Peaking for a show, are you sabotaging your efforts?

Every competitor and coach has a peaking strategy, but is it sound and built on what works, or is it voodoo that can ruin your look on stage. This episode I but the myths and give it to you straight, the reality of peaking is not what you have been led to believe. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This episode, we're going to be talking about something of vital importance no matter what category you compete in, whether you're coaching clients, competing yourself, doesn't matter if you're going to be getting on stage or helping somebody get on stage, the last week peaking process seems to be fraught with myth and mystery that nobody can seem to entangle. Every week I go to shows and I hear countless things that competitors are doing. And are they doing it right? Are they doing it wrong? Is there an easy way? Is there a hard way? Is there a better way? Well, I'm going to share some of my experiences of my 40 years in the game and from my competition and my time with clients and the things I found that work and the things I know do not work. So stick around. In a world of enhanced physiques and social media smoke and mirrors, where do you find the truth? Welcome to the OCB Natural Edge Podcast, the official voice of the world's largest drug-free bodybuilding federation. From the science of the shred to the grit of the stage, no secrets, no substances, just the edge. The culmination of months of diet and training can either be enhanced by the efforts that you put in the last week to 10 days, or it can destroy all your hard work. Yes, there are things that can be done to influence how you look on stage, but there's nothing that can be done to dramatically change your physique. There's no magic bullet. Yeah, there are theories out there, and everyone seems to have some secret sauce and how to come in ripped and dry. But in reality, there's nothing you can do to dramatically change or create a positive impact on your physique if it's not there to begin with. However, there's a lot you can do to sabotage your look. Peak week is not about dramatic changes, it's about a few subtle things you can do to enhance your look on show day. Now, to protect the innocent, I'm going to walk you through a few of my old failed peaking strategies, and some of these may sound familiar to you. Now, when I first began to compete, I was told there should not be any water drinking up to four or five days before the contest. You had to come in dry. You had to dehydrate yourself, no water at all. I did that, and I ended up with an IV hooked to me the day before the show. Another time I was told to drink an entire case of diet soda the night before the show. My coach told me it was something about the carbon and the caffeine, etc. I sat down and I drank about 16 cans before I fell violently ill, never made it onto the stage. Another time I was given a cycle where I would eat no carbs for four or five days, and then I would gorge for three or four days, eating nothing but carbs, massive amounts, bloated. Oh, I felt so distended. I also had to cut out all the sodium I was taking in that last week and take 99 milligrams of potassium every hour on the hour. And trying to drink that without taking in any water, it was pure torture. Because all water had to be eliminated the last three days. I went from full and hard a week out to flat and squishy the day of the show. I went from looking like I was a champion to barely making the top five. One time I did a sodium and a water load. I drank four gallons of water a week out, and then the day before it cut back to half a gallon. It was supposed to have something to do about tricking the body into shedding more water or something like that. I got so sick from that four gallons, I ended up having to skip that show as well. There is such a thing as overhydration, and people can die from being too hydrated. I went from drinking normally a gallon to a gallon and a half of water a day to almost three to four times what I was drinking. Of course, I was overhydrated. I've also sodium bloated. That was a complete disaster. Another time I ate 10 grapefruits a day the last week, and I think I almost got an ulcer. There were countless other foolish experiments. And I remembered that when I did my first few teenage shows back in the early 80s, we did nothing. We just walked on stage. So in 1996, I decided to do just that. Just walk out on stage, do nothing differently, and you know what? I looked incredible and I won the show. I was at my all-time best condition up to that point. And it taught me something. All these strategies, it wasn't fooling the body, it was sabotaging everything I was trying to accomplish. Now, over time, I did find ways that you could subtly influence how you looked on stage. But you got to understand, the body has thousands of chemical reactions going on at all times. These reactions are controlled by your brain. And your brain always wants you to be in a state of homeostatus. That's dynamic