#30 - How To Train Your Body For Competition
Hey, hey ladies. How is everybody out there this week? I am still bouncing a little bit from this past weekend's WNBF competition prep workshop. I hosted my first ever WNBF sanctioned clinic at the sand castle fitness center. Big shouts out to them. They have a fantastic facility and thank you so much for letting us use it. You guys, we had such a good turnout. We had about 15 plus athletes. They're brand new. Most of them had never competed before and we had six pros turn up to help out with posing, you guys. These pros volunteer their time to come help new athletes, learn the sport, it's amazing. It was such good energy. I had so much fun and I'm still kind of vibrating a little bit from it. I'm excited for the 2022 competition season. We are now done with the workshops. And next up we have the Vancouver WNBF amateur show, that's in May and taken a team and they are going to Colona and then we start prepping for the fall season, it's pretty much. It's pretty much a lifestyle. It's pretty much life consuming. It's super fun to watch athletes go through the preparation process. This clinic actually made me miss being in prep. I love the focus and the discipline and the structure of competition prep. you guys. It made me, you know, it made me think about it a little bit. It's been awhile. It's been almost three years since I got on stage. It might be time.
All right, you guys let's get into this next episode. This is episode number 30, how to train your body for competition. Now the next 10 episodes, following this episode, are also going to be on competition prep. I'm going to walk you guys through it. So if this is on your bucket list, if this is something you're interested in, you don't want to miss these episodes, but today we're coming out of the muscle development block of episodes. So we're going to be talking about strictly training your body for competition. And I'm going to talk about the bikini mostly just because that is where most athletes are coming into and rightfully so, the bikini is the smallest division, so it requires the least amount of muscle and it is the least lean. So it's not quite as hard on your body. It's a little bit easier for that first time experience. So first off, most people don't just wake up one day and sign up for a competition. Competition is usually something that people think about for a while. Maybe they want to, but they don't think that they have what it takes. Maybe it's been on the back of their mind for the last 20 years. And then they went and had kids and got a career and now they're in their forties and thinking it might be too late, it's not. So, however long you've been thinking about it. What I really want to encourage you to do if you haven't done so already, I'm pretty sure if you're thinking about competition, you're spending some time in the gym. Yeah, hopefully. So ideally, you don't want to go into a comp prep season. And it be like, okay, I'm going to start working out and I'm going to get ready for this competition. Oh, no. So ideally you want to have been training for at least the year, if not two or three or four more. You need to have a foundation of muscle on your body, even as a bikini athlete. Now, you don't necessarily need to be, you know, a gym rat. You can be an athlete of any kind, let's say you're coming out of competitive gymnastics. It's very easy to switch over into a competitive lifestyle. So ideally you want to have a minimum of one to two years in the gym or have athletics under your belt. You want to have a solid muscle base which I mean by this is developed visible quads, hamstrings, glutes, dominoes, shoulders, upper back area. Those are kind of the main focal points that we really look for on bikini athletes. Now we want to make sure that you're balanced as well. So if you've got a nice train, a nice muscle defined upper back, you should be able to do some bench pressing. Right. You should be able to do some pushups too. So a lot of people ask me, when do I know when my body is ready to pick a show. Like when do I know it's time to pick a show and my answer is when you are satisfied with what you've built. So this might be a decision you make, if you're training on your own, this might be a decision you and your coach make. If you're getting ready for your first comp, I highly recommend, you hire a coach. At least for an overseeing of your progress and posing and just to really make sure that you're not hurting your body or doing damage in the process of it. Competition prep is hard enough on your body doing it in a healthy way. Doing it in an unhealthy way can severely damage your metabolic system. So you want to make sure that you're doing it in a healthy way. Right? You're taking care of that body. That's looking so good. Okay. So when you are satisfied with what you've built, when you can see your shoulders, when you can see your glute development, when you can see your hamstring and your quads, when you know that there is a muscle base under there, that is a good time to start looking at show dates, pick at a show. And at this point, I recommend you pick a show. That's a good, you know, 16 to 24 weeks away. That's four to six months and some people are like, oh, that seems like a long time. There's a reason for that. Right. When you're at your 16 to 24 week point. This is when you stop focusing on building muscle so much, and you start focusing on slowly decreasing those calories, slowly bringing down that body fat. And the goal at this point with muscle is just to maintain what you spent so long building. I've seen athletes build muscle during their dial-in. Sure, but it's not something that I would depend on. If an athlete came to me and wanted to do a show in four months, it had very little muscle on their body, I would suggest that they spend some time building muscle first then plan on dialing it in and going in. Now, some people just have the goal to get on stage as they are just to, you know, check that box. And if that's your goal, if your goal is just to get on stage, just to say you've done it, by all means. Absolutely but if your goal is to get onstage and win, or your goal is to become a pro or your goal is to build and present the best body possible for you. You want to make sure that you've spent that time building muscle and you're giving yourself a nice, healthy 16 to 24 weeks to bring your body fat down to deplete those fat stores and protect that muscle during that time. The reason why I say this is because, you only want to drop fat so fast when you start putting yourself into a heavy deficit, a heavy calorie deficit. You start risking muscle tissue as well. So what I like about my bikini athletes, I like them to come in at 16 weeks out around 10 pounds heavier than their comp stage wait expectation. Now, this is negotiable, I