Been adding carbs and calories for the last few weeks and weight has finally stopped dropping, so barring any unexpected improvements this is probably my final submission.
I planned to trim my body hair, get a tan, learn how to pose, and do some kind of peak… but then I didn’t do any of those things and just took the pictures instead. So, this is what I look like a few hours after eating breakfast on a normal day. No pump, no water manipulation, etc.
The plan is to add calories and let my body recover for a while while adding some much-needed size, then make another push for crazy leanness once things have had a chance to normalize.
Left it in the hands of the coach I’m working with. He doesn’t know about the contest and I honestly didn’t start leaning out for the contest; it was just convenient timing. It was cool to see other guys going through the same thing I was, so I started posting updates. If my ultimate goal was to be more competitive, I definitely could have kept pushing. But he felt it best for me and my long term goals to start reversing a couple weeks ago, so that’s what I did.
That said, I’ve still lost an average of 1 lb per week during the “reverse dieting” process, so maybe that WAS the best move for my short term progress as well. And maybe I’ll still get leaner through the end of May. No way to tell right now, but I figured Id throw these up in case I didn’t. haha.
This goes the same for me. I was doing this anyway, and the timing was convenient. I’m noticing a bit of the same thing with the reverse dieting. I was adding calories in the last few weeks and a big bump the past few days. I’ve gone from 2300 a few weeks back calories to 2700 now and my weight went up a little at first, but now it’s coming back down. Even my body fat has dropped a bit more according to 3 site calipers.
I’ll post some videos soon, but wanted to share that I took my first win in a strongman competition this weekend. So that is essentially my own ‘transformation’. Details are in my log if anyone wants to read about it. I"ll take some physique photos this week as well to wrap this thing up. I’m as lean and as strong as I’ve ever been, and I’ve become so much more competent in an array of strongman events than I was before this year.
Thanks for the support guys. I would like some advice.
First, weaknesses/ strengths. What should I work on?
Second, reversing out of the diet. Right now I’m just slowly adding in 1-200 calories each week and keeping the macro percentages about the same. I’m actually getting hungrier though and my weight seems to be going down so I’m wondering if I’m going too slowly.
Last, and this might be a bit of a leading question, I was wondering how far from looking decent at a show some of the competitors here think I am and how much more dieting I would need.
That’s similar to what I’ve been doing, except much faster. I added 100 cal/day in protein six weeks ago, then stuck at that. I’ll up it another 100-150 cal/day via a tablespoon of peanut butter in six weeks. That said, the moment I added that 100 cal my weight evened out even though I did get leaner, so if you’re still dropping you’re very probably on the right track.
That sounds like the old “throwing logs on the fire” analogy in action. I know its contradictory to what you’re doing, but boy would some people love to have that problem. Thats like a metabolic sweet spot.
