In this episode, we learn all about peak-week, what muscle groups to work out and when. Glycogen & Sodium levels and how it relates to getting your best results. What to eat and then how to dry out so you look best on stage.
Muscle Talk - Bodybuilding podcast by International Protein
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In this episode, we learn all about peak-week, what muscle groups to work out and when. Glycogen & Sodium levels and how it relates to getting your best results. What to eat and then how to dry out so you look best on stage.
Muscle Talk - Bodybuilding podcast by International Protein
If you want your own questions answered on our bodybuilding podcast, then join our private Facebook Group and share your ideas, https://www.facebook.com/groups/muscletalk
If you'd like to learn more about International Protein, visit https://www.international-protein.com/
A Thinkroom production.
https://www.thinkroom.com/
Ash Horton:
Welcome to Muscle Talk where you'll get world champion advice about nutrition and stacking on muscle. Our host Christine Envall, she's a three time world champion bodybuilder and IFBB professional, a food scientist, and a founding co-owner of our podcast sponsor International Protein. In this episode, we learn all about peak week, what muscle groups to work out and when. Glycogen and sodium levels and how it relates to getting your best results, what to eat and how to dry out so you look best on stage. Peak week, what is it? What does it look like? Christine, please explain.
Christine Envall:
Okay. Peak week is what bodybuilders talk about as being the week before their competition, where they do a whole bunch of different things to what they've been doing for the last 12 or 20 weeks to optimise the way that they will look on stage. So the idea is that you want to really bring out all that definition, bring out the vascularity really, really suck that skin around the muscles and look essentially anywhere from 10 to 50% better than what you've looked every day in the gym leading up to it. So the idea bodybuilding is a sport of illusion and what you see on stage where obviously there's a tan and there's the oil and everyone looks like they're totally shrink wrapped. That is all a result of obviously the diet, but you don't just look like that by stepping on stage after dieting.
Christine Envall:
There's a whole bunch of things that you manipulate between your carbs, your sodium, your water, and that's what you do to achieve that look on stage. So normally for most people it is about seven days. Some people, it might be five days, but it's essentially you start counting down from one week before the competition. So if the competition's on Saturday, it would always be really for me Sunday would be where we would start to look at peak week.
Ash Horton:
And I'm guessing that if you have to travel somewhere, you want to have your peak week in that destination.
Christine Envall:
Absolutely. I'd always try to arrive on the Saturday. And then I would have a full clean peak week, wherever I was going. I did try it once coming in on a Wednesday and it was a big fail. Really didn't work. Americans I found would travel in on a Friday night for the Saturday show. For some reason they like that because they're still getting that dehydration effect off of the airplane and that, but it's a little bit risky when you're coming in from overseas to try to do something like that. And then of course with a professional show, there's usually a whole bunch of meetings and things that you need to do on the day before the competition. So you absolutely needed to be in well before that, but if you're traveling internationally you definitely want to be in town and you want to go through that whole week basically in the local area.
Christine Envall:
So what does peak week look like? So from training point of view, my favorite thing is always to do my last leg session as far away from the competition as possible. So that would normally be the Sunday before a Saturday competition because once you've done a heavy leg training session, there's a lot of swelling. You lose a lot of your cuts. There's also some dorms and stuff like that, so you want to have done that. So that by the time the next Saturday hits and you're in competition mode, all of that settled down and all you've got is freaky cuts. That's what you want for your legs. So you then structure the rest of your training system. I would do it so that the Wednesday would be my last training workout.
Christine Envall:
And the Wednesday would essentially be a little bit of everything other than legs. So even if I hadn't done chest on the Tuesday on that next Wednesday, I'd still do a little bit of chest, but you just basically do a whole body workout just to pump some blood. You weren't trying to do any crazy weights. It was really just about to burn out that last little bit of glycogen. But obviously know that the Monday and Tuesday would just be a regular session for try to hit your whole body really like legs on Sunday. And then between Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we trying to hit everything and then repeat the muscle groups that had been hit on the Monday and the Tuesday. So essentially that would be the training point of view, at that point in time you're not trying to break any strength records.
