Having a Great Off-Season

So I've been more or less in off-season mode for the past year, my last prep was for the 2011 Tahoe Show last August.  But for a lot of people, summer is contest mode every year, so as we start heading into another bulking cycle, let's go over a few thoughts for having the most successful off-season possible.  How do we define success?  Lean muscle growth with a lean starting point for the next prep.  Credit to John Meadows, aka mountaindog1 on professionalmuscle.com, for formulating the four thoughts which were a basis for this post.  I've re-worded to improve flow and inserted my own comments where appropriate, as well as noting which comments are purely his.

Benchmark I

So far, this has been my best off-season by a long shot.  Hard instead of soft, ripple-y instead of smooth: it's fantastic!  But it's time to start thinking about my next competition, and when your cutting phase is going to be a grueling 5 month sojourn, it's important to start the building phase much, much earlier than that.

The plan:

From now until my prep starts in late February/early March, I will be following a primarily high fat-low protein-moderate carb approach.  I find this yields the best results in terms of both muscular hypertrophy and fat elimination.  My current intake (calculated based on my macro profile, not including trace amounts or random overages) is right around 1,900 calories.  When all is said and done, it is probably closer to 2,000.  And yes, I do get pretty hungry between meals--a planned weekly or every-ten-days cheat meal is normally included.  Some weeks, my training partner and I go out to breakfast, others it's as little as a few hundred extra calories.  At this point, whatever gives me the feeling of not being ultra-depleted from week to week is sufficient to keep me going.

Macro-nutrient profile: 25/15/15 (carbs/fat/protein respectively)

Current weight: 154

Following this, I will be doing a 20 week prep for the 2013 USA Championships in Las Vegas (late July).  You might be thinking, "Girl, you are not going to be competitive on a national stage that soon," and you might be right.  But if I can qualify for it in late spring, it's only another six or eight weeks to the USA's, and at that point, you might as well, amirite?

"Starting point" posing vid:

Thank You, Chris Aceto

One of the biggest mistakes I made with my diet early on, and even somewhat recently, is eating too much protein.  Sounds weird coming from a bodybuilder, right?  In fact, many high level bodybuilders advocate(d) low protein too: Dorian Yates ate "low protein" during his reign as Mr. Olympia (6 yrs in a row, plus he's arguably the best of all time), and Chris Aceto, nutritionist and prep guru to athletes such as Ronnie Coleman, Kim Chivesky (I can't wait to look like her! :D), Jay Cutler, Mike Francois and others, also advocates low protein.  Chris is fairly well known in the bodybuilding community, and he's considered one of the major "diet gurus," along with Charles Glass, Hany Rambod, George Farah, etc.  His approach is particularly interesting because of the intense focus on low protein diet compositions.