Doing Your First Bodybuilding Competition

Entering into your first bodybuilding competition can be a super-involved, but rewarding process. You need to make sure your diet, training, mental preparation, and posing are all locked in over time. It’s a huge upgrade from just recreationally going to the gym and eating right.

As you may already know, nutrition is everything. You are going to have periods of bulking and cutting to put on muscle and then peel away fat, so you are as conditioned on stage as possible. This may also involve manipulating carbohydrates and sodium levels as you get closer to show day to make sure you are looking as full as possible to present your best body on stage. When in a surplus, make sure you are eating 1 gram per pound of bodyweight in protein. I would recommend a higher carb intake, as research has shown a higher carb approach may be slightly more optimal when it comes to completely optimizing muscle gain for the purposes of doing a bodybuilding competition. When you enter a diet mode, you want to make sure your diet keeps your protein at that same rate, if not higher, to help maintain all that hard earned muscle as you restrict calories elsewhere.

As mentioned before, timing is everything when it comes to the actual competition. Give yourself AMPLE time to diet down. You are better off dieting longer to make sure you peel away all the fat versus shortening it for the hopes of gaining slightly more muscle. An extra 4 weeks of bulking won’t add that much muscle compared to how much fat can be lost in that same time frame. You want to be practicing posing throughout your prep. I have beaten guys who looked better than me simply because I knew how to create angles that made me look bigger than them on stage. You want to play around with different carb sources and water depletion techniques, to see what allows you to present the best physique on stage. Eat too many carbs and you can look soft come show day. Eat too little and you may look too flat. One thing to accept early on is, chances are you won’t absolutely nail down your conditioning routine in your first show. It can take several shows to figure out the recipe that fits your body the best.

Building up to higher volume usually makes more sense during the off season. You are trying to maximize muscle growth overall, and studies show more sets per muscle tend to do slightly better than less sets. As you diet down for a show, you are no longer trying to build muscle. Bring the volume down, and focus on keeping the intensity high but let the fat fall off. Allow time for recovery by not doing too much work in the gym. We want to stay injury free.