Christine Envall:
You're really, really mindful of injury. So you're really just, again, it's just trying to get blood in the muscle. Again, if you've landed in a new country, you just want to just really get your body moving and make sure everything's primed. I talked about burning up some glycogen. That's because obviously another part of peak week is that you're trying to basically deplete your body of carbohydrates, so that you can hyper compensate and take in more carbohydrate and store more glycogen in your muscle than what you would have if you just had have gone through a normal week. Because the idea is that the more glycogen in the muscle, the bigger your muscle looks when you get onto competition. So you can look 20, 30% larger, once you're all carbed up and filled up. And it also that stretches out the skin, so it gives you a more ripped appearance.
Christine Envall:
Like I say it's all that illusion. And how you do that is generally what people would do is as early as Monday, but definitely by Tuesday and Wednesday dropping out your carbohydrates and really so that's where you're training on no carbs. You're burning out the glycogen, putting your body in a state where it really wants to hyper compensate now.
Ash Horton:
It must be really tough.
Christine Envall:
It's not fun. A lot of broccoli, a lot of fish or chicken. You're hungry. You're weak. You're trying to get the reps out. You feel flat as anything. But that's what you want, that's when it's working. If you're not flattening out, you're not going to get a good carb rebound. You're not going to get that good hyper compensation. So mentally it's tough because you will go from looking pretty good the week before, then all of a sudden you get flat and you lose a lot of your cuts and you have to trust the process. You have to know that this is temporary, and then I'm going to move to this phase here and then it's going to all change again.
Ash Horton:
So trusting the process. Do you think people don't trust the process and do it wrong, and they bail out right at the last minute on some occasions?
Christine Envall:
It is the hardest week, a 100% people do that. Because one, if you have a coach that knows what they're doing, and they're telling you certain things and you do trust them and follow them then you're in a good place. But I have the privilege of seeing behind the scenes of a coach and what their clients go through. And that week is tough because they'll trust the process up until that point. And then they do, they get so scared because it is so, what's the word, anti-intuitive. And if they haven't been through it before, it can totally freak people out because people think you should just be going on this smooth curve and just looking better and better and better and better, and not understanding what you're actually trying to do.
Christine Envall:
So I've probably seen more people mess it up during peak week through not being patient, not trusting it. And even they have a weigh in a lot of times a day before a competition. And I've seen people who try to peak for the weigh in so that they look impressive, and then they look absolutely terrible on the actual competition day. Because they've basically peaked a day too soon. So it's all in the timing and conversely I've seen people who look amazing the day after, because they were too scared to eat and looked flat and terrible on stage because they forget that the reason is looking great on stage, and the reason is not about starving yourself. And a lot of people kind of like, "Oh, I can't eat now. I've spent all this time dieting and it doesn't feel right to go and eat this food." Not understanding what the purpose of that is.
Christine Envall:
You're not doing this just for the purpose of not eating food or being mentally tough on a diet. The purpose is to look amazing on stage. So it's remembering what that's all about, but it is probably the thing that I have seen done most badly by more people because it is very scientific, but is also at the same time you have to be again mentally very disciplined to not do something too soon, to not freak out, to push past a lot of the things which seem not right to you and get through that training session. So it's tough from a whole bunch of different perspectives.
Ash Horton:
It almost reminds me of fighters cutting weight just for the weigh in. Dehydrating themselves in a massive way and then replenishing just before the fight as well, similar sort of processes to put your body through.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. It's a similar sort of process, a different end result in that theirs is all performance based and ours is all appearance based. But it is most definitely that same kind of thing where everything that you did in the let's say you're dieted for 12 weeks, in the 11 weeks prior to getting to peak week is all for that purpose of getting your body fat low. And then everything that you do in peak week is for the whole purpose of I'm going to keep saying it, looking amazing on stage, because it's about looking that 20% better, 30% better than what you possibly could have looked if you just hadn't dieted and stepped on stage. So that is the whole purpose. Otherwise you would, you would just diet and step on stage. And that would be guaranteed that you would look a certain way, but with bodybuilding we're always striving to look better. So you want to try to pull that something out of the bag.
