Finishing Touches

Well, I'm 8 weeks out from the competition, and that means it's time to start thinking about the finishing touches.  To be fair, if you don't have your diet and training on track, none of these little details will make or break your performance, but a polished and professional appearance and presentation certainly can't hurt!  A few things to think about as the competition nears...

Super 8

12 weeks out you guys!  Monthly recap, ready go!  And please pardon my brevity, I'm kind of running on empty here.

First Four: Recap

It goes without saying that the beginning of a diet is always going to be the easiest: you're not super hungry yet, results come faster since your metabolism is high, and your deficit is probably pretty mild.  The first four weeks of this prep were no exception.  I skated through them with a carb decrease of a mere few grams, no cardio, and yet still managed to make significant improvements.  Here's the recap!

Saboteur!

Getting ready for a contest involves a lot of dedication, it's true: There's training, posing practice, choreographing a routine, hours of cooking and meal prep, days of cardio, and of course, dieting.  But sticking to a diet, that’s really just willpower right?  Wrong.  Here are a couple hidden factors that can sabotage even the most determined among us.

Open Season

Well, it's 20 weeks until the Nevada State Championships and that means it's time to start my diet.  My most recent prep went really well overall, so I'm not going to change my approach in any drastic ways this time.  The primary alteration will be the duration of the diet--for my last show I only had 12 weeks by the time I decided to compete and it just wasn't long enough at the pace I was going.  An additional 8 weeks should be enough to really bring a dialed in package this time around. Here's my jumping off point for the first few weeks.

Tricks of the Trade

Eating chicken breast every day gets old real fast—especially if you’re eating it more than once too.  Keeping your go-to staples delicious and appetizing goes a long way towards helping you stick to a stricter intake.  Here are my favorite ways to dress up plain ol’ chicken and rice.

That Cheating Heart

When it comes to diets--specifically contest prep, but the theme applies generally--there are two basic techniques that are used.  Most diets fall somewhere along this spectrum.  One on hand, you have the "cycling" technique, where two to three moderately low carbohydrate days are cycled with moderately higher carbohydrate days, maintaining a deficit on all days.  This means that even on "high" carb days, the dieter will still be consuming less than what would be required for maintenance.  On the other end of the spectrum, we have the "cheater" style of dieting.  This is a depletion, or "keto," diet.  Ketosis is the term for the physical state in which an individual has high concentrations of ketones in the blood, caused by the body's inability to provide further energy from stored glycogen.  Ketones are produced in the liver during prolonged fasting or starvation.  Ketones combine with the byproducts of beta-oxidation and can then be incorporated into the Krebs cycle, which I discussed briefly here.  Ketones are not restricted by the blood-brain barrier in the same way albumin-bound fatty acids are and so can bring energy to the brain when sugar is not available.  "Ketosis" is used colloquially to describe a "depleted fat-burning" state.  A diet focusing on sustaining a depleted state in order to burn fat would generally also focus on lowering the intake of carbohydrates and maintaining a high calorie deficit for prolonged periods, usually one week.