Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

Oh. And hot half-demon girl. This is peak culture.

Watched way too many KPDH related stuff in the last 24 hours.

Dun,

Atleast your kid isn't watching Free.

All,

So it was kinda weird watching vocal coach stuff doing analysis. I kinda just wanna be in the thing, since I'm so overtly a massive technical nerd all the other times. Then I watch this shit, and its like "That time at band camp... learning more scales."

I dunno. I'm sure this isn't a solitary experience. Anime is dope. EJAE is a dime for her age bracket and arguable a dime in open. Great to see her have success.

Legit super wholesome.

first day of work. Pointless ******ed meanings where people talk to me like I haven an IQ of 85. i'm assigned the fewest lessons I've ever had in my life at 14. This place is super strict about clocking in and out at the right times (???). I'm always early but yeah I find the prospect of being chastised for leaving at 4:27 instead of 4:30 daunting combined with today's idiocy.

But as long as students are good, I teach classes I care about, and there's not excessive micromanagement it could still be a great job. Either way I'm fantasizing about just doing this one more year and then going to coaching full time. We'll see how the year progresses; I haven't done basically anything with website/youtube in prep just from lacking mental energy.

Recap:

Lowest weight from stomach infection at 82.5kg dried out. I looked good and not depleted. Stabilized around 84kg rehydrated I really don't need to be carb loading much. It's funny because last year I needed to be full and flattened out so easily. I'm 90% convinced the difference is in the retatrutide; I just don't flatten out and actually look good when drier. So very moderate slow linear carb load and probably actually dry out with booze+dandelion root and lower carbohydrates (250ish) the night before.

So 101.5 at the start to 82.5... that's 19 ****ing kilograms in about 22.5 weeks.

What went well:
I could not have achieved better body composition with more steps, more cardio, or less food. Anything more and i"m probably just losing weight and getting softer, and i may have already reached that point but I have enough time to be refilling into the show. I worked as hard as I possibly could and then maybe a little more than enough to be slightly counterproductive.
I managed PEDs really well and found the exact right amount which wasn't too much or too little and had basically 0 side effects the entire way through except occasional digestive discomfort from yohimbine/alpha yohibmine. 0 from the roids or other stims though. not even a clen cramp..

Posing was overall very good

I was nice to people and never got irritable/angry/hangry like i have in previous diets. I had literally 1 rage moment when the janitor threw away my water bottle because I just reuse the 4.5rmb plastic bottled waters over and over again instead of buying a fancy one like a person with an upper middle class income. Plenty of internal rage moments i blamed on dieting/stims/tren, but no it was just legit ******ation at the British school

The upper/lower training program workedd great; I shoulda switched to it a long ass time ago. Exercise selection was excellent and I had almost 0 aches and pains not just during the prep but evne deep into offseason using larger training weights.

The "diet break" i took moving to Shenzhen I actually basically made fat loss progress on and my food choices were all super clean, if much more expensive than had I been cooking for myself but obv I had no kitchen for a week.

I didn't get tempted by any women and didn't take the multiple opportunities to **** up my prep in the name of chasing some skirt.

Excellent food choices with great satiety, micronutrition, and macronutrition and really consistent with meal prepping. The chicken tenderloin was def a game changer in lowering overall intake without lowering satiety much. Frozen Raspberries also a key player in satiety+micronutrition+fiber+emotional satisfaction b/c they taste so good.

What went poorly:
The pacing was off; I dropped too little weight in the earlier phases of the diet and too much toward the end. It was not so much bigorexia or hunger, just freaking out about losing strength when I should have been taking my own advice and realizing that when you're glycogen depleted your presses/sldls/compounds take a huge dive but it doesn't mean the muscle is weaker or smaller; it may even be gaining tissue and mass while the weights go down because of leverages/rom/training in a more depleted state.

I got a stomach infection a few days ago. I thought it was retatrutide related but I'd dropped it 3 weeks ago and was dealing with crazy high rebound appetite along with digestive symptoms and they got better within literally a day of anti-biotics. SIBO, H pylori, who tf knows. I'm re-adding lower dose of reta as the mental "food noise" has been totally overwhelming and constant the past 2 days in a rebound effect. Same thing with stomach infection happened last year without the retatrutide and in 2020 during a cut; when you're in a deficit a long time you are just very prone to those kinds of stomach bugs. Using a glp1 made it hard to differentiate between glp1 sides vs infection as they can feel the same.

