S
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Saw this on IG. Those guys are major! I think Frank McGrath would be envious haha
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Hmmm, heres a potentially interesting question. Have you noticed any differences in your work now that you are shredding up? Obviously you were always an obvious lifter, but I wonder if your advice carries a bit more weight now that you are lean as hell.
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Not at my full time job. Letâs just say being an RD in an acute-rehab/long term care institution in the area that I work consists mostly of pushing information from point A to point B, taking food preferences, and sitting in meetings. There is practically no real nutrition counseling. However, after getting this lean, I am getting more and more inquires on personal nutritional coaching. And as I said, my aim is to turn up my social media following, revive my blog, promote myself, and start writing diets and programs. Thatâs always been my aspiration (along with competing) that I had hard times getting going for a specific reason, mostly that clinical depression in my past hindered many aspects of my life in the past, including professional and self-employment goals.
For my YT channel I am going to continue with the podcasts Stu and I are doing and do exercise demos, little educational chit-chats, product reviews, and food prep flicks. My IG account has about 500 followers so far. Obviously that doesnât just make money for oneself but itâs what I want to plunge forward with to hopefully and eventually monetize my passion and hobby. Truthfully I HATE working in healthcare at this point. Healthcare as a whole, much of it is a misery to work in (Iâll refrain from the details).
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this thread is awesome. i am following along. i am also following you on instagram. i cant wait to see you on stage man.
by the way i agree with you and the mighty stu about how people think they are gigantic even though most of them are blubber. when i was 106 kgs, i used to believe i would be shredded at 85 kgs. i am now 73 kgs and i am just lean with some muscle. if i had to get as shredded as you, i think i had to drop down to 65 kgs or something.
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Iâm following you on IG too. Thanks for the compliments here and the comments there!
How tall are you?
As I said, people have no concept of what is actually âskinnyâ, âbigâ, âsmallâ or whatever. I in no way say this to brag, considering I think of myself as downright ordinary. However, I think I should give myself SOME credit. I am a medium framed manâcertainly not one of those freaks with cankles, a bull neck, and hands that resemble baseball gloves. But Iâve had to fight to make a middleweight weight, even when already lean! So that says to me I have a good deal of muscle for my frame and laughable when lay people say I am skinny in this condition. I can weigh up to 180 now after a full dayâs worth of meals and fluids but weighed 176 to 177 all this week so far unfed in the morning. To call a ripped man walking around at 180 at 5â10" skinny is highly ignorant, though not a bad thing considering people just dont understand body composition,.
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im 179 cms. ( i think 5 10 in your country )
after i lost approximately 30 kgs, people that see me with shirts started saying â you are skinny â
then i opened an instagram account and started posting shirtless pictures there. now all the people at the office think i am a muscle god 
they know nothing about body composition like you said so im enjoying the compliments of the ladies at work this is something i cant complain
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I used to absolutely kill myself getting under 180 lbs, let alone make weight at <176, to have both IFBB and WNBF Pros tell me there was no way I was a Middlweight. Of course Iâd post online and have fat guys who had never leaned down (foreget ever competing), claiming 250 lbs of muscle telling me I was small because I weighed under 200 lbs.
The lack of perception is amazingly sad.
S
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@BrickHead Maybe I missed this or maybe you didnât post it in the beginning of the thread, but Iâm super curious concerning what your body fat was (roughly) at the beginning of the prep.
Percentage bodyfat? It was never tested.
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@BrickHead I asked Stu a similar question.
Do you do use macro borrowing or thinking in terms of weekly calories to allow cheating at your choosing? IE you overate calories, carbs, etc. on monday so took some from tuesdays macros?
Would this have different effects in a contest prep?
I donât count when not prepping. This is my first prep, but if I do a show in the future, I will not be counting every morsel going into my mouth when in a gaining phase. I will be using portion control with some indulging here and there. But then again, I am not a guy thatâs inclined to binge anyway. I pretty much NEVER binge. A cheat meal to me is a few slices of pizza, a burger deluxe (if I can even finish the fries), a homemade greasy meal my wife and I make, etc.
There is no calorie borrowing in this prep diet. I followed it to the T and still am! My cheats on this prep have been a bite of my birthday cake in late June and a bite of cake and a small glass of champagne while celebrating my anniversary in July.
There likely will be no bad effect if itâs controlled, which is what a carb rotation diet is like in the first place. So there is no need to calorie borrow anyway. There are high, low and medium days in a carb rotation diet, so excessive borrowing would throw it off to a degree.
I donât think people should even be in a borrowing or cheating mindset (eg, âI really wanna cheat, so I am gonna alter things tomorrowâ). If someone canât control their urges, they shouldnât prep. This doesnât mean every item has to be âcleanâ or unprocessed so long as one is consistent over and over and over with items eaten.
I have learned that contest prep is unforgiving/merciless if someone wants to do it right. If you want to lose weight at a seemingly predictable rate, there is little wiggle room.
