Regroup and Go!

It's been two months since competition #1.  This week marks week one of the second round.  My competition is March 30th so I have given myself four extra weeks.  This whole first week is about eliminating my nightly glass of wine and clearing out any starchy carbs that have snuck into my diet over the holidays.  The nightly wine is pretty much just a habit so after a few days I don't really think about it anymore.

So the plan this time around?  Take it a little slower at the end.  I will start out the same way because that worked just fine but I will have more time to tweak the second half of the prep.  I freaked out a little on the last one because I didn't think I was going to lose the weight.  I stopped weighing myself about three weeks out because it was messing with me psychologically.  This time I'm staying on it.  Obviously I'm good at losing weight.  The problem was that I lost fat and muscle so I didn't look as lean as I would have liked, just smaller.  If you read my blogs about my last round of competition prep you'll remember that I have a problem with water retention so it is freaky to me to eat too many carbs.  I am going to add sweet potatoes into my diet as of now and monitor my bodies reaction.  Higher fat, low carb and tons of protein has been what's worked for me in the past.  I'll stick with that but try something a little different.

And as for training?  Once again my shoulders lagged.  I need to be more cut in my upper arm area.  I am have been doing, and will continue to do, heavy shoulder work but this time around I am planning on training shoulders more often.  Basically every other day or as soon as they aren't sore anymore from the previous workout.  It's a bummer because I can't get my shoulders sore very often so it doesn't feel like I am working them hard enough.  I just read an article that training a muscle group more often will not decrease strength or size which means that you can deter from the standard once a week split (for example, chest and back, bis, tris and delts and legs).  Of course if you Google it the what comes up most often is that to build mass you have to train less and train harder.  We'll see if training more often works for me.

And finally, I need to work on my posing.  I was nervous during figure because I was rushed out on stage.  During physique I was fine.  I'm sticking to figure this time because I still don't think I can get big enough to compete in that category.  It seems like they are looking for a more muscular physique then I expected.  I have the video from the show but haven't watched it yet.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot when I do watch it so I'm going to get on it:)

I will post my workouts and diet over the next 12 weeks so check back!