I should have started leaner or started earlier I kinda reached the "alright I'm maxxed out" point around a week ago where it just became impossible to raise steps/cardio/posing/stimulants or lower food. At some point, you literally can't push harder to lose more fat but you don't have enough time to take a break, restore metabolic health, regain sensitivity to stims, and get back into the diet. That process will take literally 4-7 weeks, especially resensitizing to stimulants.

My posing practice was very "front loaded" where i was doing a **** ton early on and relatively less later on. I probably emphasized steps too much with 20k and posing too little, falling to as little as 10-12 minutes daily. It would have been better to do 14-15k steps per day but 40 minutes of posing instead. Next prep I hope to cap it off at 15k or maybe 17k; something about going from 17k to 20k is where it becomes 'too much'

I should have transitioned to training only 3x/wk as early as 10 weeks out, but really no later than 7 weeks out. More training was just a counterproductive way to burn calories and lower performance/muscle tissue maintenence while being unable to allocate that time and energy to posing/steps/meal prep

What's next: 8 week rebound phase of very slowly and carefully re-adding food, shooting for somewhere between 7-9kg of weight regained over that time period and slowly tapered off clen+caffeine+yohimbine. I will not be afraid to use retatrutide somewhat aggressively to compensate for the clen/caffeine/yohimbine/steps falling in this post-show rebound phase so that bodyweight doesn't get out of control. Then once the stimulants are out of my system (clen half life is 72 hours, so we're looking at about 15 days for it to be out of your system) and I've slept off some of the stimulant withdrawal, just reduce retatrutide to 1mg/wk in one shot for insulin sensitivity and start bulking FR. I remember when I was first dating the medical student (hot pot girl above) during the summer of 2021 having just come out of a deep cut I was sleeping like 12-13 hours per day from clenbuterol withdrawal and she thought I was like meeting other women late at night or some **** and found it absolutely hilarious when she verified that I was indeed sleeping from 9 to 7 and then again for a bit in the afternoon.... **** those were good times. She was chubby then, maybe 165cm and 56kg and she looked soooooo good when a little bit higher bodyfat. Face filled out and "cute". In the above pics she's a little gaunt.

Keep that deficit small and controlled with very minimal added fats, low fat from my protein sources (mostly whey, fat free greek yogurt, chicken tenderloin, quinoa), around ~230-240g protein only, and very high carbs from potato, cream of rice, pancakes, all the fruit, sweet potato, quinoa, various bread from the amazing european style bakeries in Shenzhen. 2 cheat meals per week on Sat/Sunday for sanity. Keep going approximately 24-26 weeks and start prep at the end of february/beginning of march, hopefully from a far leaner starting point and for a far shorter total prep duration. No brutal 25 week long prep; 16-18 weeks from a leaner starting point. It's going to be impossible to predict given a newer PED approach with more insulin/gh and less total anabolic steroids and how they might affect me in terms of water retention, but we're looking at an ending offseason bodyweight somewhere between 102 and 107. Any more than 107 and i've probably gotten too fat.

bring my ****ing camera to the gym and start recording/uploading more. I was too mentally exhausted to make any progress on this the last few weeks of contest prep. I also realized too late that posting on XiaoHongShu is pointless because of how anything that could be gay-baiting is censored so heavily so basically no bodybuilders can ever build a following on there. Chicks are allowed to show exposed titties through revealing gym top and face 0 shadowbanning or algo ****ery; shirtless guy gets ****ed by the algo. Guy in posing trunks gets basically shadowbanned and his content won't be shown even to people searching for bodybuilding specifically. Douyin is way more friendly to it, but also exposes you to a lot of normie morons who will just post "IS THIS NATURAL!?" in the comments section over and over and over again when it is very obviously not natural.

I can train people in person without any legal issues as my bodybuilding focused gym (12 minute taxi away) allows for independent trainers; I just pay a $14/hr floor fee and negotiate my own price with any client I want to bring in even if they aren't a member. STandard is 500 rmb/hr with a competitor at my level; can I get a foreigner premium? probably not in this industry, but that's still great part time money for something I enjoy that doesn't feel like work.

"I look too good, have reached too elite of a level, and put too much energy into this to NOT be making more income than I already am from it" Sounds arrogant to put it that way but there's a lot of people who not only look much worse but don't know nearly as much about fitness who are making more income from it than I ever will.

