Last week prep - thoughts

[PeteM]

With the advent of Mr P’s contest prep thread and his questions around the final week, I thought I would take a minute and share some of my thoughts and rationale around the recommendations that I made.

First off when it comes to the final week, you have to be lean enough. Fat doesn’t hold any water, so once you ‘drop your water’ your not going to magically go soft to shredded. During the last couple of weeks, you need to really begin to differentiate between fat and subcutaneous water. I find the best place to check is the ‘love handle’ area. Pinch the area and as you roll it though your fingers you should be able to feel the fat roll out and the skin separate. The body lines up deep to superficial – muscle, fat, skin. So if you do it carefully and with practice you can learn to feel between the two. At about the 4 week mark, that fat layer should be very thin and by two weeks out almost completely gone. This is when water manipulation will work.

Next – the technique is called water manipulation, not just simple restriction. This is where it becomes tricky. Your body will store water in 3 places, blood, muscle and skin. (High priority to low priority). Skin is the first place that it will let go of water and this is what we want to get out. If you go too far, you will pull water out of the muscle and this will give a flat and stringy appearance and if you continue you will loose water volume from you blood and that can be disastrous.

What needs to be done, is trick you body into removing all the water from the skin, but keeping it in the muscles and the blood. This will give a full, vascular dry look. In truth, your body doesn’t regulate water balance, rather your body controls hydration through manipulation of salt.

First recommendation was to drastically increase salt intake. This will significantly increase the level of salt in your body and therefore you body determines that salt levels are above normal so it releases it, and as a result water follows. This is coupled with high levels of water intake. This sets up your body to get into the habit of easily releasing water and salt. This is largely controlled by a hormone called aldosterone. Drastically increasing salt and water blunts the release of this hormone.

Carbs. Carbs are kept low during the first couple of days to allow glycogen to drain out of your muscles and create a super absorbtive state. When carbs are re-introduced, the muscles have become hypersensitive to them and will often over-compensate storing a little more glycogen then normal, ideally giving a slightly more then full look. Now during the carb up it’s important to continue to keep water high as each gram of glycogen requires 3g of water. You can’t carb up in a dry state. Now at this point don’t be afraid of carbs causing you to hold water. The carb up starts 3 days out and this is not enough time to store any appreciable amount of fat. At this point carbs won’t hold water in your skin – this is where salt comes it.

When the carb up starts, the salt disappears. By this time, salt and water has been kept high and aldosterone production is next to none. When salt is dropped, there is still a significant amount in the system, so the body will continue to drop water and salt. Remember what was said earlier, the body regulates salt, not water. Introducing salt at this time will cause water in the skin to stay. Salt goes up and so the body holds onto more water, the blood is full, the muscle should be full so the only place to put it is in the skin – the opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

Keeping water high will continue to act as a diuretic encouraging the body to continue to drop water. By noon the day before, stop water intake. It will take a while for the body to figure out what has happened and will continue to release water – drying you out. Now you will need water for digestion so limit consumption to 2-3oz with each meal – use a shot glass and don’t get greedy.

Morning of the show, I recommend to eat instinctively, pretty much anything goes at this point if your dry. Eat what you can get down – I like steak and eggs – the yolks help to get the steak down. Continue to monitor your water thought out the day – too low and you won’t be able to pump up. Your mouth should be dry but if you get cotton mouth, your too dry – 2-3oz of full sugar pop and then wait 20 min – again don’t get greedy.

Those are my thoughts. It’s not the right way, it’s only one way. Best of luck to all those competing.

[Mrs Croft]

That was a very informative read thank you for posting that..hope they put this as a sticky

[get456]

yah.... great post bro really great thanks!!

[Mrpumped]

Well this is the way I'm doing it and it's working. I'll see how things go this weekend.

[bigleemurali]

great info

[trivial]

Wow, awesome! Very good info....