If the plan is to carb, water or sodium load or
deplete pre-comp then you need to have trialled
these parts of your preparation months ago (we’ll
cover these in more detail later). Why you ask? Mainly to avoid unnecessary
muscle soreness, injury and total depletion of
muscle glycogen stores in an already calorically
reduced situation.
The week leading into a comp and the day of the
comp are NOT times to introduce anything new to
your life. Be organised 3. Avoid anything new that will make you sore,
including things like drop sets, super sets, giant
sets, resistance bands. When I say resistance
bands people I mean bands that go around the
bar not your knees.
Ideally, take holidays from work if you can, arrive at
the city or town you are competing in early,
familiarise yourself with accommodation, airport
transfers and venues for food and training before
you arrive. 4. Whether you split your quad and hamstring
workouts or not, aim to get your last leg
workout (I’d make it quads) on the Monday or
Tuesday at the latest (minimum 4 days before
comp day).
Familiarise yourself with the venue if possible, travel
time from the hotel if staying off site, the stage itself
if you can get access etc on the morning of the show
so you can be as stress free as possible.
A lot of information is provided with the WBFF
competitor packs and at registration however
there’s a lot happening on registration night so
definitely arrive at the venue with plenty of time to
familiarise your self with change rooms, hair and
makeup, tanning and the stage itself.
PEAK WEEK TRAINING TIPS
There’s some crazy old school folklore out there
about what to do and what not to do training wise in
the week leading up to the show. One of the
common recommendations is to load up with high
volume workouts to deplete glycogen early in the
week leading up to the Thursday (usually 48hrs)
before a show and then stop all training for the last
2-3 days of peak week. This may work for some
people but there’s no physiological reason why you
need to approach your training in peak week that
way.
My top 10 basic tips look like this:
1. If your usual routine is to train 5-6 days a week
then if it isn’t broken why try and fix it?
2. Avoid training to failure on sets during peak
week, especially if you don’t train that way
anyway. Drop the intensity of sets (as in its not a
time to be doing 5 x 5’s for max effort this week)
back by a few reps to maintain a muscle stimulus
without going to complete failure.