Lyle is even more long winded than me. I agree with him for the most part on "**** the big 5" (barbell row, ohp, squat, dl, flat bp). Where I disagree with him is when he says he'd put beginners straight to machines and don't even bother with bb training. Nah... you just can't get the same level of overall development when somebody literally doesn't even have those basic stabilizer muscles in a good place yet. But for somebody who's goal is looking good/hypetrophy, you might have these as 50%+ of their training only the first ~6-24 months (longer for younger/female athletes). After that, they can definitely keep some of those in based on anthropometry and what's actually working the targetted muscles well for htem with their bodies and mobility/technique, but at that point probably 70% should be machines/bodywieght, 20% dumbbells, 10% barbell training. I definitely don't hate incline or flat barbell bench; people who legit won't get good stimulus in chest from these movements are rare, but they do exist and if they are that way they should just use machiens and dumbbells. Conventional deadlift... no, just no. Nobody but strength athletes/athletes. Everyone else SLDL/RDL.

Squats for the short limbed brothers, basically nobody else.

So a few thoughts as I read through this:

1) Coaching is teaching.
2) You need to find someone equally capable (or near) to bounce ideas off of. We are all prone to being extremely stupid. I fixed an anklebreaker workout plan due to him just being in his idiocy. I can't even imagine what I'm capable of.
3) As someone who saw my personal WL contest with MLYLT, figured you'd know how hard you can crush it. But that is sick for a contest prep. You got skillz bro. And I think most of your issues are inside your head. I make jokes about not being a dong thong judge, but a lot of this is like judging which girl has the bigger tits. Ain't that hard. You are very jacked and very lean. Where you would fall in a LW pro contest, fuck if I know. But I certainly know you can get a seat at the table.
4) Glad you're coming around to the rippletoad program. Procioception is a real skill.

But to get back to a core thing, I think you genuinely enjoy teaching people. You write these long winded posts which some of us read (and I'm not sure anyone really appreciates since none of us are aspiring pros), and its obvious you wanna teach folks. But coaching is literally that. Let me give you an example of when I recently hired someone to coach me. I'm basically a wizard at most things I've spent any time on. However, am I enough of a wizard to guarantee another man's money? Def not. So I paid a dude 10k to handhold me through basically all the same shit I already know. And I would 100% do it again. You're both of these people in the analogy. You do dumb shit on occasion and people need to be sure they're not doing dumb shit. I mean FFS El D ended up paying me to give him advice. You think that man doesn't know wtf is going on?

Wait, weren’t you going to do a show?

Sorry if I missed but I feel like I would have read but definitely don’t remember. My memory was you were gonna do two and then pulled out of one but we’re still doing one? Or have I been misreading ‘contest prep’ all this time?

You’re in awesome shape btw - incredible discipline to get that lean

Show is still happening. Diets usually end 1 week out for peaking and filling out. Some people 2 weeks if they're carrying a ton a fatigue (me). Saturday is my last day of fat loss. Nobody continues fat loss up until the day of the show, and if somebody kept going until 2 or 3 days out that usually means they ****ed up.

ah ok, thanks for clarifying. also didn't realise that re dieting & fat loss.

good luck with the last parts of the prep

+1. (Just in case it's not obvious, I read everything and enjoy nodding along or shaking my head in rueful laughter, as appropriate.)

So my local gym closed down for about a month to renovate and then came back with 3 of these. And it isn't a very big gym. It only has 3 benches just to give perspective. So a pretty big investment of machinery and space.

Is this a legitimate exercise in your opinion? And if yes, for what purpose? Or just a gimmick to be avoided?

I work in with my wife on that exercise all the time.

I am worried about you jdock, you acting like JDvance. First the dumb athlete is doing a donk exercise and now questioning an exercise usually done by women.

You also married a filpino right? Stays home and cooks, takes care of the kids?? I am on to you jdock. You from Santa Monica? Stephen Miller fan? Closet MAGA?

Great exercise for strength bbing and health. Sq/dl assistance, great glute and ham hypertrophy, and great for lower back rehab prehab. I didn't do it last year bc the machine we had for it sucked, but the year before I did and I love it. Perfect for somebody like me with overdeveloped overactive erectors and underdeveloped glutes.

Not a gimmick and obv good for female aesthetics too.

I brought them back recently bc I have a good machine for it now

Bb flat bench is okay but if I were to pick one exercise between the two this would be it for sure. I mean so many things can do what flat bench does but few things do what hip thrusts do.

If you didn't dl but did this and ham curls for a few months you could come back to deadlift and set a pr very shortly after getting used to the movement pattern again

Dun,

To be extra creepy.

1) Tustin?
2) Orange?
3) Newport?
4) Balboa?

Hip thrusts may be the only meaningful compound movement that was developed/popularized in the last 10-20 years.