Ash Horton:
20 to 30% is a big jump.
Christine Envall:
I have seen people look even close to a 100%.
Ash Horton:
That's impressive.
Christine Envall:
And I'm going to give Brandon Ray our sponsored athlete a bit of a plug here because he's an incredible coach. And I have seen some of his clients during their peak week or even how they've come to him and seeing them through the process, and the difference to the definition and just how they look on stage, I am just like, "My goodness." I would say in a lot of my shows I would have got sometimes 50% better, but it was kind of hit and miss and sometimes I might look 50% better and sometimes I might look 50% worse if you mess it up. And then I found a system where I was pretty much 20%, 30% better consistently I could do it consistently, but Brandon has a very specific method and it's not a one size fits all.
Christine Envall:
It is a very hands-on method where he's constantly monitoring his clients and making the adjustments based on how they look. But the results are absolutely phenomenal. And it really is you just like, "How did you get that person from that to that? He's genius. And that's why I say, if you have a good coach who is there stepping though you every step of the way, do listen to what they're saying. But the unfortunate thing is there's also a lot of coaches, that are kind of trying to figure it out still themselves. So that kind of thing you need to look at who people have coached and who they've put through that process, and make your determination on whether you think they know what they're doing or whether they're just guessing at it.
Christine Envall:
Because as I say, it's the most scientific part of the whole process and it is the most you've got the opportunity to make something look brilliant or make something look less than brilliant. And finding that place in between, which is consistent and repeatable because the one thing that I know about peak week is that it changes what you need to do depending on your body size. Like if you're a bodybuilder who's progressing up through the weight classes or putting on size every year, what you need to do when you're weighing I guess as a female, 58 kilos, as opposed to when you're weighing 68 kilos is a totally different ball game. It just changes everything, how your body responds to different things that you do, like the carbing and the drying. So you've got to be very, very mindful that it isn't something that will be the same every single time that you prep.
Christine Envall:
And the other thing that you have to mindful of is how the condition that you come into that last peak week, and this is something that I remember I'm not sure that people know who Chris Cormier is. He was one of the the premier pro male bodybuilders back in the early 2000 when I was competing through, and he used to say if he came into a show and he wasn't as lean as what he felt he should be then he would do a very, very heavy deplete in that last week. If he came in and his conditioning was on point, he would handle it totally differently in that last week. So your run into the show is very, very important. How hard you've worked in those 11 weeks or whatever coming up to your competition does dictate how you handle the actual peak week.
Christine Envall:
So it's different, like I say, in every single situation but if you're doing a run of competitions, like you do your first one, and then you've got two weeks later one and another week later one, like what I had in my amateur days it's a lot easier because not a lot has changed and you can really refine that process. You can really look at the timing that you did things look at the impact and then make adjustments. You might decide that what you ate before you went on stage, you should have eaten half an hour earlier to get a better result or you should have eaten twice as much of it. All those little things.
Ash Horton:
So in saying that you actually record everything you do in peak week as well-
Christine Envall:
Absolutely.
Ash Horton:
... times-
Christine Envall:
Absolutely.
Ash Horton:
.... everything like that along the journey.
Christine Envall:
Yes. Because when you're getting ready for a competition in those 11 weeks, you have a program set out for you, for example, that you're following. You don't have to think you just follow your program. And then when you get to that peak week, if someone's giving that to you then they will have written that down for you to follow. If Brandon proactively changes things, then he's telling that person, "Okay, now do this." Because I did my own peaks what I would always do, I would have a plan. And then if something deviated from the plan, I would write that down-
Ash Horton:
And adjust it. Yep.
Christine Envall:
Yep. Yep. And by the final competition of that run, each time I would get it better and better and learn from those little tweaks and you really have to learn your body, learn to read your body, how it reacts to certain things, how strongly it reacts to certain things, everything from your training session to your posing that you're doing leading into that posing that you do in those last few days. Because all of that then impacts on what you do backstage and in those last final hours before you get into competitions so it's very, very... You can kind of make it as detailed as possible.
