Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

interesting points on sacrifice etc

i often ask myself when reading these things why people push everything so hard when they could probably get 75% the results on 50% of the effort

so it makes sense that you don't see at as a sacrifice and that helps me better understand your motivation to push small edges

The normal Chinese life is to never ever cook and order delivery for 80% of your meals and then maybe have lunch in person Mo-Fri on workdays and literally never cook, especially women because cooking is a male role in this culture. I ate like that for a while and honestly it cost a lot of money, I felt like crap, and my body composition was crap because the advice of "just get enough protein 1g perlb of bodyweight and make sure you're in a surplus if you want to grow and in a deficit if you want to cut" is stupid and wrong. Micronutrition, blood sugar variability, and satiety actually matter a ton. Maybe when you're dealing with turbofatty MLYLT types this advice is actually okay because their dietary choices are just that utterly ******ed. But I still managed to get pretty over-fat eating that way and when I would cut on relatively high protein restaurant food it just wasn't quite the same. It was also pretty expensive and nothing tasted all that good. Since I started eating like a bodybuilder and making nearly all of my own food, it frankly tastes better than how I was eating before, I feel a lot better because my micronutrition/blood sugar/satiety needs are more attended to, and I save a lot of money eating this way.

There are skinnyfat girls who will eat less than 30g of protein in total per day and their diet consists of a high sugar cream topped latte+croissant for breakfast, a milk tea and sweet bread for lunch, and then a bowl of oily beef noodle soup for dinner. And they wonder why they're in the hospital on an IV from a "cold" 4x per year and blame their foreign male colleague, guythatgoestodagym, for insisting on turning on the air conditioning in the office on a 28c day. He's such a ****ing moron, everyone knows that excessive coldness causes respiratory illnesses. And these people have unironically criticized me for eating unhealthy because I "eat too much meats and fruits and not enough vegetables".

A "normal" American diet isn't that much better, but it is measurably better than a normal Chinese diet and typically most middle class families are cooking at home or eating packaged food at home like 70-80% of their meals which can run a huge range in terms of health, body composition, and tastiness.

I assume it's partly androgen related, but my ability to digest saturated fats has drastically decreased with age and keeping fats limited to sources like almond butter/guac/trace fats in chicken has made my stomach and digestion infinitely better. I still have the occasional steak or whatever, but I couldn't handle a high 120g+ fat intake daily now which is again very normal in both Chinese or American diets.

I will never do anything but a relatively low fat, high complex carb, moderate protein diet even after I retire from bbing. Protein might fall from 1.2g/lb to around 0.8g, but yeah potato, sweet potato, berry, apple, kiwi, banana, oats, honey, dates, raisins as main carb sources year round with the occasional rice products, bread, and fat-free candy here and there.

I probably would benefit from including more sea food but frankly I haven't put as much effort into learning ways to make it taste good or how to prep it in bulk and it tends to be much more expensive than chicken breast/tenderloin.

carbed up today. The difference between flat and full was larger than I expected.

one of my best friends and clients

I find it kinda wild how vilified the SAD diet is. When the diet is globally fairly normie except people just eat a **** ton of it. France lives on buttery pastries with jam for breakfast. Objectively a tablespoon of butter, processed flour and sugar is not what any reasonable person would constitute a "healthy" meal, but when you eat a 300-400 calories instead of the ~1200 on a normal American breakfast at a diner you're shockingly gonna be able to fit in a mid-afternoon pastry or ice cream or whatever else.

Authentic Chinese food is just dismal and invariably Chinese people defending Chinese food point to Westernized versions of their own cuisine as "ideal" and "authentic". But this rant has been had many times.

One of my current faves is how many people genuinely think the food quality in the EU is somehow superior to the US and are blatantly ignorant of food laws and agriculture practices in both areas. If you wanna debate protein content in flour due to the general type of wheat being grown, sure that is a reasonable argument and why you aren't going to be making bread the same way as in America as in Europe. But Europe was woefully lacking in food safety laws before the reformed the practice in the 90s/00s, but enforcement is still lax. (lol Poland) However, if you're out eating at a random place, the portion sizes are vastly smaller and the amount of high fat dairy products (cream/cheese) is generally way way less than you'll see in America.

