Contents INTRODUCTION: What Bodybuilding Can Do for You PART 1: UNDERSTANDING BODYBUILDING CHAPTER 1: How to Become a Competitive Bodybuilder CHAPTER 2: From Strongmen to Bodybuilders CHAPTER 3: Compete or Just Look Good? PART 2: NUTRITION FOR BODYBUILDERS CHAPTER 4: The New Rules of Getting Lean CHAPTER 5: Relearning How to Eat CHAPTER 6: How Macronutrients Work in Your Body CHAPTER 7: Nutrient Timing and the Phases of Dieting PART 3: THE BODYBUILDER’S WORKOUT CHAPTER 8: Growing and Sculpting Muscle CHAPTER 9: The Bodybuilder’s Workout 24-Week Plans CHAPTER 10: The Exercises CHAPTER 11: The Importance of Cardiovascular Workouts PART 4: THE COMPETITION PHASE CHAPTER 12: The Final Push CHAPTER 13: The Dark Art: Tanning for the Contest CHAPTER 14: Flex Appeal: The Choreography of Contest Posing CHAPTER 15: Peak Week CHAPTER 16: It’s Show Time INDEX Introduction What Bodybuilding Can Do for You R EMEMBER THE FIRST time you stood in front of the bathroom mirror and made a muscle? You were probably 9 or 10, wondering if you would ever get as big as your older brother or cousin. Your biceps looked pretty puny at the time. But you knew they had potential—you had potential—to get bigger and stronger. So you started doing pushups and curling your brother’s dumbbells. Maybe you hung a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Lou Ferrigno in your garage for motivation. You probably turned a lined notebook into a workout log and started recording repetitions and sets and, go ahead admit it, the size of your arms and chest measured with a tape. (We all did that.) And through all this effort you learned a grand lesson: that hard work and dedication to a goal paid off in spades. And the payoff didn’t just come in the form of bigger biceps. Some people believe bodybuilding is for the insecure or narcissistic, but that’s a narrow view. Anyone who has tried to build muscle and strength knows this. The sport of bodybuilding brings with it a rewarding experience that can provide the bodybuilder with a vast array of benefits beyond the sense of accomplishment that comes from winning the recognition of peers through competition. Natural bodybuilding delivers incredible health benefits regardless of whether you decide to compete against others or just challenge yourself. I encourage you to try competition. Competing in a bodybuilding event takes a serious commitment. When done correctly, it can have a profound life-altering effect. It has in my life, as you’ll learn in the first chapter. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some amazing people, many of whom I now call dear friends, who define the true essence of the sport of natural bodybuilding and make it such an awesome and inspiring lifestyle. From my experience and from the experience of many others, here are some of the ways bodybuilding can benefit you that go far beyond impressing that 9- year-old kid looking back at you in the mirror: 1 Mental clarity and focus You’ve heard the expression “Give it 110 percent.” When a person makes the decision to compete in a bodybuilding competition, he or she is doing just that. There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes. When you make the decision to compete in bodybuilding, you are flipping on a switch inside your body that signals it’s time to get serious. It fosters a mental clarity and focus of purpose that will flood into all other aspects of your life. One of the first things I tell a prospective physique competitor—man or woman, figure competitor or bodybuilder—is that he or she needs to be 100 percent ready to make the mental connection and to do what it takes to compete. It’s a decision that will help shape every aspect of your life and determine the body and health benefits you receive. 2 Physical strength and spirit The human body was meant to be active every day. It was designed for work. Building lean muscle, burning body fat, and pushing your body to the limit—in the gym and outside of it—are what make the physical aspect of bodybuilding so unique. We are not only training to train, or training to lose body fat, or training to look better. No, we are training to bring our bodies to a point at which they rival the ancient Greece sculptures—the images of the Greek gods, the embodiments of perfection. We may want the ultimate lean, conditioned, and muscular body—but it’s the physical effort that will get us there. Bodybuilding is about the physical body, the physical mind, and the physical spirit—the improvement of each can have its own benefit for the bodybuilder. 3 Discipline and commitment Why do diets fail? It’s not the diet or the food that fails. Nine times out of 10 it’s the person who gives up. The person simply lacks the discipline and commitment to see it through to the end. It’s not that it is always the individual’s fault—he or she might have been set up for failure from the beginning by the wrong plan or family life situation, time restraints, and the list goes on. This is not a criticism of the weakness of people who fall off their fitness and diet plans; it’s just a fact of human nature. The only way to overcome it is through this X factor: discipline and commitment. The bodybuilder must make a commitment to discipline. There is no other way. The ability to make an amazing commitment may be the reason that many bodybuilders are stereotyped as type A personalities. A successful bodybuilder will always have discipline and will always understand the true meaning of commitment. 4 The ideal physique Much of the world is facing a frightening epidemic of obesity and the diseases triggered by sedentary lifestyles. For most of these people the goal is simply to improve their health. For a bodybuilder, the goal is optimization. The human body is a work of art that when given the correct guidance can become an amazing real-life sculpture. Bodybuilding provides the physical element like no other sport out there. You are judged on your ability to present a physique that you have sculpted for others to see and ultimately reward. Nothing else offers the same blank canvas on which to create that your body can provide. Your muscles are there, ready to be shaped and fine-tuned into the exact form you wish to achieve. Just think of the sense of accomplishment that you’ll feel when you present a physique that you have brought to its ultimate potential.