Ash Horton:
Do you get a bit of smack talk backstage?
Christine Envall:
No.
Ash Horton:
You don't. Every bodybuilder supports each other as opposed to the odd sledging in the cricket, for example.
Christine Envall:
Funnily enough, the female bodybuilders were pretty casual, pretty cruisy. A lot of camaraderie backstage.
Ash Horton:
That's awesome.
Christine Envall:
Same with the male bodybuilders. But I do remember when I was competing the NABBA figure in the universe, they didn't really want to talk to the female bodybuilders they just wanted the mirrors. They were pushing everybody out of the way to get in front of the mirrors. And the men's physique guys are like that, the bodybuilders sit back and chill and then it's like the men's physique boys are all in the mirror and the bodybuilders, "Ha-ha." Whatever. It's more interdivisional rivalry.
Ash Horton:
But you don't have a Conor McGregor there up in someone's face trying to break their soul.
Christine Envall:
No. Because you're not fighting someone or something like that, it's like the judge's decision. The decision is in the hands of the judges, whilst you, I'm not saying that people don't psyche people out-
Ash Horton:
Surely it's a mental game.
Christine Envall:
And what we would do is we would wait until a certain particular period of time until I would take off my clothes to pump up. And I do remember a few times where people you'd be in the area all covered up and you take your clothes off. And I remember one time, one of the competitors she just pretty much walked out because she knew she lost-
Ash Horton:
Oh really.
Christine Envall:
... at that point. And she did, but it's that thing where until you really see that person, I guess you've got that hope that maybe this year you've got them. But when you kind of see it in reality it's like, "Oh, man.”
Ash Horton:
I see that as poor sportsmanship though.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. It was. It was. And again, it transcribes the stage because you can still bring yourself up by being more confident on stage. If you look great and you bring yourself down by not being confident, if you're not as good, you can still pose yourself up and pose a certain way. And that's why posing is such an important part of your presentation and how you present on stage and the confidence, because this is digressing a little bit from peak week, but just in terms of stage mentality. I always looked at it like I'm there to entertain. I'm there to make you feel comfortable on stage so I want to project that. Because if I was sitting in an audience and I saw someone who looked awkward on stage, who didn't feel confident. I felt awkward and I felt uncomfortable watching them.
Christine Envall:
And I imagine that in the same thing as a judge. If I'm judging and someone's looking unconfident, it shows in their whole body posture. And the whole thing of bodybuilding is you're being judged on your body presented in such a way. And we always used to say take up as much room on stage as possible because that's the point you're there to be big. So pose big, don't minimise yourself. And if we have visuals, I'm kind of like showing this to expanding your arms and when you hit a pose, posing as large as you possibly can rather than being all crunched up and closed in and that. So that's just the mentality of being on stage but just coming back to peak week.
Christine Envall:
So we've talked about training, so we've talked about running through all of your body parts, doing your legs furthest away from the show so that they're not all blurred out and suffering from cortisol release and everything like that. Then we've talked about going into the depletion phase. Now that as I said is quite individual based on how you've come into a competition, whether you to go quite hard at it or whether you can go quite moderately. Because what I found that the bigger I got in terms of the more muscle that I carried if I've fully depleted and when I say fully depleted, I eliminated all of my carbohydrates for those two and a half or three days, I physically couldn't eat enough carbohydrate to reload to get to where I needed to be on stage. Because I actually get quite tired of eating and I just couldn't the food in that I needed to do to fill back up properly.
Christine Envall:
And back then the science was talking about the hyper saturation and the hyper loading of carbohydrate and glycogen and then more recent studies came out and said, "Look, you can still get that same effect without having to fully deplete." So I tested that out and yes, you could half deplete so I'd half my carbohydrate intake and not eliminate it completely and still get enough of a result. And it was like I wasn't coming back from this lower position, so I could get to where I needed to go and still get the food in and still get the look that I wanted on stage. But that was because I was in the condition before that week, if I had have been a little bit off it would have been a harder depletion. So that phase normally goes through, for example, it might be halfway through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then halfway through Thursday, if you're competing on Saturday would be reintroduction of carbohydrates.