equilibrium, more or less balance. It's always going to find a way to achieve that balance. And the process will not always make the physique look better. Remember, you're trying to combat your physiology with some foolish practices. You're not tricking anything. You don't trick your brain. Now you gotta control some variables the final weeks carbs, sodium, water. They need to be controlled to an extent, but not a dramatic extent. Now these variables are gonna differ from person to person, and it's based on your sex, your muscle size, the density, your body fat percentage, but mostly how your body tolerates carbs. Mesomorphs, as we talked about in a previous episode, can handle a lot of carbs. Same with ectomorphs, where endomorphs are a little more carb resistant. You're probably going to be dieting on slightly less carbs. Now, we know some individuals are very carb-sensitive and insulin resistant. Some people have food allergies, so the wrong carbs introduced on Peak Week can be disastrous and cause water retention. Now, this shouldn't be determined in the last few days before the show, particularly the carbs you're going to be taking in. It should be determined months prior to the show. The point of Peak Week is not to eat or introduce anything new to your diet you haven't eaten throughout the entire diet cycle. Don't suddenly increase the amount of a macronutrient to include carbohydrate far beyond what you've been doing and introducing a new food at the same time. Another disastrous result I had. One show I hadn't eaten rice at all, and then I was told to eat piles of rice to carb up, and all it did was make me bloated and smooth because my body didn't really tolerate rice that well. So if the maximum number of carbs you can tolerate throughout a diet was, say, 200 grams a day, don't suddenly eat a thousand the last three days before the show. If you couldn't tolerate that much when you're going through your hard training, you're not going to be able to tolerate that much when you're going through your peaking phase. So let me start by saying carbing up as normally presented doesn't work unless you have chemically altered your body physiology. How do you alter your body physiology? Through PEDs. We can't use insulin and prescription diuretics and all kinds of different hormones and GLP1s and natural bodybuilding. So you can't change the physiology of how much carbs your body can tolerate. You can't take in more carbs than your body can tolerate, period, without their being spill over extracellularly. Now, what does that mean? It means that area that lies between the muscle and the skin, it's a thin layer of fat. Excess water and carbs is going to be stored there. It's not all going to end up in the muscle cell. It's called oversaturation. Now, on average, the body can store between 250 and 450 grams of carbohydrates in the body. That's just a rough guesstimate. Some people with more muscle mass and are more mesomorphic can be on a higher range than that. So roughly between 250 and 450 grams of carbohydrate. Of that, only around 70% is going to go to the muscles. 20% is going to go into the liver, and the rest is going to go into your blood glucose or into your bloodstream. If you take in too much glycogen, the rest is going to end up as interintestinal fluids. That's water and it goes into your skin. This means smooth carbs, water into the fat cells around the skin, smooth, blurry look. How many times have you taken in too many carbohydrates and looked squishy? That's the squishy look. Now, how much carbohydrate you take in and when they when you consume them, well, that's going to be dependent on a variety of factors. I would suggest that you don't take any more than you can tolerate on a refeed day. So, for example, you're dieting down around to 250 grams of carbs per day, and then you have a refeed of 450 grams. Well, 450 grams should be your upper limit of carbohydrates. But also pay attention when you're training and you have a refeed day, how do those carbs make you look? And when do they impact your body? If you take in 600 grams of carbohydrate, do you look better the following day? Well, that's a data point. If you take in 400 grams of carbohydrates, do you look smooth the next day? Also a data point. So keeping a detailed log to determine your upper carbohydrate level is essential. Now, when you start taking them is also very individual. Some people can wait until the day before the show. Other people need to start adding carbs two or three days out. Some people need to add the carbs in for two or three days and then switch back to a high protein diet if they took in too many. Again, very individual. This also brings us back to those data points. When you're dieting down for a show and you're checking your condition in the mirror the next day, always monitor how you look the morning, the afternoon, and the evening after high carbohydrate meals. Also, check how you look two days after. What I found for myself, for example, is if I had a really high carb day, 450, 500 grams of carbs