Wrt seafood, blackened is an easy prep that you can learn to make pretty easily (can also do this with chicken). I usually grill shrimp with a little seasoned salt (Tonys more spice is my personal goto). But if you aren't in a coastal area with cheap seafood, I wouldn't bother. Back home adding shrimp skewers to a steak dinner was a cheaper and cost effective option. In Eurotardia its substantially more expensive.

You're completely correct. The SAD isn't really that bad compared to many places in Asia, including my current country. It kinda MOGS a place like Malaysia and many parts of India in terms of balanced micronutrition and adequate protein. I mean sure Chinese do eat more fruits and vegetables, but about 1/3rd the protein, 50% more sugar, much less dairy, and quadrouple the high fat oils (I don't know **** about seed or synthetic oils and their health impacts, only that tons of fats from these oils is definitely very calorically dense and obesity inducing). The average Chinese female might be more like 1/5th as much protein; they are often terrified of meat and think it causes body hair growth and "excessive body hot energy".

With the SAD like you said, it's mostly excessive portion sizes and some donkery with fats. But more critically, urban design focused on driving and much lower average step counts than a place like France or China explains the discrepancy in obesity, not food choices. If Chinese drove as much as Americans and walked as little as they did with the same level of disposable income, they'd be far more obese than Americans.

My 2 rest/deload/refeed days are over and for the first time I feel this incredible aggression and sort of "going to war" energy typical of a bodybuilder in prep rather than my normal jolly happy go lucky jovial energy and I find this unsettling and hope it ends soon. 4 more weeks of aggressive fat loss and yeah I guess its hard enough to mandate some aggression to get through it. I will need to dial back starting on Aug 19 when I go back to work; probably slightly up carbs and drop steps to around 15k to not be walking around basically cognitively impaired and lethargic all of the time.

I had some cod at a meal prep place just 300m from my house and I'm going to buy some (expensive, $20/kg vs 4$/kg for chicken tenderloin) and experiment with it TODAY. Probably just pan fry in my stainless steal with a home-made blackened seasoning. YEah I actually have a meal prep place 300m from my house but it's designed for small people and I haven't asked about custom meals. i probably will in offseason but right now I'll keep more variables consistent.

https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/american-industrialization-and-china

bronzeagepervert

American Industrialization and China

-Read this "based" essay comparing Chinese industrialization to US, and why Trump tariffs and shitting on Europe/Japan isn't going to make anything better. Thought it was interesting.

I've heard a lot of negative things about this Bronze Age Pervert guy from normiecore sources, which means he's probably very based. I read it but I need time to collect my thoughts; as I've alluded to earlier my cognition is at about 50% of normal this deep into an extended deficit. The tweet-thread he quotes from his thread is just a rapid fire assault of BASED statements though. Tactical nuke.

"In all this debate, the poor quality of America’s “elite” or managerial class, which is unserious and self-righteous, is maybe the biggest weakness, and it’s again hard to decide if this is a cultural, social, economic or political problem" Definitely true in my first hand experience. Elite here are so much less concerned with status jockeying and more with pure pragmatic realism. To the extent they do play status games, it's more based on competence and materialistic pursuits, whereas in America it's holding the "right" opinions and faux-compassion to and identification with one's lessers as a tool to broadcast one's superior status.

Thank you for sharing, Mr. Dunyian.

Unrelated to the above, but there are some truly incompetent bodybuilders with terrible physiques and poor competition results making very good livings as coaches and many are much younger than me. I'm deficient in social media communication. This is not a point of pride or a way of broadcasting "bro I'm so smart I can't even communicate with normies bro"; this is a DEFICIENCY that needs to be rectified. If I can earn master's degrees in hard subjects and learn challenging second languages, I can learn how to make posts on various social media networks that normal people find compelling. And ultimately what i'm selling, my coaching services, are something I believe in and have real conviction in. Just being authentic and spam posting without much stylistic change to reach a broader audience may be enough.