And Iâve also learned that if one wants to do it right, they will likely question how much longer they can go on or why they even thought of doing it in the first place! Hence, as I said before it is unsustainable. Anyone whoâs done it knows this. It gets more and more difficult and the last month is misery for the most part, which is what I am now experiencing. I remember my pro friend telling me, "Just wait til the last three weeks. Youâll see⊠"
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I agree completely. I think a well programmed re-feed day can be very positive, it certainly was for me once we programmed them into my prep towards the end. But thereâs a significant difference between a re-feed executed properly and a cheat:
REFEED
-Carb intake increases for the day, up to 1.5x-2x normal depending on the individual and how they want to structure it.
-Fat intake is very minimal for the day as your body is hyper sensitive, and having high carbs AND high fat in your blood can increase chances of storing body fat
-Protein intake for the day drops to 1g per pound to leave room for the carbs. Carbs are muscle sparing in nature, so dropping protein for one day will have no negative effects at all.
CHEAT
-Eat whatever, typically high carb and high fat foods like pizza or cheeseburgers. Opening the door to store excess body fat, hold a lot of water which will throw off the scale and mirror for a couple of days depending on the individual.
I think the whole âcheatâ mentality is dangerous. A cheat âmealâ (not a cheat DAY, a cheat MEAL) CAN be beneficial if executed properly and itâs really, truly needed, but most people just donât have the mental discipline to go 16-20 weeks without eating crap so they reward themselves with a âcheat.â
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Hey @BrickHead â I know youâre getting down to the nitty-gritty of the prep and totally understand if this thread is becoming too much work for youâŠInsofar as you just want to turn your brain off when you can. But I would really like to hear your opinions on a couple of things.
I have a degree in philosophy, so Iâm wont to put EVERYTHING into context (because that makes sense to me). So, hereâs a tiny bit of background on where Iâm coming from:
I started lifting weights because I wanted to be healthy. I mean, I did the whole âlifting for sports in high schoolâ thing, but in college, I started smoking, drinking, touring in a rock band, not eating or sleeping enough, etc. I stand 5â10" and I got down to 112 lbs when I was 21. I had that âahaâ moment when I realized how disgusting I was (looked, smelled, everything, right?) and decided to start working out.
Anyway, over time that turned into a fascination with the subculture of bodybuilding and I started trying to pursue BB. I love BB, the structure it gives my life, the sense of accomplishment I feel from it, the physical and mental results it gives, etc.
But hereâs the rub: I have never felt the itch or desire to do a competition. That in and of itself is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Given that you are doing your first show after years and years of bodybuilding coupled with the fact that you describe this competition as a bucket-list endeavor, Iâd like to know how LONG youâve wanted to compete. Or was your desire to compete for all those years always a âsomedayâ thingâŠ
Have you always had the itch to compete and you put it off because of the personal circumstances youâve dealt with (as youâve outlined a bit above), or is the itch to compete a recent thing? What was the final âkick-in-the-assâ to do this show? (if you donât mind me asking).
If youâd like to hit this topic, but maybe without the personal angle, perhaps you could touch on your thoughts concerning the idea of a âbodybuilder who doesnât competeââŠmaybe thatâs a podcast episode that @The_Mighty_Stu and @arash_rahbar could add their opinions to as wellâŠ
Thanks for indulging me in advanceâŠand if you donât, I know youâre exhausted all the time right now and I understand. Stay the course and keep grinding. Youâre the best, Brad.
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just realized that i posted my reply on the wrong topic, so im pasting here, if you dont mind
Just want to say thanks to you and everybody in this topic, so much great information here, and btw, you are looking GREAT bro, one of the bests motivations to natural bodybuilders for me here
do you mind if i ask a couple of questions?
- what do you did to bring up your chest?
- How often you change your training and what do you change ?
- How do you know when you got to start doing cardio/hit when doing pre contest?
- How often do you low your calories during pre contest?
@TrevorLPT @humblelifter @IronAndMetal I read all your posts, and thank you for them. Itâs getting a bit late now (got morning cardio, lol) but I will be back to answer all questions and address posts Friday or Saturday.
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Iâve always enjoyed stories of âwhat brought you to thisâ myself. Weâve kicked around the idea of doing more updates just on brads progress, but you guys already see how difficult it is for us to just get the podcasts done on a regular basis. Life is busy! -lol.
Hopefully we can knock out one the next week or so while bradâs still pre-show and Arash is finally back In town post Olympia. That would certainly be a great comparison; one guy with childhood dreams of competing finally going to step onstage and in his mind complete the goal of being âone of those guys,â and the other, with a life long dream and burning passion, just off of the top competitive arena for the entire sport.
S
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@humblelifter This is the right place to ask me about my training, considering itâs about my training, right? 
Thanks for the compliment (although some here might say I am not natural considering Iâve been solely taking medication for a medical condition since I was 22 years old)!
I brought up my chest over the past year, and especially the past six months by:
-
Giving up upper-lower splits for good, or for as long as I want to look like a bodybuilder! I will return to an upper-lower split when I return to casual training some day, likely immediately when I have my first kid, which I am âworking onâ getting.