Christine Envall:
So that Thursday night or the Friday, and then into the Saturday. So that's the carbohydrate cycle, but there's so many different ways that people need to experiment based on themselves because some people like to hyper load say Thursday and Friday, but then on a competition day just go back to their normal diet. Reason being that you don't want to have a big bloated stomach on stage you don't want to feel uncomfortable, but for myself it's like your metabolism speeds up when you get very close to competition and you start messing around with your carbs. And then on competition day, if I try to go back to my diet levels doesn't matter how much I carbed up Thursday, Friday, I'd be flat again by the time I'd be going to get onto stage at the night show because you'd have a pre-judging around midday and then a night show at around seven o'clock in the professional.
Christine Envall:
So I couldn't only eat what I would eat on normal diet day and get through onto stage looking all right. I had to eat more food, so everyone is different. And as I said, some people did use that method and then felt that just going back to their normal day gave them a better result. So it's something where again, it's only by doing it, trying it experimenting see what worked that you're going to find that kind of thing out. Did you get the best result? Do you think you could have gone further? Did you think you went too far. So that's what kept me competing I think all those years is that testing and trying and seeing, could I get better because it's always about trying to get that little bit better.
Christine Envall:
So that's from a basic carbohydrate point of view. Getting into more detail on the actual day of the competition, then the type carbohydrate does become a little more important too, where people are putting sugars in because you're trying to bring out vascularity, you're potentially, you've eliminated sodium. And again, the sodium method is some people like to hyper load sodium, then drop sodium so that they get that over elimination of fluid to help with that. Other people like to cut it for a certain period of time to make sure that they don't have sodium in their system, and then re-introduce a little bit right at the end because without sodium you're flat. Again, there's so many different variables and I would find that for myself, I was a keep the sodium moderate to low most of the time but then just in that pre-stage pump up meal, you introduce a little bit of sodium and that would be enough to really bring out the hardness in the muscles.
Christine Envall:
And without that, you find you can't flex as hard as what you need to. So sodium plays a role and obviously glycogen plays a massive role. And because of remembering that all of this time you're also dehydrated. Which is then the third aspect of peaking, which is getting your fluids low or getting the fluid out between your skin and your muscle.
Ash Horton:
It's all getting very complex.
Christine Envall:
I know I can tell from Ash's face that he's thinking, "Oh, Christ, why did we bring this up?”
Ash Horton:
Well, I've got so many questions. It's like, how much of the sodium, things like that, but that's all dependent on the person, right?
Christine Envall:
And again, it's so dependent on your diet coming into it. My recommendation for people would be to never eliminate completely. And again, you need to experiment with your own body because the bigger you get, the more you need that balance. And then also it does depend on your sodium potassium balance. It's never a single thing in the body, the body always has a counter action. So if your potassium is low, the sodium needs to be low but if your potassium is higher you can afford to have sodium higher because it's the differential between the two, which creates whether it's water is going to hold in the muscle, which is where you want it, or whether it's going to hold between the skin and the muscle, which is where you don't want it. So that's the extracellular fluid that we talk about, and the intracellular fluid is when you're talking about having it inside of the muscle.
Christine Envall:
So the idea is that obviously when the potassium is higher than the sodium it stores within the muscle, when the sodium is higher than the potassium it stores outside of the muscle. So you want to try to have your balance so that your potassium, which is obviously coming in from your fruits and natural sources and the reason why I say that is because it's actually very, very dangerous to get super high potassium. That's where people have heart attacks. That's where people die. That's the serious side of dehydration and bodybuilding and diuretic use is when they basically create a situation in their body where they give themselves an electric shock is what they call the potassium gradient, is so out of balance with the sodium, there's too much potassium and too little sodium that basically the electric impulses don't fire properly and you shock yourself, and heart stops working or muscles totally cramp up so that is something just to be aware of.