like no more than a pound, a week loss during comp dial-in. So if you're 16 weeks out, that means you have potential to lose 16 pounds. Can you lose more? Absolutely. But you risk muscle tissue as well. So if you have 20 pounds or 24 pounds to lose to get onstage, and you're going to want 20 weeks or 24 weeks. Now, not every coach is going to agree with me. Some comp prep coaches do much more drastic dial-ins, I've done it before you guys. The reason that I don't do it anymore is because I find that drastic dial-ins losing that 30, 40 pounds in the four to five months leading up to a competition is so stressful on the athlete and on the coach because the entire comp prep, you feel behind, or you're not sure if you're going to be ready in time. Right. And you're in such a high calorie deficit you're just trying to find the energy to do the workouts and to live and all of the things. So it's much easier on your body. If you make sure that you are in a good place to start your comp dial-in. So at this point, you've spent one to two plus years building the muscle foundations.
And now let's say you're 16 weeks out. How do you train for the last 16 weeks to get onstage. This is a question I get so much. So I'm going to tell you my philosophy. I'm going to tell you my strategy. And I don't necessarily do this with all of my athletes, it really depends on where they're at with their bodies and what they've been doing leading up until that 16 weeks, but this is my favorite strategy. Are you guys ready? Let you in on all the secrets here. So what I like to do is around 16 weeks out, I keep their weight training fairly heavy. I like to keep them in hypertrophy. So maybe they've been in strength, training or hypertrophy up until this point. Maybe they've conditioned down into their 16 weeks. Hopefully not. But at this point, I like to definitely make sure that we're training them in hypertrophy, which is still in that muscle building phase as we start to go into a calorie deficit. So the first four weeks I focus mostly on nutrition, keep them training nice and heavy. I may add in a little bit of an uptick in intensity in their workouts. And by this, I mean, there might be less rest time, the right deal, a little bit more plyometrics between exercises. I'm just keeping their heart rate up at a higher point throughout their weight training. I probably haven't added in cardio at this point. Maybe a light 10 to 15 minute warmup. If the athlete likes cardio. And at this point, I'm heavily focusing on those targeted areas, especially on their weak spots. So if an athlete comes to me who has a very well developed lower body but they’re missing the symmetry of having that beautifully developed upper body, I might be training their shoulders and their back two to three times a week at this point to create that symmetry. I might be really focusing on glute training and shoulder training. If there is a lot span, and it isn't as wide as I want it to be, there might be a lot of work in their program. So this first month of dial-in, helps me to really kind of. start that sculpting process in terms of putting any little bits of extra muscle where I want it now, a month is not enough time to build a lot of muscle. You guys, it's enough time to make small adjustments to create visual effects that may not have been there before, so I can tweak. You can't produce magic in a month, but you can definitely tweak. So this is what I would use that for 16 weeks for so you would expect a heavier lifting program, it's still focused on building, especially in those weak spots. And then getting it to 12 weeks out, we're going to maybe focus on strength and conditioning. So we might start to bring down some of those reps, take the weight up a little bit, just to really make sure that the body is Holding the athletes muscle while they're in a deficit. Now, note when athletes are in a calorie deficit, they're not going to recover quite the same as if they were in a calorie surplus. So I might be making those strength training days on higher calorie days, and then offsetting those with conditioning days, higher repetition days, maybe some cardio days at this point with lower choleric days. So we start to get into a little bit of cycling. And at this point it's kind of this juggling act between maintaining the muscle and starting to really bring that body fat down. At eight weeks out, this is where I start to add in cardio or increased cardio. If the athlete isn't doing it already. So you can expect 20 to 30 minutes of cardio, maybe four to six times a week. Either with your training or apart from your training, depending on your time. And we're going to keep working in that hypertrophy stage. So we might bring the athlete back to six to 12 repetitions. We want to keep the weight training as heavy as we comfortably can during dial-in because again, as soon as we start to bring those weights down and really push the conditioning element, the body is super smart. It's going to be like, we don't need all of these muscles anymore. We're not lifting heavy weights. We can just use them for energy since she's not feeding us. So, we want to make sure that we are telling our body, we still need that muscle even if it's just with one or two sets or one or two days a week of heavier training. Now, as we get into four weeks out, this is when athletes are starting to get really quite lean at four weeks out, most of my athletes look like they could be tanned up and put on stage. And this is when we want to start being a little bit more careful with the body we want to really make sure that we're taking time to rest. This is often what I'll move, athletes' training into more of a cable focused program. I'll really bring those reps into more of conditioning up to, that 12 to 20 rep range and really focus on safe exercises that athletes aren't risking injuring themselves or hurting themselves at this stage because there isn't as much body fat on the athlete and the athletes probably getting tired at this point. Their calories are coming down nice and low, their carbohydrates are coming down nice and low. And by low, I just want to let you guys know. It's very rare, very rare that I will take an athlete lower than 15 to 1600 calories. Even during their four week up island. Peak week, I might play in that range, if they're a very small athlete. But there is no reason that you should be eating less than that during your call prep, if you started your prep with a healthy metabolism. If you need to take your calories lower than 14 or 1500, really consider maybe picking a show that is a little bit further away and keeping your calories up. And the reason for this is because you're risking amazing your metabolism. You're risking a really extreme bounce back post-competition with a slow metabolism. Anything less than 1400 calories, It's really low.
