The Naturally Fit Super Show in Austin, TX is approaching fast, so over the past two weeks Marcella and I have shifted from off season into pre-contest mode! Here’s the down low on what we’re doing to prepare for this major event!:

Time Frame: Since I was less than happy with my last appearance on stage, I wanted to give us both plenty of time for a long slow contest prep, so we decided to start at 16 weeks out by reigning in the diet, adjusting our routines, and increasing cardio slightly. With this long to prepare we should be able to make easy, gradual changes and get into peak condition without too much torture or muscle loss. Plus, we’ve stayed on a very clean diet and have both been doing cardio the entire off season, so we have decent conditioning right from the get-go!

Diet: Marcella will be posting our exact meal plans in our member portal as we update them so that members can follow along, and we will also be posting pictures and recipes when we can as well. As I mentioned in my last post, my goal this off season was to increase Marcella’s metabolism as much as possible, and keep mine humming along as well, by maintaining a little cardio, doing some high intensity work, and eating as many calories from a clean diet as we could get away with. Now that we are into the preparation stage, calories will be slowly reigned in as the weeks go by, and cardio will be increased as well to make a fat-loss deficit. We’ve both calculated the body fat percentage we want to reach in 16 weeks, and the amount of fat in pounds we need to lose to get there,  so we are doing weekly assessments to decide when we will need to decrease calories and increase cardio. For now we’ve each reduced our daily calories by about 300, eliminated all refined foods like brown rice pasta and sprouted grain breads and wraps, and sources of fat like avocados and nuts. We’ve also reduced eating out to once or twice per month for the duration, and then only very healthy fare. We’ve also started adding branched chain amino acids before and after workouts, see post.

Routines: My routine has actually been staying pretty consistent, so the previous post will have the details on what I’m doing and why. The only real change I’ve made is hitting a double split (am and pm workouts) twice per week on whichever workouts fall on Tuesday and Thursday, and allowing my self a bit more creativity with the sets and reps while still hitting all the exercises I have listed for each workout. So far it’s working excellently and I’m now the leanest I’ve ever been at 190lbs – 6.5% body fat! (see pic below)

I’m updating Marcella’s program every 4 weeks based on feedback from her and what we both feel needs to be addressed, and for the past several weeks we’ve been working on increasing her volume and frequency (longer workouts more often), especially for her upper body so we can gain as much muscle there as possible. She’s making great progress, and has been working so hard at it we’ll probably schedule a reduced volume/frequency week in the near future to boost recovery. Here’s her most recent program.

Cardio: The major change here is the addition of a weekly sprint session and a weekly posing session. I’m sticking to the 20-30min swim and 20-30min run I’ve kept up, and Marcella is now doing 30 minutes of steady cardio 5x per week, and to that we’ve both added the timed sprints and posing on our off days. Sprints are fantastic for stimulating the metabolism and creating an excellent hormonal environment for muscle growth/recovery, and posing is literally what the sport of bodybuilding is all about so these two changes will make a big contribution to our conditioning as weeks pass. We currently do 6 sprints of apprx 80 meters, and as time passes we will increase the amount of sprints per session, as well as the number of sprint and posing workouts per week. We will also increase steady state cardio, but I’d like to keep this as low as possible for the duration to maintain our metabolic rates.

So goes our progress! We’ll add more info as we make changes, so stay tuned!