Ash Horton:
But that's pushing things to the extreme.
Christine Envall:
Pushing things to the extreme, and it's not always at the extreme level where it happens. There has been deaths at competitions of people who were not at the highest level, we're not necessarily in the best condition and they've just tried too hard. And that's why I wanted to talk about that drying side of it, and why I said naturally you want to try to change that ratio because there's plenty of potassium in things like bananas and kiwi fruit. And trying to stick around things where you can't go ridiculously outside of the range. And this is, I don't know if anyone's really noticed but you don't see potassium supplements on-
Ash Horton:
No.
Christine Envall:
... the shelves because it is dangerous. So the potassium supplements are doctor prescribed and the ones the Slow-K is delivered in such a way that it's delivering the potassium slowly into your body because obviously it's a water soluble mineral, so it won't store in your body it will flush out. So if people are looking into doing this kind of thing with a competition, I do suggest that they talk to a doctor. So I would always go to a doctor and explain what I was doing and take his advice. Like I wouldn't go, "Doctor said that I'm going to do three times what he said." No, don't do that. It's not worth the risk. If you choose to go down that path of using things that need prescription, you do need to talk to people who know about this stuff.
Christine Envall:
Not your mate at the gym who says, "Oh, I know what to do." When you're messing around with that stuff I guess I want to impress how serious that actually is. Potassium sounds fairly innocuous because you find it in bananas, but if you get it in the wrong dosage and you get it in a concentrated dosage from a supplement, it can cause a lot of trouble, particularly when you are dropping your sodium out so be aware of that. So that's where in introducing carbohydrates I would always introduce things like bananas and kiwi fruit were my two favourite things because I had a naturally high level of potassium. Interestingly enough, coffee has a high level of potassium as well. That's just something of interest there, if people are still drinking coffee that they are aware that that also contains potassium.
Christine Envall:
When you're coming into that drying phase, reducing your sodium... Again, it comes back to feeling because you'll get to a point where if your sodium is too low, again, you will feel very, very flat and you'll feel thirsty. Believe it or not salt normally makes you thirsty. But when you're super low in sodium you also feel very, very thirsty. But your water goes in and comes straight back out again, so that's when someone knows that they've maybe gone a little bit too low. So it's actually a good idea to try to whilst you have your diet, you're eliminating, you don't eat processed meat, obviously because it has sodium in it.
Christine Envall:
You're eliminating products which have a lot of hidden added sodium, but you maybe look at introducing back some type of seasoning, which has a salt base in it. And then actually introducing that into a particular meal to try to make sure that you still have a certain level of sodium come into your body. So it's kind of, again, reading that and you'll feel it from your contraction. Like if you're in the gym you can't feel your contraction very hard or you're flexing and doing your posing practice, and you feel like the muscles is not contracting very hard is generally an indication that your sodium's too low because is like I say it is that balance. Now I've freaked everyone out about drying, again, best way is to try to do it naturally.
Christine Envall:
If you're a smaller frame person, you normally do use a time method where you can by just eliminating your water or not eliminating completely, please don't do that. Reducing your water intake. So if you're normally taking two liters a day that might come back to 250 ml for that day. So you're physically just not putting the water back into your body and you can normally trick your body for about a couple of days before it says, "Ah-ah, I need this water." And then literally everything that you do you just hold water. So when you're a smaller frame person, you can do that. When you're a bigger frame person, you can not do that because your muscle being 80% water literally is what starts to... It doesn't matter what your balances are it just gives out that water. So you end up deflating, basically peeing your muscle out if you try to dry like that. So you do have to do a very, very short timeframe.
Ash Horton:
You just gave a really interesting visual for everybody listening. Anyway.
Christine Envall:
We need a little diagram to-
Ash Horton:
We do.
Christine Envall:
... show that.
Ash Horton:
We do or an animation.
