Peaking - why don’t
bodybuilders stay lean
all the time?
Submitted
by: Susan
Dear Tom,
On your website, you wrote:
"Who better to "model" than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind! Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up all their muscle. Some of them are nothing but skin and bone."
There seems to be a contradiction unless I'm missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week 'transformation' prior to every event instead of staying 'lean and mean' all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct??
Susan
Hi Susan
It’s all about "peaking".
Any shape
you can stay in all year round is NOT your “peak” condition.
You can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a "peak",
right? What is the definition of a peak? It’s a high point surrounded
by two lower points isn’t it?
The intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders,
fitness and figure competitors use), is to train/diet in a seasonal or
cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to maintenance
(or growth phase).
What you're doing is going from good shape to great (peak) shape, then
easing back off to good shape.... but never getting "out of shape."
Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Here’s an example: I have no illusions whatsoever of walking around
365 days a year at 3.7% body fat like I appear in the photo on my website.
Off-season, when I'm not competing, my body fat is about 9.5%. Mind you,
that’s very lean and still single digit body fat (I don’t
like double digits!)
I don't stray too far from competition shape, but I don't maintain contest
shape all the time. It takes me 12-14 weeks or so to gradually drop from
9.5% to 3.5%-4.0% body fat to "peak" for competition with NO
loss of lean body mass...using the same techniques I reveal in my e-book.
It would be almost impossible to maintain 3.7% body fat, and even if I
could, why would I want to? For the few weeks prior to competition I’m
so ripped, and “drawn” in the face, that complete strangers
walk up and offer to feed me. Okay, so I’m just kidding about that,
but let’s just say being “being ripped to shreds” isn’t
a desirable condition to maintain because it takes such a monumental effort
to stay there. It’s probably not even healthy to try to force yourself
to hold extreme low body fat. Your body will fight you unless you’re
a natural “ectomorph” (skinny, fast metabolism) body type.
Instead of attempting to hold the peak, I cycle back into a less demanding
off-season program and avoid creeping beyond 9.9% body fat. Some years
I’ve stayed leaner - like 6-8%, (which takes effort), especially
when I knew I would be photographed, but I don’t let it go over
10%.
This practice isn’t just restricted to bodybuilders. Athletes in
all sports use periodization to build themselves up to their best shape
for competition. Is a pro football player in the same condition in March-April
as he is in August-September? Not a chance. Many show up fat and out of
shape (relatively speaking) for training camp, others just need fine tuning,
but none are in peak form... that’s why they have training camp!!!
There’s another reason you wouldn’t want to maintain a “ripped
to shreds” physique all year round – you’d have to be
dieting (calorie restricted) all the time. And this is one of the reasons
that 95% of people cant lose weight and keep it off --they haven’t
mastered the art of training and dieting in seasons or cycles. They are
CHRONIC dieters... always on some type of diet. Know anyone like that?
You can’t stay on restricted low calories indefinitely. Sooner or
later your metabolism slows down and you plateau. But if you diet for
fat loss and push incredibly hard for 3 months, then ease off for a while
and eat a little more (healthy food, not "pigging out"), your
metabolic rate doesn’t slow down. In a few weeks or months, you
can return to another fat loss phase and reach an even lower body fat
level, until you finally reach the point that’s your happy maintenance
level for life – a level that is healthy and realistic – as
well as visually appealing.
Bodybuilders have discovered a methodology for losing fat that’s
so effective, it puts them in complete control of their body composition.
They’ve mastered this area of their lives and will never have to
worry about it again. If they ever “slip” and fall off the
wagon like all humans do at times … no problem! They know how to
get back into shape fast. They have the tools and knowledge to hold a
low body fat all year round (such as 9% for men, or maybe 14-16% for women),
and then at a whim, to reach a temporary “peak” of extremely
low body fat for the purpose of competition.
Maybe most
important of all, they have the power and control to slowly ease back
from peak shape into maintenance, and not balloon up and yo-yo like most
conventional dieters!
What if you had the power to stay lean all year round, and then get really
lean when summer rolled around, or when you took your vacation to the
Caribbean, or when your wedding date was coming up? Wouldn’t you
like to be in control of your body like that? Isn’t that the same
thing that bodybuilders do, only on a more practical, real world level?
So even if you have no competitive aspirations whatsoever, don’t you agree that there’s something of value everyone could learn from physique athletes? This is powerful, life changing stuff. Don’t follow the huge crowd of losers who follow fad diets like automatons – MODEL EXCELLENCE!
Burn The Fat, Feed the Muscle (BFFM) is a fat loss program and lifestyle which acknowledges the real, simple solution to fat loss: “Eat (a little) Less, Exercise (a whole lot) more. Don’t let yourself be a part of these chilling obesity epidemic statistics. Visit my fat loss webpage today to learn more.
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