as a refeed, the very next day, no matter what I did or how I tolerated, I looked a little squishy and smooth. But if I went back to lower carbohydrates and higher protein intake that day, the day after, I looked incredible. So for me, my peaking strategy was always to have my carb up meal on Thursday, where Friday I would switch back to more moderate carbohydrates or even lower carbohydrates and eating predominantly protein. And I looked harder and fuller on Saturday for a show. This is what I learned from my data. I had other clients turn around and they looked the very best the next day. I had still others who could tolerate two days of high carbohydrate intake, again, not going crazy. If their upper limit was 500 grams of carbohydrates, we carved up on 500 grams of carbohydrates for two days. Now, some people are going to say that seems a little light sully. I know I can fill out more. Yes, that is true. But would you rather take in too many and come in too full and squishy? Or would you rather come in a little bit less full and tighter? Remember, in bodybuilding, for that category, tighter wins. Where for classic physique, the definition, the emphasis isn't quite as high. So maybe you could tolerate a little bit more and lean on the fuller end. Men's physique, you're going to want to come in harder. And then you could go on solid and down the line. Bikini being the least lean of all the categories, you still have to have clean delineation between all your major muscle groups, and you should show fullness in the glutes without having too much spillover or softness. So you might want to be able to go a little bit over. Where a women's physique competitor, it's always about leanness and rippness. So again, take what category you're competing in into consideration as well. Always, always, always, always make sure you do a test run two or three weeks out to get your timing perfectly. Never turn around and just trust data that's given to you off the street. Make sure you have the test run. How about training? Well, I was a little bit different in my training approaches when I started really working good peaks for shows. I trained all the way up pretty much the Thursday before a show, including leg training. I always found that my legs looked good and leaner on stage if I was training my legs all the way through than if I stopped training my legs two weeks out, which seemed to be a popular misnomer of the time. But my how I trained them was different. I did far more giant sets, supersets, fast paced training, much more higher rep with a lot of peak contraction. I would skip the bench presses in favor of cable crossovers and I would hold the peak contraction for two to three seconds. I would eliminate the squats, I would do leg extension, I would hold the leg extension out for two or three seconds. This peak contraction mimicked posing to a good extent. So I would train so I would change the training more away from hypertrophy type stuff and more into a faster-paced peak contraction type working out. It seemed to really, really shuttle the carbs where I really wanted to have them when I'd have my high carb meals. I would take Friday off of training and just pose and then hit the show. This worked very well for my clients too. Now, cardio. I would do cardio all the way through as well. However, I wouldn't do any hip cardio the last week or so before the show, but I wouldn't stop cardio totally. I would still do walking or low intensity cardio. Now, again, it varies person to person. I had some clients who did HIIT cardio right up to the day before the show. I had some clients who didn't do HIIT cardio or high-intensity cardio throughout the entire training program. It again is variable. If you haven't been doing HIT and all of a sudden tells you to do high-intensity interval training or HIT cardio the last week, don't. You're changing a variable that could change the outcome. Keep everything the same. Just cut back on the higher intensity cardio. And I also cut back on my time. If I was doing 30 minutes of cardio, I cut back to 15 or 20. What I always like to replace that time with was posing. Posing, posing, posing. Just like the peak contractions that you are getting in your workouts, the posing is going to help make the body look a little bit harder as well. That peak contraction really, really works. Now let's talk about the carb depletion days. The point is you're trying to deplete the carbs, but you're not trying to deplete the muscles of what they really, really need. So for me, cutting back on carbs was just cutting back on carbs. So I would always do that higher carb day Wednesday and Thursday, sometimes just Thursday. And then I would go back on Friday to 50% of what my normal carbs were. So if I was taking in 200 grams of carbohydrate, my lower carb days were about 100 grams. For clients that I had that were dieting on the lower end of carbs, let's say 100 to 150, I would have them go no lower than 50. Listen, if you're a severe endomorph with a lot of insulin sensitivity issues, there