Physique Clinic Suggestions

Training Bodybuilding
1

I have been reading and participating on this site off and on for years. I think I started reading material here in 1999 when I was looking for information to fill the void MM2K left when it transformed itself.

Well, over the past week I’ve finished reading most of the Physique Clinics, and I want to say that this concept is such a great addition to the site. It is great to see writers on the site putting their knowledge to work on different individuals. The transformations are inspirational – and I’m a person who’s mostly immune to inspiration.

It looks like they are going to continue with the participants who are willing, and I’m glad to see this because honestly, tons of people I know have dieted for a couple months and lost fat, but few have stuck with it until they look really good. I would like to see that happen.

I am much more interested to see whether and how a person who’s already lost 30 or 50 pounds will deal with sticking points or plateaus in their progress. I want to see these guys and gals get ripped because I know people who have lost 30 or 50 pounds on NutriSystem, but I’ve rarely seen someone go from fat to ripped. I hope that T-Nation will continue with the ladies as well as the guys.

One thing that would improve the PC, though, is more and better markers of progress along the way. Obviously they thought of this as they went along and started weighing and taking pics more frequently. But why no BF%???

I have dieted a few times and wouldn’t dream of doing it without monitoring my progress with calipers. Pinch the fat and measure how thick it is! In my first diet attempts, I reached a point where I started losing muscle INSTEAD of fat. I would never have known this by just stepping on the scale. I had to INCREASE my calories to reverse the trend!

I have a SlimGuide caliper which cost about 20 bucks and was recommended by Dan Duchaine years ago. I don’t care whether it is accurate or not, just that I’m getting a reliable indicator of progress.

To monitor progress, I firmly believe in stepping on the scale EVERY DAY and pinching fat ONCE A WEEK. I weigh every day because there are large fluctuations from day to day. If you weigh just once a week, you might be getting a low point in the fluctuation on week 1, and a high point in the fluctuation on week 2, leading to you believe incorrectly that you haven’t progressed. Or vice versa.

I also believe in charting your scale weight along with a moving average to smooth out the variation and see the true trend of your fat loss. I posted about this one time and people were like, Man, that’s way too complicated. Hey, it is NOT complicated and it’s REALLY helpful both to monitor your true progress and motivate you. For a moving average, you just average your weight from the past 3 or 4 days.

I am attaching a chart of doing this with a training partner. Notice on the chart that the weekly scale weight (red triangle) is unreliable due to water weight fluctuations, especially on weeks 2 and 5. This is real data. My partner on week 5 would have been discouraged from making no progress, but she actually had lost about 4 pounds that week! The purple moving average line tells the true story.

The purple line also shows a plateau in progress between 11/11 and 11/19 - half a pound in 9 days. Notice the dramatic progress after that though? That came from changing the diet because of noticing the plateau. Using only weekly weight numbers, that change would have come 2 weeks later than it was needed. Superior feedback leads to superior progress…

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Here’s the chart.

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[quote]andersons wrote:
Here’s the chart.[/quote]

I’ll admit this is interesting, but it’s the wrong decade to be moving down and this would be a gigantic distraction that would lead to poorly informed decisions for anybody not a few weeks from a contest and maybe even for them in my opinion.

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I don’t know what you mean.

This is tracking progress toward a goal.

It’s a lot easier and faster to reach the goal if you know how you are doing.

For example, a number of the Physique Clinic participants are working to lose fat. Gauging progress week to week with pics, measurements, and scale weight is OK. But there’s still a lot of guessing, especially for the females, for example, that maybe they have gained a pound or two of muscle mass and lost a few pounds of fat when the scale hasn’t changed that much. This is a possibility, but if you don’t measure it, you don’t know.

If your goal is to lose fat, it is good to know how much fat you are losing, if any. The only way to know is to estimate your bodyfat periodically. The cheapest and easiest way I know to do this is with calipers. But you also need to know your weight. And a 4-day average is a better estimate of your weight than any single day’s reading, which is highly variable.

I would actually think that experienced competitors would need LESS of this kind of feedback because they’d fluctuate between low bodyfat levels and be more experienced and objective about evaluating their physiques visually.

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nice work man…it looks like you put some work into this