t really raise leptin back to normal levels. It’s just an unfortunate reality. What you can do though is temporarily over-eat, what’s called a refeed. Effective refeeds will last from maybe half a day on up to 48 hours. The trick here is to keep it high-carb and low-fat; carbs signal leptin, and you don’t really want to get a lot of dietary fat while you’re overeating as it tends to be stored.

Although refeeding isn’t a permanent solution, it’s often enough to reset things enough to get past a sticking point. The less you’re eating and the leaner you get, the more frequent refeeds should become. There’s also a psychological benefit to not being so restrictive with your food. If you know you’ll get a break every so often, it’s that much easier to avoid temptation.

There are some cons though. Some people just don’t do well with any sort of cheat; give them a piece of fruit or something and next thing you know they’ve cleaned out a buffet. Obviously this is counter-productive.

Also this yet one more area where drug-users will have an advantage. With a decent dose of clenbuterol or better yet, thyroid hormone, most of the metabolic problems will vanish. Add in some anabolics, go spend three hours on the treadmill, and the fat will come off just fine. Remember that artificially manipulating your physiology with chemistry is certainly a viable tactic – but you as a natural can’t follow that path.

Eating “Clean”

The first thing people tend to bring up when talking about a diet is eating “clean”. I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m hostile to this term, and it’s purely because of all the misconceptions that it encourages.

On the one hand, “clean eating” can be an improvement. For most people it’s just not possible to eat as much “clean” food as junk. By default you’ll be eating less.

On the other hand, people think that “clean food” is all they need to see changes – and that’s just not true. Clean eating will usually correlate with eating less food, but it does not automatically mean you are eating in a calorie deficit, which is required to drop fat.

Worse, “clean eating” is one hell of an ambiguous term. Nobody seems able to define what it really is. The common definition is “natural, unprocessed foods” – but then these same people will be eating rice cakes.

I’ve often made it a point to demonstrate how ridiculous the concept is; there’s just no linkage between clean eating and fat loss. There’s a lot of correlation between the two, but it’s a mistake to assume clean eating causes fat loss.

Now what I would suggest is thinking in terms of “nutrient dense” foods. That’s a lot easier to quantify. As I mentioned, you do have a daily requirement for protein and for essential fats. There’s also a lot of micronutrients, your vitamins and minerals and such, that are important to get.

At the same time, if you want a cookie, and the cookie doesn’t ruin your calorie goals for the day, eat the cookie. It’s not going to make you fat, and it’s not going to ruin your entire day. In general I’m very encouraging of people that want to have small “cheat foods” if it helps with overall adherence, and I certainly encourage refeeding in people that need it.

In my view, any negative effects of overeating will be more than off-set by the effects of leptin signaling and metabolic improvement; not only is it validated by science, but I’ve seen it happen time and again. There’s no need to fight the body at every step when it will help you out if you play nice.

As mentioned, the only exception to this would be in cases where the person in question is prone to binging. Then again, when you take away the impetus for a binge – which tends to be extreme restriction and a focus on 100% adherence no matter what – the binges tend to stop. Go figure.

Needless food restrictions

To follow on with the “clean eating” thing, contest prep diets will often have arbitrary, and sometimes very strange, restrictions on what foods can’t be eaten. Usually the explanation given doesn’t make much sense, either; if there’s any kind of scientific rationale, it’s often very questionable.

The big things you’ll see taken out in a contest diet are dairy products and fruit. Both are taken out for needless reasons; ironically, both are potentially very beneficial while on a diet.

Dairy products, which would be milk, cheese, yogurt and things of that nature, are very high-quality protein sources and a source of dietary calcium.

Calcium in particular is important because it doesn’t come from many non-dairy sources, certainly not in the same amounts. Further, calcium has shown potentially beneficial effects on fat loss, making it something you don’t want to neglect. Lyle McDonald has said that there’s a strong possibility that calcium from food sources is absorbed better than pill-form, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this holds true.

There’s also several other potential benefits from dairy, such as how yogurt can help with digestion and gut health by providing ‘good bacteria’ in the intestines.

The only rationales I’ve seen from excluding dairy come from some of the anti-milk weirdos, who just think milk is bad no matter what – the fact that they have no evidence for their claims hardly seems to stop them. I’ve seen it suggested that milk makes you ’smooth’, but that’s probably bunk. I’d need to see some real evidence of that happening. This is sometimes attributed to the sugars in milk, but I’ve already covered that: it hardly matters if your daily calorie balance is where it needs to be.