is little difference in the body between eating 50 grams a day or zero. And I'm going to tell you, 50 grams is a lot much easier to tolerate than zero. But again, it is all based individually on what you are taking. You're not varying too far from your baseline. So 50% of what you would normally take in on a daily intake for carbs on your low day, and about what you take in on a refeed on your higher day. I found those to be the best parameters. Again, just subtle little changes. Now we're going to talk about water, water, water. And one word, do not eliminate water. The body is 70% water and muscle is 70%, 75%. If you're as little as 2% dehydrated, it's going to impact your muscle hardness and your density. Now just look how full and hard you look the week before a show. And then you see people cut back on their water and they look so flat and they can't get a pump. It's because they are 2% or more dehydrated. If you want to look full and vascular on stage, you should not be eliminating your water. Your muscles are filled with water and a fully hydrated muscle is dense, hard, and ripped. When you're full of water, it goes into the muscle cell, it follows the carbs in, and it makes you harder and it makes you fuller. If you try to dry out by drinking too little water or have little or no water, it is going to release aldosterone. And that aldosterone is going to cause the water to be stored as interintestinal plasma. Or what that means is under the skin. Because the body knows it doesn't have enough, it's going to want to retain what it has. It's only going to store there when your brain signals your body that you're dehydrated. So if you dehydrate yourself, you risk paralyzing your condition. Now, I've seen a lot of competitors get away with this for a show. And then they try it again and it doesn't work. And they go back and they try it again, it doesn't work. And they try it again, it doesn't work. And they're still sticking a fork in a light socket. Just because it didn't shock you the first time, because the power was off in the house, once the power is turned on and your body recognizes it, it's going to signal and you are going to look soft and squishy. So one to two days without water, awful. Aldosterone is going to begin to be released in as little as 12 to 14 hours after it identifies a water shortage. So 12 hours is your critical timeline. I've never had a client cut out water. I never cut it out myself once I got smart, but I did have them reduce the fluid intake for that last 12 hours. Now, this was a slight reduction, not an all-out cut. Never cut it out completely. All I did was reduce the amount of volume of water that I would drink in the morning between the show up to the pre-judging by about 50%. So let's say I drank three 16 ounce bottles of water during that time frame on an average day. I would get up and I would maintain one, maybe one and a half of those until after prejudging. After prejudging, I went right back to normal water. Now most OCB shows are single sessions. You go on stage and you come off stage. And then you come out and do your routine and then you get your posing. And then if you have an overall pose down, it's done after that. So it makes the timing easier. What makes the timing harder is where you are placed in the rotation of the show. So remember that 12-hour rule. If you get up at 8 in the morning and you're not going to be on stage until 8 in the evening, then you start your water reduction then. But about 12 hours should be your maximum. Now, in an extreme situation, I've seen people go to 14 or 15 hours. But anything other than that, you really risk that aldosterone trigger and coming in squishy. Now let's talk about sodium. I always had my clients keep sodium at normal levels all the way through their diet. If the water is high, excess sodium is going to be flushed right out. And now an average person needs two to three grams of sodium per day. And bodybuilders, you're not normal people. You can tolerate more. Much more if you're losing a lot through sweat and hard cardio, working hard job out in the summertime heat. If you live in a hot climate, even more is recommended. How do you find out what works for you? Listen, once you have your baseline diet set up and you're salting your food with sea salt, not the iodized table salt, sea salt, once you find out how much taking in for sodium, how many milligrams that is, you just maintain that. And that is pretty much all you need to do. If it's four grams a day, it's four grams a day. If it's three grams a day, it's three grams a day. All you got to do is maintain that all the way through your diet. And then to subtly change it, all I would do was lower my sodium slightly the day before the show. That's it, slightly. If I was taking four grams of sodium per day, I would just cut it down to two, but I never eliminate it. Now, sodium and potassium are responsible for the balance of fluids inside your muscle. You can't influence one without affecting the other. When you drop your sodium, there's