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Proper exercise selection and sequencing and pre-exhaust. I ditched barbell bench pressing for good and stick with machine presses, flys, dumbbell benches, and dips. I use the order of exercise sequencing that Paul Carter and Stu use, which are coincidentally identical considering the two donât even share ideas with each other. Carter recommends starting for a weak muscle with a secondary or tertiary exercise in which the tension is on the muscle at the end of a rep (eg, Hammer Strength incline press, pec-deck fly or cable crossover), then move onto an isolation exercise in which the tension is strongest in the bottom position (eg, dumbbell fly, GHR, dumbbell pullover), AND THEN moving onto compound lifts. When Stu gave me my program, I couldnât believe that two men reached similar conclusions on exercise sequencing without even speaking to one another but sheer experimentation and experience.
My chest workout is:
- Hammer Strength or Precor incline press (pretty much the same stuff)
- Incline fly
- Flat dumbbell bench press
- Weighted dips
As you can see, thereâs pre-exhaust for the pecs as a whole and I start off with stuff for the upper chest, where my chest is the thinnest. Sets and reps are 3 work sets for 8-12 reps.
I havenât changed my training in like half a year. I will be changing it up a bit with some other exercises to keep fresh after I am done with prep.
Stu had me start off with cardio from the beginning. It started with only two interval sessions every six days consisting of ten sets of intervals of 30 seconds hard-2 min easy and then followed with 15 or 20 minutes (I forgot off hand) slow steady steady state thereafter. The cardio was increased (but not the HIIT) every time there was a dietary adjustment, to the point now being a 50 minute brisk walk before breakfast everyday and the HIIT sessions followed by 30 min LISS. There was also a little LISS after every leg session. Now every leg session gets 30 min LISS at the end. YES, itâs a lot now, but we didnât start like that and one canât if they plan to have a good prep!
We made caloric and carb adjustments every time the weight loss was not occurring as fast as we wanted it to. There is no exact way to tell how often one will have to adjust. The adjustments are made as you move forward.
Thanks for the post!
If I recall correctly you inquired about how I pre-exhaust and sequence exercises. I am choosing not go to back into that now derailed thread, so I am answering you here.
I donât pre-exhaust or sequence exercise in the same way for the same reason, although I did run down how I pre-exhaust my chest, which is a weak area, for @humblelifter.
I donât Meadows exercise for every muscle group except my back exercise sequence is very similar.
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I sequence my chest as above because itâs a weak muscle I am thoroughly convinced pre-exhaust with isolation and secondary exercise is the best way to bring up a muscle.
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I have always had good quads but I now pre-exhaust them a bit in my leg workouts. I also do traditional pre-exhaust to bring up my hams with them.
Stu had me doing the following:
Leg curl
Stiff legged-deadlift with dumbbells
Lunges
Squats
That bothered my lower back quite a bit, doing deadlifts of any sort before squats. Down the road, I changed my workout to:
Glut-ham raises
Leg curls
Lunges
Squats (safety bar or back squat)
Leg extensions
Stiff legged deadliftsâŠ
⊠for less sets each (3 working sets)
I went over this with him and obviously as a great coach he does give templates and guidelines but he is still savvy with how people feel and treats his clients like adults with minds of their own. I believe these exercises and sequence are great for me considering I need glut work and that is prioritized with GHRâs and lunges.
Another VERY important reason why, from now on, I will always be doing hamstring curl variations and/or GHRâs and lunges or Bulgarian split squats before squats is because my body feels so much better like this! I have far less loading on my spine, neck, hips, shoulders, and knees with **the same or better results! And thatâs important if one wants to lift for a long time. People forget that for advanced BBâers there are other ways to make progress in size (and resulting strength!) rather than constantly âadding weight to the barâ of the big three, or any other âbig exerciseâ. Anyway, one can still add weight to a big exercise that is followed by pre-exhaust anyway! If one pre-exhausts his quads with extensions and lunges and his squat goes down to 275 for reps, then by all means he should attempt at any time he can to add weight to the bar anyway over time. And he should be adding weight to the leg extension and lunge over time too! I used to do lunges with 35 pounds after squats and then when doing them before squats now, have brought them up to 50 lb dumbbells in each hand for 24 to 30 steps on average! My 315 for 18 to 20 rep squat went down to 225 if I recall! Mid prep it went up to 275, and now it has lowered to 245 (because I lost a damn 30 pounds and doing a shit ton of LISS cardio and some intervals. I lost only a bit of leg mass, but thatâs prep!
For back, I do rows first for the same reason Meadows recommends: easier on the shoulder girdle rather than starting with pull-ups or chin-ups. I also do pullovers and pulldowns with PARTIAL RANGE where the tension is highest with tight form nonetheless and then FINISH with chin-ups. This has put far more tension on my lats then when I did otherwise. My biâs used to take over in pull-ups and now that I do them at the end of all the other lat stuff I feel it far more in my lats.
I can go on, but you see this takes some thought and ingenuity. I can write more later if you wish.