What I did for my contest preparation

Howdy folks! I’ve posted my progress photos around the internets and everyone wants to know what I did to get such amazing results. If you follow my progression on this blog you will see exactly what I did to experiment with my workout routine and my diet, but let me sum it up for you!

I’m not an expert by any means. I can share my experience, but you gotta figure out what works best for you. Here’s what I can say. Some people are just genetically smaller, or easy gainers, don’t have trouble spots, and can eat whatever they want and not exercise hard. I am none of those things but I’ve always been petite. At my heaviest I weighed 114 lbs (currently 5’3, 105 lbs). So you may never be the same weight as me but still look and feel awesome. Many pro-competitors weigh ten pounds more than me at the same height because they have more muscle maturity. The scale is a very bad indication of health and fitness. The best thing to do would be to get a caliper test to see what your body fat percentage is and see if you are in a “healthy” range.

Also how you feel in your clothes and when you look in the mirror is a great indication of results. I seriously committed myself to working out 5-6 days a week in January and I was at 108. Since I changed my routine to lifting more (9 weeks ago) I’ve doubled in size of muscle, lost 4% body fat, but the scale has steadily been at 105 the whole time. Muscle takes up less space on your body than fat.

Soooo with all that being said if you check out my blog you can see my progression and what I’ve tried. It’s been an experiment for myself the whole time. But here’s the rundown.

Once I switched to lifting heavy 5x a week with 2 HIIT cardio sessions, gave up all processed food, and switched to eating 5-6 small meals throughout the day, that’s when I saw the fat just melt away. More muscle on your body allows you to burn more calories all the time. Also HIIT training is more effective at burning fat than steady state cardio. Don’t bother doing an hour on the treadmill (unless it’s at a steep incline and you are hustling). So I would do a 5-day bodybuilding split with two leg days (Google that to find a workout you can follow), always in the afternoon, with fasted cardio in the morning 2-3x a week.

Everything is an experiment like I said, so try that for 4 weeks and compare your results. Be sure to take your measurements and get an accurate body fat test done. Always take photos! They can really help you see if you are making progress, but clothes are a good indication as well. Clothing that was tight on me last summer are falling off me now.

70% of results is DIET. I highly recommend you track a few days of your food intake in MyFitnessPal to see where you are currently at (I do NOT track my food everyday or even every week). I did an average day (of my new diet without processed foods) to see how many calories I need to maintain my weight (which was 1750 calories, I did not starve myself at all during this process!!). It gives you the option to say if you want to lose weight and it will give you a slight calorie deficiency. But I believe you shouldn’t go under 300-500 calorie deficiency and ACTUALLY if you are lifting 5x a week you might try to NOT go into deficiency (before entering workouts which take away those calories burned from your total) at all to prevent your metabolism from crashing. If you increase your activity you can eat more (yay!). Experiment and see how it feels!

For me personally, I didn’t see results until I cut out ALL processed food. No chips, no crackers, no bread, pasta, pastries, no sugar, no alcohol. I do let myself have ONE “cheat meal” a week where I can eat whatever I want, but I haven’t had a sip of alcohol the whole 9 weeks I’ve been preparing for my contest. But again I want to emphasis that I did not starve myself or calorie restrict. I ate an average of 1700-1900 calories a day. But I did pay attention to the quality of my food, ate more protein, limited starchy carbs to twice a day and reduced my fat intact by some.

The first photo above is from May 1st. The second one was taken on July 11th when I picked up my beautiful contest bikini from WhiteStar Manufacturing. If you can afford to have a coach to design a program for you that is an excellent idea but you can totally do it on your own. I did! It just takes serious dedication if you want to get the results. Everything else in my life was put on hold. So you have to decide. Are you ready to put in the work?

If you can’t afford a coach I highly recommend you do our 28-day program! Give me 28 days to transform your health and well-being. What are you waiting for?

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I’d love to hear from YOU about what worked best for you on your fitness journey. We are all different so it’s great to compare programs!