Now if you have a real food allergy to dairy, or if you’re lactose-intolerant, then you’ve got a case to be made. Lactose intolerance can be gotten around with digestive enzymes (lactase in particular), but if you’re genuinely allergic to dairy and that causes you to hold water, you may be out of luck. I find it hard to believe that so many people really are allergic to dairy products, but I’ll readily admit I have no data in front of me to support either position.

A big fear of fruit comes from a misunderstanding of fructose, which is a kind of sugar found in fruits. Fructose is known for preferentially filling up liver glycogen levels, as opposed to muscle glycogen (which is what glucose would do). The liver only holds some abysmally tiny amount of glycogen, like 100g or so, and once full, it seems that the liver begins converting fructose into fat, a process called de-novo lipogenesis (DNL). On paper that looks kinda scary.

In practice, there’s some problems. Firstly, most fruit is only 50% fructose, meaning that an apple with 20g of carbs will only have 10g of fructose give or take. Probably worse for this argument is the research done showing that overeating with fructose, glucose, sucrose (a mix of fructose and glucose), or fat causes no significant differences in fat balance (McDevitt et al 2000). In other words, overeating is overeating, and the body doesn’t seem to particularly care that fructose fills up the liver first.

While DNL might contribute to fat gains, the consensus is that it will take some very large calorie intakes to make it happen. A few pieces of fruit each day, while in a net calorie deficit, is just not going to cut it.

On the opposite side, fructose has some nice effects on metabolic activity (it allegedly influences levels of thyroid hormone), and fruits in general are very nutrient-rich. If you’re just all that worried that fruit will make you fat and oh no sugars! then you’re free to exclude them. Just realize that there’s no scientific basis for it.

Relying on Supplements

This is going to lead into a whole separate rant, I know it. People like to rely on supplements. “Fat-burners”, L-glutamine, BCAAs, magical pre/post-workout protein formulas, night-time protein formulas, and of course the piles of other voodoo crap.

I don’t want to knock all supplements, because there are some useful ones that you should be taking, but you have to realize that the industry itself is a money-making marketing machine. Overstated claims and outright lies are the name of the game. Even something as mediocre as protein powder can be turned into SUPER MEGA ANABOLIC AMINO BLEND WITH 342667% EXTRA GLUTAMINE FOR ANABOLIC ANABOLISM!!!!!11

Supplements can broadly be classified into two categories: what I call ‘packaged nutrients’, and of course ‘voodoo crap’. Packaged nutrients would be your protein powders, multi-vitamins, fish oils, flax seed oil, and all the other various vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fats you can find. You can get them in your diet, but it’s often a matter of convenience to have them in pill-form. Voodoo crap is all the other magical ingredients that are the latest fad but have no actual science behind them (note: lying about what one or two studies say is not ’scientific backing’) and never actually work despite all the testimonials and good Bros swearing that it’s the next hot thing.

Even the packaged nutrients can be spun into voodoo crap; just look at protein powder. I’m not going to go into detail here, but check out The Protein Book for an in-depth look all the research and an honest analysis. The consensus? It doesn’t matter. Get the cheapest whey you can find that doesn’t taste like chalk. If you opt for the more expensive brands, just realize that you’re paying for flavor and marketing. In fact, despite the marketing stating otherwise, you’re better off with a slower acting protein post-workout; milk has been shown to be superior to whey PWO. Leave the fast stuff for beforehand.

Along these lines you see L-glutamine and branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) marketed to dieters on the rationale that they ’spare muscle mass’. Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: these are all contained in any animal-derived protein source. If you’re eating sufficient protein on your diet, you’re already getting more than sufficient amounts of glutamine and all the BCAAs. Further, glutamine can’t even get into your bloodstream in sufficient amounts unless you run an IV (which is how the research is done). If you think it ‘works for you’ then by all means; just realize that there is no (legitimate) scientific support for these products as compared to just eating whole protein sources.

