Brandon's Contest Prep: Week 10
RECAP
Week 9 was the last week before the diet break this week. Besides the physiological relief to eat more food, we decided to run a mock “peak week” to see how things turn out.
What is peak week?
Peak Week is the last week leading up to a show or event where you manipulate variables to “peak” your physique to look its best on a particular day at a certain time. There are multitude of things to monitor including:
Nutrition: Food intake, fluid intake, electrolyte intake
Training: Volume, Intensity
Mentality: Stress levels, mindset
Physique: How you look! Which is obviously the most important variable
BECAUSE there are so many variables going on, it can pay off to practice juggling everything in a less stressful time period to work on some kinks for the REAL event later on.
Later in this article I detail changes to my Nutrition and Mentality during the week, but for here I wanted to recap the results of it.
Changes?
From my eyes, there weren’t any DRASTIC changes in my physique from Day 1 to Day 5 of the mock peak. A couple theories are behind this:
More to Lose: In reality, I’m probably just not at the typical natural bodybuilder conditioning yet. Which is HUMBLING considering I’m very close to being at the 30lb down mark. Knowing I would have more to go to get to elite levels is just a reminder that I’ve got a long way to go in my bodybuilding career. Back to digging some more!
More Carbs: The second theory is that I did not TOTALLY assimilate enough carbs. Perhaps there was still a flatness to my look to where edging up carbs even more could have shown some good detail.
Lighting/Camera: Lastly, in terms of assessing the “stage ready” aspect, I could say some of it comes down to my apartment having terrible lighting and taking these screen grabs from my iphone front facing camera. Therefore, I’m aiming to get different sets of lighting or even with different cameras these next couple of weeks as I keep going down.
Takeaway:
It just goes to show that for naturals and peak weeks to remember a couple of things:
Get Lean First:
To really see changes, you need to be at a low enough body fat to see the effects. Oftentimes, competitors will think they aren’t filling out or “holding on to water” to justify eating more food when in reality, it's just fat that’s still there.
Get lean first and know you’ve ticked your boxes in THAT area of the contest prep game before you start chalking it up to a messed up peak week.
Don’t Expect or DO anything Drastic:
While enhanced competitors can play around with drugs, diuretics, water, electrolytes AND food, it's seen that for natural competitors the goal is to “not fuck up what you’ve already got”. Naturals are more predictable and have less variables going on. If you get lean first, peak week should just be icing on the cake.
The hard work is already done! Now just the finishing touches.
NUTRITION
For this mock peak week diet break, we bumped up calories to what is probably my new maintenance (perhaps even slightly lower to be conservative) of 2600-2700.
Adding Food:
In this case, I wanted to add foods I was virtually certain would sit well and not deviate too far from what I was ALREADY eating. The last thing you want to do on peak week is totally switch up foods, especially to ones you have not eaten in a long time.
Therefore, here’s how my Food changed from the last week of dieting to mock peak week.
As you can see there are very subtle changes. I followed my usual protocol outlined below:
electrolytes/water
About a week or so before this trial peak, we got a BASELINE of what my usually intake consisted of day to day:
Sodium: The practical way to track changes in sodium for us was to track “added salt”. I used my measuring spoons to track iodized salt servings for each of my meals. Typically I’ll add ¼ tsp to my Bf, Lunch and Dinner and ⅛ tsp to my casein pudding at night. This resulted in around ~2000 mg of added sodium that I kept the same from dieting to the mock peak week.
When I added foods back in, I also tried to add them from less sodium dense foods. As you can see, I added rice, rice noodles, sweet potatoes and cereal which all don’t contain a lot of sodium.
If you’re peaking and add processed food high in sodium, there’s a chance you could “spill over” and hold a lot of water, especially if you add a lot of it in on one particular day.
Water: For water consumption, coach had me “drink to thirst”. Reason being is that for natural competitors, the body has a way of maintaining fluid balance to a reasonable degree.
My intake on average was about half a gallon a day. Doesn’t that seem low? Remember as well though that FOOD contains water. I’m eating around 6-8 combined servings of fruits and vegetables while additionally eating food like sweet potatoes and greek yogurt which are high volume and higher in water.
Another thing is I don’t sweat as much being that I’m in a calorie deficit and my body doesn’t produce as much heat. Therefore, I don’t have to replenish lost fluids from sweating as often.
MINDSET
Saturday, May 26th: The hardest day of prep
This was a little diary entry I wrote this day:
“This might have been the most psychologically challenging day of prep.
But not for the reason one would think. I wasn’t hungry, tired or food focused. But my mental state was extremely anxious the entire day.
It was the 3rd day of this refeed and to be completely honest, I just was NOT a fan of how I was looking. Being about 4 weeks out, this stuck in my head all day. I kept thinking back of how long I have been chipping away at this process and I just liked nothing about how I was looking.
The worst part about this is that I look really good, especially for me. But I think I’ve set some unrealistic standard in my head that I projected I was going to look like. I always thought this extra food was going to really unmask all my hard work for weeks on end and leave me more motivated. I was super nervous going into this week thinking “what if it doesn’t happen”. I’m already 168 and 27 lbs down and I look at myself sometimes and think that I could have another 10 lbs to lose.
It always seems like it's 10 lbs. That number never changes. Although I’ve gladly taken the extra food this week, I miss the momentum I had right before. This is by far the hardest diet break ever. I want to stop it and wake up tomorrow on low calories and hard training again. It makes me insane knowing I’m taking a break when I’m less than a month out and I WANT to push.
I trust my coach fully with this process and I would not have hired him if I didn’t believe that. These are just honest, in the moment feelings.
I need to remind myself to be patient and subjective of this journey. And I really wish I could decompress and not worry about it. But it's harder and harder when I’ve been so paralyzed by my routine.
This was THE day, where I fantasized about what would happen if I just gave up. If I just gave up on the show, the diet, and showcasing this journey in general. That’s the honest truth. I teared up twice today, not even knowing why. Just have been very emotional, knowing it's so close.
As a result, I booked my hotel room and tan for the day before show day. I don’t plan on quitting now and a good night’s sleep is going to do wonders for me.”
conclusion
To be honest its starting to take a LOT of effort to write these up! I have to pretty much bang them out when I have a full wave of energy because otherwise I just don’t have the energy to do it.
I don’t even register hunger honestly anymore. I’m so used to all of it that, its just another day.
Any further questions? Ask my on Instagram @brandonjod