Christine Envall:
Of the person just shrinks down, but the best method I always found as I got bigger was to literally like from... So the two days before the competition flush and when I say flush literally drink a lot of water. So I'd probably try to double the amount of water that I was used to drinking because then you'll find your flushing everything out and your body continues to dump water. Like it's like, "Oh, too much water." So it just gets rid of it all. And it's like the opposite of hyper compensating with the glycogen and retaining it. It just keeps pushing that water out. So if you stop your water at midnight, the night before your competition, your body is still like, "Oh, too much water." Pushing it out, pushing it out, pushing it out you wake up in the morning and you've literally flushed out all the water.
Christine Envall:
And then you're like, "Okay, now I'm dry. Now I just have to hold that for the day." So that is probably the safest way of doing it. Some of the natural things which can help obviously are and I'm going to go get it wrong. Your dandelion, there are some natural herbal type preparations where you're using herbs to eliminate coffee. Obviously, caffeine eliminates water and vitamin C are some of the natural things that you can use to help keep the water off and flush that out. So that is the as I said, it's kind of like the safest way of doing that drying method. If you do choose to use diuretics, as I said, they are prescription. So you do need to talk to your doctor and talk to what they say about it in terms of the dosage and the timing and the half life because they aren't all created equal.
Christine Envall:
They do react differently in how they actually eliminate the water from your body. And that does become very critical in terms of what you are taking in, in terms of not only your electrolytes but also your sugars. And as I said, the timeframe in which they work so the timing of when you would take them. So none of this you hear stories of people who took diuretics for a week, for the whole week of peak week and stuff like that and that scares me when I hear people talking about stuff like that, because like I say it is a very, very serious topic and a dangerous thing. So most of the time a diuretic is like within 24 hours of the competition and it's only for that specific thing. And then you don't have the temptation of continuing to take it so that you look good for your photo shoot the next day.
Christine Envall:
You want to be off stage and then again rehydrating getting your Gatorade in, make sure you're getting your electrolytes back in, make sure you're getting your fluids back in and rebalancing your body and just washing that through and then getting ready for your next competition. So it's a very, very technical thing... The best way to do it really is, like I say, find that very safe and reliable method where you're really pushing your body to the least extreme, just because there's so many problems that can occur. But it's something then that you can do reproducibly. And if it means that you're 20% better than what you could have looked but not 50% better than what you could have looked, then be happy with that 20% because you know you're going to be safe.
Christine Envall:
You're not going to be cramping up or worse in a hospital or whatever. But that's essentially as I say it's part of bodybuilding, the drying is part of it and the reason is that it shows off the definition so much more. Obviously there's the tanning and the oiling, and that's again, part of the process of peak week. It doesn't obviously involve anything that you really need to do other than turn up to the tanning booth and get your tan put on, but getting that part of it right. And getting the right darkness is really, really critical.
Ash Horton:
Because if you get it wrong you look ridiculous.
Christine Envall:
And if the lighting's not right and this is actually a topic where here in Australia, where it is mostly I guess white skin people competing, everyone's feeling even. But I know and again Brandon he suffers from this because of his tonality of his skin is very dark, you think that'd be like a bonus but it actually isn't because it ends up washing out all of his cuts because he's too dark. He needs to be more of a reddy brown than a brown and it really does make a difference and getting the right mixture of the tanning colors, because there's like red based and yellow based and getting all of that is obviously critical to enhancing how you look. And if you get it wrong and you're too pale and everyone else is dark and they can't see your cuts, or if you're too dark and can't see your cuts and it's also wasted because you're putting in so much effort and you really want to have that part a 100% right, otherwise you're not showing yourself off to truly how you look on stage.
Christine Envall:
So people laugh at bodybuilders and kind of like, "Oh, why do they go so dark?" Because they don't understand that once you step under those stage lights everything changes. So if you look normal out under natural sunlight, you're probably not dark enough for a competition. But at the same time with all the different divisions, they actually have a different tanning level that they go to for the different divisions as well because they're looking for different things. So there's so much to it Ash.
