In natural bodybuilding, you got to stay positive. When it is always in your best interest to carry with you a positive attitude in all aspects of life, what I am specifically referring to here is the importance of bringing a positive frame of mind into each and every one of your workouts. You must learn to approach your training with unbridled excitement and enthusiasm, stomping out all doubt and negatively before you ever walk through the gym doors.
Do not even touch a weight until you vividly imagine the wicked pump you are about to induce and how satisfying it will feel when your skin stretches to its bursting point! Relish the fact that this workout is going to bring you one step closer to your goals, with every repetition literally commanding your muscles to grow bigger, harder and stronger. Expect that you will have a far more productive workout today than you did yesterday. Know that the weights will feel lighter in your hands than ever before. See in your mind’s eye that you will execute every movement flawlessly and with meticulous precision. Embrace the pain that you are about to put yourself through, while remaining full cognizant of the fact that few people have the discipline, dedication or guts to push themselves like you do. Bodybuilding is your passion and you love it! You will have the best workout of your life today—and not a thing on this earth can stop you! I am positive on that!
Last year, I did my first drug free show and everything went great until the final few days. I was looking awesome the Saturday before the show, but did not look nearly as good on the day of the contest. My trainer had me deplete carbs (zero grams) Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and then load (double my bodyweight) on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I drank 2 gallons of water on loading day one. Then, 1 gallon on the second day and finally, no water on the last day. My sodium was at zero all three days. I ended up flat and never filled out despite the extra carbs. I was also not as sharp. So what happened here?
Believe it or not, I get questions like this all the time and every time I do, I shake my head in amazement! Think about this for a minute—you looked awesome one week from the show, but lost conditioning as the week progressed? If you looked so good a week away, why did your trainer radically alter your plan in that final week? This is one of the biggest mistakes natural bodybuilders make in preparation for a show. When are people going to realize that there are no magic tricks that are going to drastically improve your physique in the final few days? All of these radical depletion and loading techniques are nothing more than a crapshoot and more often than not, result in the competitor going flat or spilling over. The truth is, if you are in shape and you did not your homework, then the final week should be used for nothing more than a little fine tuning—that is, dropping a little subcutaneous water and slightly filling out the muscle cells with glycogen.
While it is impossible for me to give you an exact protocol for the final week unless I have been working with you for your entire contest preparation, I will give you a general outline of what I might recommend. Up through Saturday (one week out), follow your normal training and nutrition regimen. Take Sunday off of the weights, but do your cardio work and consume your regular macronutrient amounts for an off day. On Monday and Tuesday, eat and drink as you normally would for training days, but split your body into two halves, working one half on Monday and the other half on Tuesday. However, increase the volume of your total sets by about 50 percent above normal and make sure each set is in the range of 15-20 reps. So, if you normally perform about 20 total sets in a workout, increase that to about 30 sets. This is a safer and more effective way of depleting your glycogen stores than dropping your carbs radically low, which often forces your already-exhausted system into a state where it is unable to bounce back in time for a show just a few days later.
From Wednesday to Friday, you will not train with weights, but you should practice your mandatory posing and routine in order to work up a little sweat and build some more endurance and composure for pre-judging. At this point, your body fat should be completely stripped, so there should be no more need for any cardio.
As for your diet, you will use a very conservative carb-up just to help fill out your muscle cells a bit, allowing them push out more forcefully against your skin. Your highest carb day will be on Wednesday, since this is when your metabolism will be most ideally primed to store carbs properly and efficiently. I recommend simply doubling your normal off-day intake for Wednesday, dropping this by 50 percent on Thursday and then returning to your baseline carb intake on Friday. So, in other words, if in the week prior you were consuming 100 grams of carbs on your off days, you will then ingest 200 grams on Wednesday, 150 grams on Thursday and 100 grams on Friday. This “downhill” carb-up method always prevents “spillover” while still allowing the muscles to fill and volumize.
Two more very important points: Never cut your sodium or your water intake to zero! At least some sodium is needed to properly transport carbs into muscle cells and without any water, you are sure to flatten out and could possibly have problems with cramps. I suggest a low, but not zero, sodium intake during your carb-up—meaning you can still drink spring water rather than moving to distilled, which will only serve to leach minerals from your system. And speaking of water, a safe bet is to stay with your normal intake on Wednesday, cut it in half on Thursday and once again cut it in half on Friday. Your body will not hold any subcutaneous water at this point and will either pull it into muscle cells along with ingesting carbs or simply eliminate it through urine.
If you take away nothing else from my answer, just remember one thing: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” In other words, if you look awesome one week out, stay on a similar path in the final few days or you could risk blowing 12-16 weeks of sacrifice and hard work!