going to be a corresponding drop in blood pressure, and plasmas push out of the vascular system and into the skin. The kidneys are going to do what they can to prevent more sodium from being eliminated, and the sodium will be reabsorbed in the serum sodium levels, are going to remain unchanged. This is the homeostasis of your body. It means you cut the sodium down, it's going to stop eliminating sodium through your urine, and it's going to store it right where you don't want it stored with the excess water, any remaining water it has in the body, in the skin. In essence, your body stops eliminating it. Your dolsterone levels are going to increase the blood plasma levels to decline and can use, say, soft and squishy. Now, as for potassium, one of the other things I told you about, I had to take the additional potassium, one per hour, 99 milligrams, no sodium. Well, guess what that did? It changed the ratio. Your body wants to maintain a ratio of sodium and potassium about two to one. So now if you suddenly eliminate your sodium and you quadruple and you maximize your potassium, your body is going to recognize that as a signal that it needs to retain and hold on to the salt, retain fluid, and go back into that squishy phase. So if you're ever told to start adding potassium into the diet, make sure you are not. Not deviating from that two to one ratio. It's a rough ratio, but about a two to one. So if you're suddenly going to be taking in a gram and a gram and a half of potassium every hour throughout the day, or 99 milligrams, every hour you're going to be taking in 10, 12 grams of potassium by the end of the day, and you catch your sodium out. Even if you didn't catch your sodium out, you skewed the balance it increases your risk of aldosterone. Aldosterone, aldolesterone, aldosterone. Googling. Gemini AI it's double-check my fact. So when you get some peeking advice from somebody, trust them, but also verify. Don't just verify with Gemini. In previous episodes, we talked about all the different resources you can use to double check information. So trust but verify. And that brings me to the next topic: trust but verify. We live in a society where information is at our fingertips. I am now a firm believer that AI is a good tool. Do I still think it's out to take the world over? Maybe. Jury is still out on that. I hope it's not a Terminator situation, but it is a situation where we have floods of information that we can quickly get hold of somewhere on the internet. We also have advisors and experts and coaches throughout social media. Everybody's got information that they're trying to present to you. You can trust it, but you should verify it. Always verify the information you're getting. No matter if it has something to do with bodybuilding, other human beings, something happening in the world, trust it, but verify. Always verify through neutral sources. Don't turn around and just verify some social media by other people that are on social media. Try to find a neutral source. If it has something to do with the human body or training, remember PubMed.gov is a great resource for you that we can look at the abstracts from thousands and thousands and thousands of different studies that they did. You can Gemini AI it, but ask Gemini to include the links to the resources it used to make its conclusion. I have found with AI, there are times when you click those links and they're going to be turning around and utilizing for verification something that was a flawed study. A flawed study would be when a supplement company says that chromium is going to increase muscle by 10 pounds as soon as you take brand X of chromium, and then brand X sponsors a test, and then they don't have any parameters in the study test, and they're using all PED using athletes that have been off PEDs for 10 weeks and they're going back on them and giving them chromium, and all of a sudden they gain 10 pounds of muscle. So they're fire, it verifies it, and AI picks up on that, and then it gives you that as a resource. So go back in and verify those links. So my biggest, biggest thing I can tell you to do is to trust, trust the people who tell you things, but verify the information they provide you. From newscasters to social media influencers to your friends to even your coaches, trust but verify because you might learn something you didn't know. Most people don't give you bad information because they're bad people. Most people give you bad information because they trusted a source and never verified it. So that's my lesson today. Trust but verify what you hear. And thank you again for taking part in Natural Edge. It really brings me a lot of joy to do these episodes and to run into people throughout the contest spectrum that appreciate the content that we're trying to bring forward. So please follow our Natural Edge, follow us on Triceps. If you have any ideas of topics that we can do, bring them up. Share your experiences with us down in the comments. And as always, stay humble, stay hungry, and stay natural. Selly out