Okay. I know I'm supposed to be talking about muscle development. So we'll come to nutrition for competition. We'll get there, I promise in the next 10 episodes. But that last four weeks, we want to spend really conditioning, really focusing on what pumps up our muscles the best, really utilizing those heavier carb days and seeing how our bodies absorb those carbs, working on exercises that bring the most blood volume into our muscle tissue so that we know what to use while we're backstage getting ready for getting onstage. We know what exercises are going to pump us up the best. So what I really liked to use that last four weeks for is absolutely we're getting workouts instill, but they're kind of like these practice pump-up days and then posing. Literally that last four weeks, I expect my athletes to pose seven days a week, every single fucking day. You should be in your heels, practicing you're posing when you get on stage, especially that first time, your brain is going to go blank. You're going to be a deer in headlights. You're going to have no idea what you're doing, you're not going to be able to think about it. And if you haven't muscle memorized what you want to do on stage, you're winging it. So I expect my athletes to go through their mandatory posing and their t-walk poses, like a thousand times, that month before getting on stage. 15 to 20 minutes every day in that 15 to 20 minutes, they're getting at least I'd say 10 rounds in. And they're doing that every day, which is 300 rounds of posing. And then they'd been practicing from 16 weeks out. So it's a lot, right. You want to have it so perfected that when you get on stage and your brain goes blank, your body just does it because it's been memorized.
Okay, let's talk about one week out. So at one week out, usually you're going into your peak week, which is when a lot of coaches really carve deplete just to get into those last little stubborn fats stores to really deplete glycogen out of the muscle tissue. Getting your body ready for that carb reload to really fill your muscle tissues up. And shrink wrap your skin, like make you as tight as possible. Now in a bikini, we do this lightly. It's not nearly as severe as what we do for bodybuilders or figure or fit body athletes. So one week out, what I usually suggest for my athletes. is as much rest as physically possible. And two to three strategically placed full body pumps sessions. Usually I'll put these in on days that they go a little bit of a carb spike. And then on days that they're having lower carbs or they're depleting out, we focus on posing, stretching, and rest. Now, just a quick disclaimer, every single human body is different. Every single athlete is different. Every single body requires a slightly different strategy to bring its best to stage. So I heavily rely on my athletes and their feedback. I train my athletes to listen to their bodies and to empower themselves to make decisions about what feels good to them. If they need an extra rest day, I encourage them to take an extra rest day. If they feel like they need a little bit more food, we talk about adding in a bit more food. Maybe more carbohydrates are needed, right? Every single person is different. And that first competition prep is literally just listening to your body and seeing what it's comfortable with, seeing what it's capable of. And it is a push but it's not worth damaging or hurting your body in the process of it. So I highly recommend that you do it as safely as possible. All right. My friends. That is what I have. If you have any questions about how to train for your first competition, send me an email [email protected]. I'm going to be giving you guys a ton of resources in the next 10 episodes, in the next 10 weeks that you can study and utilize and read and download to help prep you for your first competition or at least to get the juices flowing. If comp is something that you really want to do, but you know, it's far off for you. Maybe it's a couple of years away. Maybe you need to, you know, start going to the gym and start building some muscle. Maybe you need to lose some weight burst. It's okay to get excited now. It's okay to get involved now. Come volunteer at a show, help out backstage. Look at the athletes that are doing it now. Be inspired by them. And learn as much as you can about the process. Now, let it fuel you. And motivate you and push you to achieve those goals to get there, to be ready to start your 16 week on dial in. This industry, you guys, is full of so many amazing, amazing people, especially women.
All right, you guys have a fantastic week. I will see you next week. Bye for now.