Tustin. Good deductive reasoning to narrow down the list. Not MAGA enough for Huntington Beach and not enough of an Asianophile for Garden Grove, Westminster or Irvine.

I'll take it as a complement you think it possible I could afford to live in Newport (in fairness my house is worth more than lowest end condos in Newport, so I could theoretically afford to live there).

I can't believe these houses in tustin go for 1.5m minimum. I mean you are not that close to the beach and those houses 300k in texas.

I still love and miss Cali, but if I go back there it will be lake tahoe or temecula.

There are so many I want to try out once this is over. Belt squat machine, smith squats, power squat machine (we have 2 variations), hacks, smith rfess, smith ffess... I basically need to experiment with more leg training stuff to figure out how to hit glutes more. SLDLs are okay but not glute specific and more overall pchain. RFESS with DBs just has so much stability and cardio requirements I'm not sure if it's the best choice, but I might stick with it if other movements don't feel great.

Reverse diet is going fine. Last shot of retatrutide was on Sunday 14 days out so it should be mostly cleared around next wednesday which is when I need to really start pushing them high. Right now I'm on around 250p 300c and 25g added fats the rest just trace fats in oats/chicken. Still losing scale weight despite cutting clen in half and steps down to 10k. Probably just lots of inflammation, water, and fatigue coming off. I feel like sleeping 13+ hours per day and exhausted from like 8am to 4pm every day then finally an uptick in energy around 5pm.

Man so much of this bbing **** is literally solved by "don't get too fat in the offseason". If you can set yourself up to only lose 20-25lbs (10% or less of starting bodyweight) in a 16 week prep you are golden basically. Losing the 10lbs that followed the first 25lbs was about 7-8x as difficult per pound and strength just started crashing like crazy after the first 25lbs lost.

Like I said before; it isn't a willpower contest of who can suffer through the hardest diet during prep, it's a contest of who can be the most precise in the offseason to maintain a good body composition so that they don't have to suffer hard precontest. Bodybuilding is about who can diet the softest, not who can diet the hardest. We all cope with food to some degree; just gotta find a way to cope with food in a healthier less fattening way and redirect that emotional coping energy toward bullshit like writing short stories or playing jrpgs or going for walks in the park basically. That 90s Chad Nichols ronnie coleman gigantic megabulk followed by suicidecut is just wrong and stupid.

Dun,

You ever go to those Viet coffee bikini bars? Do they still exist? There were a **** ton out there when I was out there last.

Assuming you been out there forever and a day, we've probably been closer in person than any 2p2er other than dudes I've personally met up with. (Barring a weird airport interlude.)

While I think Cali is atrocious, making a mil owning a home for 20y seems like a solid deal. (Minus aidsy carrying costs.)

Guy,

I find all of those fun to learn. But at the same time... there is a reason why you or I don't utilize those movements. When I was doing strength focused programming (SS, 531, etc) there is a large amount of room for ancillary work, which weird complex work can certainly fall into. They're fun and interesting to master, usually not very CNS demanding and worthwhile to atleast learn.

So I'd say totally go for it. You seem like you understand what a wide stance half sqat isn't the magical key that you're missing for muscular development so go nuts.

And yeah, contest prep is a much more complex thing than just short term weight cutting for weight limit sports or other ****. Looking super ripped at a specific window in time (days) is an art.

did show happen over the past few days or do we have another week to wait?

Lots of Vietnamese coffee bikini bars in garden grove and Westminster. Not my scene though.

I am not saying I have ever or would ever go to an establishment featuring scantily clad pretty Asian girls of dubious legal status. But IF I were to do so, I would go to a massage parlour, and spend about the same and get a massage out of it.

This Sunday, 5 days out. Last training will be tomorrow just a light upper pump workout

glgl

Not my best. I'm bringing like 91%. It's kind of impossible to bring 100 when you move and change jobs. Using retatrutide for the very first time and not having a good idea of how to dose it also contribute. 24 to 28 week off-season and then a 16 to 20 week cut. I may put a 4 to 5 week minicut in that 24 to 28 week bulk if my body composition gets even remotely above 13%. It's just too important to start prep leaner, more important than staying in a surplus longer to gain more muscle

Even given all that, looking pretty thick, solid, and tight; time to bring it home!

yep, good luck retaining your condition for the weekend. Hard for me to 'judge' given the only BB comp I ever look at is Open at Olympia, so I don't know the comparisons for your weight class and comp level, but IMO you've done an outstanding job of shredding, while retaining muscle shape and size

well done on this achievement and the learning you've accumulated...whatever the end stage result is