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Preparing Your Body: The Most Essential Elements in a Bodybuilding Competition
By Idaho Bodybuilding Contests
In bodybuilding competitions, judges are usually looking for “certain builds” when they examine participants. Depending on the category, a particular aesthetic generally stands out. No one muscle group is more important than all others so it is important to strike a balance on your weekly workouts.
The question is, how can such balance be achieved? The following is a list of what you need to consider to ensure that you have a great chance of winning in what you signed up for.
Muscle Fullness
The first thing that judges will notice when they look at you is the fullness and denseness of your muscles. It all comes down to size. The best way to ensure that you’re big enough when competition day comes is to spend your offseason training in a methodical manner. Here are the various phases of muscle growth that you must take into account:
- Strength phase: Consists of workouts with lower reps but higher intensity. The purpose of this phase is to build maximum power and strength for CNS adaptation and muscle density.
- Hypertrophy phase: Consists of workouts with moderate intensity and volume. This encourages better blood flow resulting to bigger pumps, allowing myofibril hypertrophy which in turn increases muscle cell size.
- Endurance or sharpening phase: Consists of supersets and workouts with higher volume. This phase focuses on aesthetics and muscle balance.
The key is to go through all three phases to build muscles the right way and to avoid plateaus. It is recommended to utilize 3 to 4-week training cycles for each phase to achieve your desired results.
Muscle Symmetry
Just as the key to effective training is balance, the key to a balanced physique is symmetry. Judges give higher scores on participants that look like they didn’t neglect any muscle group.
Naturally, some of your muscle groups will be lagging, especially if you favor particular workouts more than the others. If you have plans of slaying your competitors, you have to focus on your lagging body parts. This can be done by adding focus or trigger sessions for those muscles. These are low to moderate intensity sessions consisting of 2 to 3 sets of just 1 to 2 exercises dedicated solely for those lagging parts.
Conditioning
To ensure that you will be at your best at the end of your training cycle, you must have done all the work needed to get to the body that you were hoping to have. Now, this isn’t all about having done all the necessary lifting and physical work. Your diet also plays a big and crucial role in how you’ll look on competition day.
All your work will be for naught if you failed to consider the diet that is appropriate to make a mark or even win in your chosen category. Food may be a seemingly trivial thing, but people have won and lost exactly because they weren’t being careful of what they’ve been putting in their mouths.
Although taking note of these elements will not guarantee a decisive win for you, they can help you get closer to the kind of physique that can take home the gold.
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