My foray onto XHS was a complete disaster; I didn't quite understand the algorithm and hash tags changing the rules of what is okay to posts. Chinese social media has some very confusing and counterintuitive community guideline standards that get heavily differentiated based on the niche you're targetting. You have to hashtags things in very specific ways to be allowed to post anything in posing trunks/showing lower body or you are gonna get fiecked by the algorithm permanently. So that's over already. IG I haven't even started trying or posting my own clients; I do plan on doing so immediately after my next competition results/photos/videos are done which will mean mid september.

But here's an example of somebody who has managed to do it despite frankly being an awful bodybuilding athlete and a very mediocre coach who's best results don't hold a candle to my clients despite a much larger number of opportunities to nail it with clients: https://www.instagram.com/_lhtraining/

Raw and Revive are enormous brands (cbum, if you don't know who that is kindly leave my log forever), and even getting a discount code sponsorship from them is a very big deal in this industry and means you're gaining a lot of traction. But he's very underwhelming as a bodybuilder, permabulker, and has just mediocre client before and afters. I'm not hating; he's obviously VERY good at the marketing/promotion end of things even if he doesn't understand how to actually coach or bodybuild himself (yet). Except that 57 year old female competitor, he did a great job there.

AFAICT this is the only thread Yugo posts in or follows. This message is mainly for him; but I just finished a second reread of the Aspect Emperor series and thoroughly enjoyed it. (I have read the Prince of Nothing series which is a much easier read 4 times already) Even picked up on a few things I missed the first time, such as Kelhus being possessed (switched?) with Ajokli right before he was killed, and the whole backstory of The Ark which I kind of glazed over on the first read. Very bummed Bakker never wrote the last trilogy, but it is what it is.

I am currently reading a new Malazan book, supposedly centered on Karsa, that takes place after Book of the Fallen. But I am 35% through and it is a very slow burn and Karsa hasn't been introduced, so hoping things pick up.

I think I missed this post at the time. I am 100% on both these points.

I have been following point 1 for about 3 years now and my life is so much better. News is invariably negative, political debate is generally toxic and the people who are passionate about it are boring and delusional.

It occasionally means I have to bluff a little if I'm somehow sucked into a conversation about current affairs with a client who I can't shut down immediately, but that's easy enough. And it gives me an opportunity to immediately shut down any 1 on 1 politics conversations which friends initiate 'sorry, I don't watch the news. not interested in it at all' and to walk away if there is a group discussing issues/topics of the day.

it just seems to be such a hugely -ev pursuit to follow, care about and try to be active in it. You will achieve nothing and distract yourself from more constructive or enjoyable ways to spend your time.

Not true, I thought of an example. My job last year... every international curriculum school in China has "the local staff" and "the foreign staff" and there's always a bit of division/separation between them. They are always paid differently, but at my previous school the gap was very small, where local staff only earn about 15% less but they are owed much more generous benefits so it's kind of a wash. They tend to be cliquish and implicitly segregated in terms of social circle, language, how students relate to them. Morning meetings I'm consistently seated on the side with "the local staff" and when the principal is addressing "the local staff" he's clearly including me in that group instead of "the foreign staff". "We really need to create an immersive English only environment, and the responsibility for this largely falls on the local staff including GuyThatGoestoDaGym as he's very good in Chinese".

It was a rare instance of a foreigner being so culturally integrated as to be considered among "the local staff" and treated as such by colleagues/students. This became problematic as students often refused to engage with me in English and would default to Chinese. Many that I didn't have as students in my class did not even know my English name and referred to me by my Chinese name. A handful of the younger kdis didn't even know my nationality and had just assumed I'd be raised in northern China based on my accent.

But this would never ever happen among less educated Chinese where race dominates behaviour/culture/language.