Ash Horton:
It's very, very complex and also fascinating for someone that hasn't gone into the peak week or even trained professionally at all in anything, but it is fascinating.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. And I think for me the most interesting part about it is that it is so.... Nothing that you do in the gym is really related to what happens on stage. You don't pull out a bench press, you not going to squat rack out there, it's the posing. We probably haven't touched on that so much, but that's something where people should be practicing that from as far... I used to say, practice it from as far out as what you look reasonable. Because it's actually very hard... You feel full off season and you try to hit a pose, it's actually very hard to hit those poses because you can't get your body into exactly the same position.
Ash Horton:
So where do you for you, where is reasonable?
Christine Envall:
I would say like-
Ash Horton:
On a timeline.
Christine Envall:
On the timeline, if I was going on one of my 20 or 26 week preps, it'd be at the 12 week mark. So obviously if someone's starting at 12 weeks, probably around about the eight week mark, I would expect that they were in reasonable enough shape, that they should be able to be getting into the positions that they need to get into for the poses, kind of see where their weaknesses and their strengths are. Because obviously when you're posing, you're trying to emphasize your strengths and de-emphasize your weaknesses. And you need to be at a point where your body's looking what it will look like on stage. And then at the four week mark get quite serious about putting that work in and sorry, that's actually the one thing I haven't talked about in peak week is cardio. Same deal with the training with the cardio I would normally Thursday morning would be my last cardio session, assuming that I was doing double cardio session.
Christine Envall:
So I would always kind of have that last session to pull through, start to pull the carbohydrates in. And sometimes I'd go for a very, very light session on the Friday, like a very, very light walk, again, just for me because of being so active to then come back to no activity is very difficult. So I try to do some kind of gentle walk again, just to keep the blood moving and feel like I was keeping the digestion moving and keeping everything flowing in. But definitely from then on and it's really a lot of flexing, really utilising that time to practice your posing. And again, the flexing also uses glycogen, believe it or not.
Christine Envall:
So it helps to draw that carbohydrating as you're carbing up and keeps that coming in, so that becomes to me a very important part. And even as you're pumping up getting ready to get onstage, that's again, a huge part of where that comes in. Like you don't need to do a workout really backstage and go crazy and pump up, just the flexing should be enough to bring everything out. And that's when you're actually got the right amount of carbs in you is that you only need to do a little bit of activity and you feel everything start to pump. And you feel the veins start to come out and that tells you that you kind of... You've got the right amount of carbohydrate because it's kind of sitting there ready to pop as soon as you get onstage.
Christine Envall:
But if you're having to do a lot of work to get that, it means you have under carbed. So that's just a tip on how do you know when you're ready, how do you know when you've had enough and you have to keep yourself at that level. And often it can mean every two hours just having a few mouthfuls of rice or something to keep you at that level. Because you don't want to drop too far away from that because it gets too hard to bring yourself back into that particular position. So there's so much more that I could talk about in terms of what do you do with your protein over that period of time. Obviously, in those last few days where you're carbing, you don't need the same amount of protein that you were taking in when you were training.
Ash Horton:
Well, how about we leave because there's so much more that you could talk about.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. Let's leave it to part two.
Ash Horton:
Or we will, and-
Christine Envall:
Get Brandon on.
Ash Horton:
Not just or but also and people can actually ask on our Aussie Muscle Guru Facebook page some questions specifically about peak week and Christine will answer them directly.
Christine Envall:
Yeah, that would be good. And as I said, we can also have a chat with Brandon about that and just kind of see some of his methods because he’s-
Ash Horton:
He's the guru.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. He's refined it over a period of time. And I would say that he gets consistent results with multiple clients from all different categories and body types and everything. So it's something that I think it is one of the hardest things to get right in bodybuilding.
Ash Horton:
Very good. Thank you very much, Christine.
Christine Envall:
No problem Ash.
Ash Horton:
Words of wisdom. If you like what you've heard, recognize that these tips are free. So show your support by becoming a loyal International Protein customer by jumping online, hunt out product down and hit that buy now button. So once again, like, share and subscribe to our podcast so we can continue to bring you these episodes from our one and only Aussie Muscle Guru three times world champion, Christine Envall.