As for the rest? Over the counter “fat burners” don’t really burn fat, unless we’re talking ephedrine/ephedra, and even there it’s a very tiny effect. There is a case to be made for yohimbine while on low-carb diets and before cardio for those people with stubborn fat issues, but that’s something of a niche and requires specific conditions to be useful. Caffeine is a good mental boost, and it’s what you’re getting in most “fat burners” anyway. The real power of these things is appetite suppression and pre-workout energy, truth be told – just realize this and don’t spend $80 on the latest fad when a cup of coffee will do the same thing. You can find the actual effective ingredients in these things for far less than the ‘proprietary blends’ (which is supplement-company speak for ‘we didn’t actually put anything of consequence in this product’).

Finally there’s other things that can have tiny, if marginal, effects. Zinc, magnesium, and melatonin for sleep; creatine to help with strength; hoodia to help with appetite; green tea for the ECGC; L-tyrosine to help with energy and alertness; and so on. Keep in mind that none of these will make or break you – that’s what ‘marginal effects’ means. They may or may not be worth the money.

As for the rest? Well, if you like paying out the nose for a placebo effect, have at it. Everybody’s always looking for the next best thing; you need to be focusing on the basics.

The Final Week

The final week has little, if anything, to do with fat loss. Instead, the idea is to manipulate your water balance so that you come in with full, pumped muscles and minimal sub-cutaneous water (water under the skin). If you do it right, you’ll come in looking striated and veiny, with bulging muscles and thin skin.

This is arguably the centerpiece of a contest coach’s repertoire, the Big SecretTM. Shhhhh!

See also: the best drugs to take to get rid of water.

It’s often suggested to manipulate water levels by drinking massive amounts of water, then cutting intake the night before the show. Some will suggest adding sodium-loading on top of this. This is usually combined with a depletion workout earlier in the week to prime the body for a later carb-up.

The approaches are geared towards creating a rebound effect, where your body pulls water into the muscles and gets rid of the rest. Sounds good on paper.

However, I just don’t think all the water and sodium loading makes that much of a difference in naturals. At the end of the day, it’s like any other hormonal loop in your body: you can play with it a little, but you’re not going to create any significant changes with just diet. Drugs, yes. Diet, no.

In my thinking, the best bet is to play with the factors we do know can have a strong effect; this would be carb depletion and loading. Time and again what we see is that a carb or carb/fat (junk) load leading in to the show tends to create the best effect. How many competitors complain about coming in too soft or too flat, then go out and gorge on crap after the show, and wake up looking better than they did on stage?

This is the same rationale; in fact, if it weren’t for potential water-balance issues from alcohol and the gut bloating from food, I’d almost be tempted to suggest going out to a buffet and getting drunk the night before the show. You do that one at your own risk, but the point remains: naturals really aren’t going to affect water balance all that much. Cutting your water and getting in a fair bit of carbs or carbs/fat the night before and morning of is about the extent of it. If your federation allows OTC diuretics, that’s another option.

The small shifts in water balance you can achieve without drugs will happen in response to this. Now, I can’t really lay out a blanket protocol because the truth is people are going to respond differently. Some might respond to a depletion workout early in the week, while others won’t. Some will respond to carbs, some will need a “junk” load. Some might need a carb-up 2-3 days out, then coast into the show with their normal diet.

You get the idea. There’s a lot of individual tolerances and requirements that mean you don’t know how you’ll respond until you actually try it. This is one reason I’ve found Lyle’s Ultimate Diet 2.0 to be so effective during contest preparation – you get a weekly carb-up. You can toy around with the different variables to see what works, and when you end up looking your best. This is important during your first prep cycle, but also for refining your strategy as you do subsequent shows. Even if you don’t use the UD2 verbatim, there’s a good case to be made for some kind of cyclic carb-loading just to get an idea of how you’ll respond.

 

[SOCOM]

Thanks for posting Sess!

 

[Regas]

good article, ty

 

[Sesshomaru]

Bump for those who havent seen it.

Any controversy or discussion?

 

[mikeyt869]

great article i agree one hundred percent with the consistant heavy taining! Not crazy heavy but sets of 6-8 instead of 12 or more when dieting or trying to add lean mass. If your doing these higher rep ranges i do think your short changing yourelf. He makes many other good points as well but that really sticks out, heavy training is the way to go no questions asked.

 

[Sesshomaru]

Im bumping this up because I think more people on this forum could learn from it.

 

[terrellopy]

This article on contest prep was very informative and thourough. This suited me very well.