There's social punishments for being a fascist in 2025. There are no similar punishments for being a communist or a cultural communist denying the influence of genetics on cognition and behaviour and clinging to broken blank slatist theories and using this to justify totalitarian state control (look at the UK now... dystopian...). I think we should treat both groups with severity as both are bad and have large death tolls historically.

In reference to the first paragraph, just because average everyday people's views are changing about something, doesn't mean changing views are good or will lead toward a good outcome. As BAP articulates, we need better educated elites, not embracing low human value uneducated right wing populism.

The problem isn't necessarily someone saying "The Nazis weren't that bad." The problem is the people saying it right now have a lot of bad ideas baked in; like isolationism, tariffs, anti-immigration, racism for the sake of racism, etc. Even if you think MTG has the correct stance on Gaza, pretty much all of her other positions, which are much more relevant to our everyday lives, suck horribly.

In reference to your second paragraph, if China refuses to address an issue at all and engages in super aggressive censorship, allowing outside agencies to construct a narrative in the vacuum, that is kind of on them.

Just as it is generally regarded that if Israel didn't want Hamas, Al Jazeera to control the narrative of what is going on in Gaza, they should have let journalists in themselves.

Also, I feel I am pretty tuned into what the zeitgeist, especially as it pertains to mainstream press. And I am not sure where you are getting the “we are being lied to about what life in china is like” narrative.

I don’t think our media/elites talk at all about what life in china is like, good or bad. Or talk poorly about Chinese people/culture at all generally.

Even right wing racist social media that is always taking shots at Africa, India, Israel etc. is benign when it comes to china.

Our elites and MSM are critical of the CCP itself for being authoritarian, aligning with other authoritarian nations like Russia and Iran, and generally having an adversarial foreign policy. it doesn’t go a whole lot further than that.

If fact, I have heard it argued we are not critical of china enough, to a fault. And that china basically declared war on us a long time ago, and have been pursuing this war vigorously, and we still haven’t noticed yet, to our detriment.

If i have been exposed to any negative opinions about china that isnt specially about their central govt, it probably came from you, Rickroll or someone else giving an insider view.

Sure, I have a salient example right here:

A youtube channel with 766k subscribers is more relevant than CNN/NBC to males aged 16-35. This is essentially 'mainstream' for that demographic. Also this idea of a social credit score... yeah that straight up doesn't exist, I have no idea how this tall tale gained so much traction.

It's literally a Chinese tourism company trying to advertise using western influencers and he paints it as some vast CCP propaganda conspiracy instead of some little local government agencies trying to get more tourism bucks by showing off some cool **** you can see in China.

Serpentza/China Uncensored/Laowhy86... all very mainstream sources. TV=/= mainstream among the young male demographic anymore.

I have certainly never heard of any of those channels. I think you might be over-estimating the penetration of anti-Chinese propaganda into the American populace. And underestimating the importance of the MSM. But I really don't know. Maybe Rickroll, who lives in NYC and may be more sensitive towards any anti-Chinese propaganda than I am, will chime in.

Maybe, but since you are old you probably don't quite understand just how vastly young people's media consumption differs from your generation's.

Ok. Fine.

You were also lied to about what happened in 1989 in Tiananmen square. There's a misunderstanding about shame in Asian culture broadly and specifically in China that allows American propagandists to spin a very untrue narrative about what happened because it is censored so heavily in China. Americans are very consistently lied to about what life in China is like even for average/poor Chinese people and assume that anyone who says anything positive about China is some paid CCP shill.

But I was responding specifically to the bolded, and the way you frame it, you make it seem your argument is we were lied to from history books and MSM. Not YouTube channels no one in this forum (except you and may Rickroll) have ever heard of.

And for good or bad they don't really teach history anymore in the US. Just social justice narratives about Nazis and other white people victimizing everyone else. I doubt most young Americans can tell you a single thing about Tiananmen square, except maybe they can recall that one picture of the tank rolling up on the dude.

