Are you interested in participating in a figure competition or are you currently prepping for a figure competition? Dieting to lose fat and keep your hard-earned lean muscle to enter a figure contest takes strong mental focus, as well as a well structured contest prep diet.
Often times, figure competitors set out with good intentions to diet down their body fat, yet end up cutting calories far too low, over-training, and doing far too much cardio too soon.
Such costly and ill thought out decisions just leads to a total train wreck and eventually burn out.
In this article I'll give you some tips and guidelines on how to avoid the figure competitor diet burnout.
When you start your pre-contest diet, give yourself enough time to diet down slowly.
This ensures you lose body fat and not your lean muscle mass.
Every figure competitor's dieting time will vary.
Some will diet for 16-20 weeks and others can get by with dieting for 12-14 weeks.
Your dieting time is based on how much body fat you need to lose.
When you begin your figure competition diet, start off with enough calories to support your training and nutrition.
Staring your diet with too low calories leaves you no room to lower calories when that time comes.
A good starting point is to multiply your total body weight by 12 to 14 for a starting baseline diet.
Once you are on your established baseline diet you can start deducting calories when needed to keep excelling fat loss.
Don't go on a low-carb diet right out the gate.
The figure competition dieting process involves a bit of skill and diet manipulation.
One easy and very effective way to use food to burn fat is to cycle your carbs.
The trick behind carb-cycling is you feed your body a set number of carbs every day for about 2 weeks, then take away the last carb meal and run that format for 2 weeks.
Continue to remove the last carb meal every 2 weeks and watch the body fat just melt off.
Cheat girlfriend.
Yep, you heard me.
Take a scheduled cheat day once a week to pull your body out of the routine of strict dieting.
This cheat day serves as a surplus of calories that your body isn't use to.
When your body suddenly gets this surplus of calories, it increases your metabolism and you start burning body fat again.
Be careful...
Far too many figure competitors tend to abuse cheat day by letting it extend into a cheat weekend.
Keep your cheat day limited to just ONE DAY and it will work wonders.
These are just a few tips and tricks to prevent that all too familiar figure competition diet burnout!