Post-Show Recovery and Reverse Dieting Myths

no absolutely so when we're looking at the comp prep When people are coming out of that, what are some protocols that people need to be thinking about? In terms of let's go nutrition first, do they need to go straight to their new maintenance? Is it more of a reverse diet protocol? What are your recommendations on that? Yeah, you know what? I'm not a big fan of reverse dieting. The way I see it is this guy's dieted down. Let's take a natural athlete. It's not uncommon for a natural athlete to take 24 weeks to diet down for a show, or they should, right? because the slower you can do it, the more likely you're going to retain lean tissue. And if they don't have anabolic drugs on their side, then they can't really rush it like somebody who's enhanced. So if you ask them to reverse diet out, you're just delaying the inevitable. You might as well focus on let's look at the maintenance and maybe give them like a 10% to 15% off the maintenance, right? And I found that that works a lot better. Um, if, if I will use reverse dieting, if I have someone where maybe they're at some point there was an eating disorder or disordered eating involved, or I tell them, you know, if they're sitting at, you know, 1500 calories, I'm going to take up to 2400. If they look like they're about to hyperventilate and they've got tachycardia, I'm like, all right, all right, let's just try 300 calories. And we just keep trying to raise that as much as we can to get them back up. And one of the reasons why is if you look at, if you look at total daily energy expenditure, and a lot of these bodybuilders, they'll take their energy intake well below their BMR. And once you start doing that, that's when the body says, hey, I don't need to have strong erections. I don't need to have a menstrual cycle. I don't need to make pretty hair, skin, and nails. I don't need to create a lot of body temperature because it starts getting rid of all the things that you don't need to survive and it moves into kind of a survival state where it's only funneling fuel and the things that are keeping you alive. So you've got this massive wiggle room. If we assume that a typical sedentary person, that that BMR could be anywhere from 60% to 70%, and then we layer on top of that non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, thermic effect of food, and then adaptive thermogenesis, whether that's from regulating body heat or maybe that's from exercise, you've got a good 30% to 40% spread there where if you're already dieting at like 40% of your calories or more if you're getting ready for a show, you can probably add a lot of that back and that'll up-regulate thermic effect of food. The minute you eat food, you're going to lose some of that because you're going to burn some calories to process that. You're going to start burning more energy when you train so your adaptive thermogenesis and exercise thermogenesis will go up. And then you going to start moving more naturally subconsciously through NEAT So a lot of that stuff you can actually kind of wipe out because you fueling stuff that is now deregulated You immediately push it back up once you start eating more. So I would rather just give them that. And if they gain a little weight, who cares, right? You're not going to be able to stay that lean forever anyway. So if you go from 5% to 12% body fat after a show, who gives a shit? You're still leaner than the majority of the population. you just at this point think you're obese fat and you're not you're because bodybuilders tend to be delusional if if they can't see a vein in their fucking uh navel but uh i i would rather just pump it up say okay let's let's focus on how much you're training let's focus on your estimated rmr let's focus on some of these other things and let's pump you up to maintenance and then maybe maybe we go to maintenance and pull off about 10 to 15 to 20 percent off the top of that so that i can prove to you you're not actually going to get fat. And then we can play around with some macros, right? You know, the least likely macro to be turned into fat is protein. So what we might do post-show in order to get more calories, then we might pump the protein up to really high levels. Okay, that way we kick up thermic effect of food. We've got a macronutrient that, yes, it can be turned into carbs and that can be turned into fat. But by the time it gets down to the fat level, there's not really that many calories left. So you're safe as pumping that up, right? If you're really lean, most likely if you've done things right, you're probably still really insulin sensitive. So it makes sense to pump the carbs up too and maybe keep the fat a little lower, right? On the low side and then slowly get the fat up at some point. But it's hard for, it's really hard for me to answer this because we set so many things up really well before they compete that we never have clients blow up. But our clients are always eating two to three times more than anybody else at the show because we don't believe in starving them. We plan on building work capacity high, building up the calories. So by the time they get on stage, you know, they're destroying carbs. I've got girls eating 750 to 900 grams of carbs a day because they're burning through it so quickly by the way we set up their biochemistry going into the show and they're very well conditioned.