And I hope you can appreciate the dissonance from stating US narratives are too harsh on China AND not harsh enough on Communism. China isn't very Communist right now; but for most of the later 20th century it was, and it is a pretty dark history, that you are correct has never been properly treated because of Western polite societies' general sympathy towards Communism and antipathy towards Asia.

oh, sorry about that. I see why I wrote that in a very confusing way. Your characterization about history teaching in the US today is alarming yet believable; I don't know anything about it not living there for so long.

You're also not wrong that we're not critical enough of communism generally and that ofc includes pre 1979 China.

oh getting things back on track to diet and stuff... one secret weapon that's helped a ton just the past few weeks and really accelerated fat loss progress was switching my chicken breast to chicken tenderloin. As I mentioned before, I literally couldn't get it where I was living previously. It has about 1/3rd the fat of chicken breast; that starts to add up to quite a bit of calories from fats when you're eating 800g of the stuff cooked measurement day in day out.

This diet I really have not reduced carbs by very much. The conventional wisdom is "fat loss is stalling, pull carbs down low, jack up protein, and eat enough fats for health" and that's what I did last year. You know what happened? despite being less lean than I am now, dieting for a shorter time period, and using that very harsh condemned labz Arsyn stim with the DMHA in it, I felt exhausted all the time and performance just tanked. I remember at least 2 leg days when i walked into the gym, warmed up, and exited within 20 minutes because the 15 minute walk to the gym and warming up was just that exhausting. And I probably don't need to remind anyone about how I felt doing keto for contest prep way back in 2022 and the disastrous results that produced in terms of both how I felt on a day to day basis and what it did to my physique.

Now on training days, I have whatever trace fats are in the chicken tenderloin, 2 sam's club 70g cups of guacamole which totals to around 24g of added fats, and thats it. Meanwhile I'm having 150g frozen raspberries topped with 20g honey post workout, cream of rice made with skim milk and even more frozen raspberries pre workout, and carbs probably in the neighborhood of 250-300. I feel great, I never feel so out of energy in the gym, my performance has been falling at a much slower rate than it was during last year's cut where I ate salmon every single day and had 0 carb meals with fats and a lean protein at least once a day, probably closer to 120-150g carb near the end. There's a lot of talk about getting enough dietary fat for basic health and function, and i"m sure in the long run that's true, but when you're 4 weeks out from a bodybuilding contest I think dropping carbs is not the move. You just end up feeling so shitty and that ends up effecting the output side of the CICO equation too much than had you droppedd equivalent calories from fats instead. It's like if you eat fats and protein, you are going to feel less hungry and more sated and have less insulin running around storing stuff as fat, but you also end up moving a lot less, not able to contract your muscles as hard in the gym, and overall may end up with both worse weight loss and less muscle maintained. There are those superfreaks who convert dietary fat into muscle glycogen extremely efficiently (Toney Freeman, Dave Palumbo), but there's a reason that in 2025, higher fats/lower carbs diets pretty much don't exist in top level bodybuilding anymore and nearly everyone is doing high carb moderate protein low fat. These diets are great for very high bodyfat normies trying to lose weight who are complete donks with food choices and need nomzies psychologically and are unwilling or unable to use a GLP, but they don't work well for athletes or bbers who are already very lean trying to get to exotically lean.

That said, there's a notable disadvantage in that your appetite and hunger throughout the day tends to be higher on the high carb approach. Even on retatrutide, my appetite is higher this year on higher carbs/lower fats than it was in 2022 on the keto diet. It's about the same as last year, but I also only dieted for 15 weeks last year vs just finishing up week 20 this year. Like my hunger levels this week are around what they were in weeks 14-15 of the diet last year.

