By: Jimmy Smith
This is my client Tina, a figure competitor and model. As of today, Thursday June 14th, she’s exactly 15 days away from her third competition and attempting to get her pro card. You know, she might already have it as she has a contest on June 16th but it wasn’t a prime focus of ours as she entered on a whim. I began working with Tina exactly 12 weeks out of the June 16th contest date, which really made us have to get right after it.
At 12 weeks out, most competitors are beginning to diet hard, in our case we had to add muscle mass to her then drop her down, a tough task indeed. We were able to add 5 lean pounds to her frame in 7 weeks, leaving us 6 more weeks for her to diet. She’s not drying out as much as I would of liked and she recently responded badly to a detox attempt. I have 100% confidence that she is going to get her pro card in one of her two upcoming contests.
While I can’t get into the specifics of her program or nutrition design, I will tell you some of the methods she’s using 3 weeks out.
Heavy lifting- We’ve all seen the videos of Ronnie Coleman deadlifting 800 pounds a few weeks out from the Mr.Olmypia. Tina’s no different; her sessions usually begin with sets in the 1-5 rep range.
Bodypart training- With her three weeks out, we’ve gone back to the traditional bodypart splits. Our goal here is to try to increase her vascularity as much as possible. We’re not attempting to build any muscle mass, just not lose it. So in this case bodypart splits are optimal. At this stage in the game, it is really easy to over-fatigue her so her volume is adjusted accordingly.
Next week, I’ll update you and get into some of the more advanced methods we use.
