The Importance of Carbohydrates for Stage Conditioning

Then we might throw in more aerobics at the very end so we can keep the calories high. But then it also depends on how much time they have. if you're a very busy executive and you just like to bodybuild if you're like a weekend bodybuilder and you don't have a lot of time then we have to figure out what's most important and at that point eating lower amounts of food is probably going to be better because that doesn't take up a lot of time but if you're another coach and you've got all the time in the world you might be doing a tremendous amount of work going into your show because you've got the time for that and that will enable you to eat far more calories than if we didn't have that in. Then we can also modulate, you know, what is the VO2 max I'm looking for? So often I get people, girls, especially girls, they'll come in and they'll do consults with us and they're a few months out from their show and they decided to stop with another coach because they already lost their period and their hair was falling out and they didn't feel normal. And they're like, I don't, if this is the way I'm going to feel, I don't want to compete. I'm like, well, you're probably going to feel like that at least the last three weeks, but you shouldn't feel like that three months out, right? So what we might do with them is kind of the same process of building up the aerobic base. Then a lot of these girls are eating no carbs because that tends to be the thing now is hashtag fuck cardio and like hashtag fuck carbs, which both of those statements are completely – it's not good that people are doing that. They're losing sight of that these things are tools and tools are made to be used where they're appropriate. so we may start them out with you know four or five weeks of aerobics um and then in order to bring in a lot more carbohydrates we might move them to really high intense cardio where it's and prep their carbs up three or four having a lot of that off of the conditioning they're filling out they're feeling better the thyroid comes back online they get the periods back everything starts working really well and we've proven to them that carbs don't make you fat because this is one of the big misconceptions is that because people still think that carbs make you fat they don't want to eat them so when you want to put them back in their body they they said no no no this is everyone else is taking all the carbs out to get lean i can't have carbs carbs aren't the problem it's how your body's utilizing that and if i don't give you carbs early then by the time you get ready to get on stage how are you supposed to look good when the carbs aren't filling you out right so if i haven't given somebody carbs for months that they think that magically that last week if they just eat carbs they're going to make glycogen and that's not how it works your body gets to a point where it's not making glycogen effectively it's just burning through just burning through glucose and it's using too much glucose at rest instead of using fat and basically you're trying to at this point you're trying to nail a square block or a round hole. What we need to do is we got to get the carbs in earlier so your body can fill out effectively. And then we can feed you a hell of a lot more carbs during peak week. I've got some guys that eat 1,250 to 1,500 grams of carbohydrates three or four days before their show because they can utilize it and they fill up really nicely. You know, in my earlier career, part of my career, when we were still thinking that low carbs were the thing, you get to peak week, you give them carbohydrates and they'd sweat a lot but they wouldn't fill out and now we start looking into some of the signs and symptoms of relative energy deficiency syndrome we now understand that one of the problems when you've been eating like that for a long time is your body gets to a point where it can't turn glucose and the glycogen appropriately well how are you supposed to look on good on stage what makes your muscles look really nice and round when you get on stage sodium carbohydrate and water so again there's almost an adaptation of your body's now being eating low-carb for a while, just use fats, and now you're going, okay, now I'm going to give you a fuckload of carbs, and it's like, well, what the fuck do you want me to do with that? Absolutely. So what they end up doing, they end up shitloading, so they just start eating anything to try to build up intramuscular triglycerides and try to shove sodium in the cell, and sometimes that can work really well, but more often than not, you just look like bloated and watery and smooth, and you don't have the conditioning. You look massive, but your conditioning sucks, and realistically conditioning almost always will win over size if you have somebody that's really big but they're real smooth and you have somebody that's not quite as big but they're diced the person who's diced is typically going to win yeah no i agree with that just have to i've a few girls and you can always see that on on the stages it quite obvious they just look better because they lean they like they look more muscular Yeah And what ends up happening too is you get people that they trying to fill out before they get on stage and they can Well, then after the show, they go out and they have pizza and beer and all this, and they wake up and they look amazing. And they're like, well, I must need to eat pizza and beer before I get on stage. That's got to be the magic recipe for this. And it's like, hey, you go ahead and try that your next show. We'll see what happens. And then they just look terrible. Yeah, whether or not taking the scrap notes, probably the water and the sodium as well is going to be a bit of a factor. Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. Especially when you look at long term dieting, right? What controls the retention of sodium in the body? Aldosterone and also cortisol. Cortisol can attach to the middle quarter quarter receptor until your kidneys to retain that as well. If you got to the point where you've got long term dieting and you've been bathing yourself in cortisol, you're dysregulating aldosterone and cortisol. then you end up to the point where you're not holding any sodium you look really flat and the minute you give sodium the body goes oh shit sodium yay and it just holds on to it and then you can't get it off