On off days I'm still eating slightly less carbs around 175-200 and throwing in some whole egg meals, but I'm probably going to scrap that and just use the same dietary strategy. If you're got exogenous androgens, I think you can pull fats down very very low without really suffering any performance or body composition consequences, and any health stuff is probably chronic as opposed to acute and you can just add back some fats once you're done with the contest. Fats are really overrated in the context of a bodybuilding diet. Maybe something like keto or keto-esque low carb in the very beginning phases of a diet for appetite management; higher fats, less than 50g carbs, and moderate protein does have the advantage of nuking appetite. But this is bodybuilding and that's just gonna end up with low appetite and low energy/performance resulting in muscle loss because you can't generate enough training stimulus to maintain mass...

I am gonna go back to a legs push pull setup instead of upper lower and go to 5x/wk. My upper sessions are just too long now and I really need to bring up lats from the front in this next offseason growth phase. My chest/shoulders/tris are really strong so I can kinda whack off during push sessions and when I experimented with this setup earlier this summer, my push sessions could be finished in literally only 40 minutes. It will be 5x/wk on consecutive days, so that means everything gets hit twice per week for 2 weeks and then once per week one week, or on average it's about twice every 8 days. I like to do Mo-Fri and take Saturday/Sunday to decompress from bbing so it's not 24/7 all I do or think about. I am probably going to be able to finish a pull workout in less than 1 hour, but legs is gonna take at least 75 minutes even with all the arm and delt volume that preceded it with the modified upper/lower gone. I'll still throw in 2 sets of biceps pre leg day. I'm also reconstructing my leg day to emphasize glutes and hams and get them caught up to quads. Machine hip thrust, single leg extension, single leg ham curl, paused SLDL, RFESS. 2 sets each, all around 8-12, all to failure exception the sldl and RFESS where I'll shoot for an RPE 8 or so on the 2nd set.

After a lot of asperger-ing and pestering other coaches on ig and gathering data, I've decided my bulk/cut rythm will be 24 weeks in a surplus, of which 8 are very slow and controlled reverse dieting, and then 16 weeks in a deficit. It would mean approximately one show every 40 weeks instead of every year, and I think that's probably closer to optimal to get that resensitization and diet rebound with slightly higher frequency than one year while still allowing the bulks to be long enough to make meaningful progress. I could have gotten things done sooner this go-around if not for the job being so much gayer than every other teaching job I had and I'm already show ready at 4 weeks out. Let me clarify... at my teaching jobs I've had, I'm busy constantly, moving around, walking, and actually teaching classes. At last year's job I was sitting around, doing meaningless unhelpful tasks on my computer filling out paperwork and forms that serve no purpose, attending meetings, and attending very ****ing long assemblies. I'm hoping that this new job will be more like a normal one that has me... actually teaching classes as the main thing I do at work! That reduction in NEAT throughout my working day along with 2 diet breaks, one near the beginning and one recently when I moved here, made me diet for 20 weeks what I could have finished in 16.

Life plan is two more years teaching then move and go allin on coaching. Even if I fail I will still end up having a hell of a fun year just bodybuilding and enjoying life and it won't cost me more than 30k usd worth of expenses to live really well for a year in Thailand doing that.

June 2022, keto

August 2025

This is actually not that good of progress and there was a lot of ****ing around, setbacks, and gignatic bodybuilding leaks. If I could go back and coach myself, it could have been done in more like 18-20 months. It wasn't until November 2023 where I really got my head out of my ass and started actually bodybuilding for realsies. I am going to make much more progress in the next 3 year span. First pics were also with a pump in very favorable lighting. Second pics flat first thing out of bed fasted no pump in neutral objective lighting.

Jesus I may really accidentally win this pro card.... and like i've stated before, it doesn't matter if I don't. I need it ideally before I go allin on coaching, and if I don't get it in 2025 it's near guaranteed in 2026 just bringing this same conditioning and an extra 7-10lbs of muscle.

I hate to even post personal stuff/Vintage Evoken, but I'll grace you with a very brief one.

damn this isn't a vintage evoken post at all, this is white pill hopefuel redemption arc, boyos. Whatever the opposite of "emo" is.

I don't judge dong thong BBing competitions. But you definitely more thick solid and tight. (Anus unknown. Unsure from the origin of that comment what he was talking about being tight.)