Title Setting Goals.pdf ✅

Setting Goals Introduction and Welcome By the time you start yourself or a client on a contest prep, they need to have built up all of the muscle they plan to take onstage and then some. Contest prep is all about conditioning the body for the stage. It's not about muscle hypertrophy. That means every comp prep athlete should have a similar set of goals. 1. Lose the required amount of body fat. 2. Maximize muscle retention. 3. Keep as much energy as possible. 4. Be ready as early as reasonably possible and get used to your new body weight. It doesn't matter what your federation or division is, and it doesn't matter how long you have to prep. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. These are your goals. This course is about achieving those goals with as little pain and suffering as possible. As we've already mentioned, unless you're on drugs, you will most likely lose some lean body mass when you lose fat. Metabolism isn't black or white. Everything interacts with everything else, either directly or indirectly. You can't change one setting without changing the others. Burning fat requires putting the body into a catabolic state and catabolism is going to affect lean mass and fat mass typically. Now, there's not a ton of research in this space, but experience with over a thousand comp prep competitors plus the case studies that have been done on natural bodybuilders and natural physique athletes shows that you should expect about 70% of the weight loss to come from fat tissue and 30% to come from lean tissue (Kistler et al., 2014; Pardue et al., 2017; Rossow et al., 2013). Now, amongst the case studies out there, you have as low as virtually no lean body mass lost in a natural athlete (Petrizzo et al., 2017; Tinsley et al., 2019) and some over 50% of weight loss from lean mass (Robinson et al., 2015). So it certainly can change and vary from person to person. But on average it's about a 70:30 ratio. You might even get lucky and find that one person who can target just fat loss without impacting lean tissue, but they're going to be the exception, not the rule. The thing with averages, they tell you nothing about any one individual, but they do give you a guide about what you should expect over a large population of individuals.
So when we're looking at planning with different people, especially people if we haven't worked with them before, we have to start with the averages and then if they end up being outliers we have to change what we're doing to fit to them. But we should start with the averages because that's the most likely place that we're going to get it right. You don't want to plan for people to be outliers only to find they're average because it's going to be much more likely that they're close to the average or in the average than they are outliers. The second thing to note about this 70:30 rule is that we should expect about 30% of weight loss to be lean tissue, but that doesn't necessarily mean muscle tissue. Lean body mass is everything that's not fat, meaning organs, skin, hair, bones, even water, everything that isn't fat. So a lot of you will probably freak out when you hear that 30% number, but it's not like you're losing pure muscle. There's a lot of tissue that's going to be lost just from fluid and other tissues other than lean muscle during comp prep. It should go without saying that we want to keep energy levels up. The higher your energy, the better your training, willpower, and overall enjoyment of the process will be. Contest prep will really tax the body's energy systems. The body will defend itself against perceived starvation by reducing energy expenditure as much as it can as calories go lower and lower. This is going to make you not feel so hot and feeling not so hot doesn't do anybody good. We can't prevent this, but we can minimize it and plan for it. Finally, we want to wrap up our prep as quickly as we can. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the faster we reach our goal, the less you're likely to suffer. It's much more pleasant to reverse diet into a competition than it is to have to slam down 1,200 calories with zero energy on stage. You might look great, but it's going to be harder to present it well. My best clients have always been the ones that have been ready early. We've been able to start reintroducing calories and push calories up heading into competition. Second, if we've got extra room in our schedule, that means we could have some time to play with if things go wrong. Remember shit's going to happen during prep. If you don't leave time to deal with it, you could end up throwing away weeks or months worth of work. The master goal here is numero UNO. We need to get to our target level of leanness. You can be the most muscular, high energy person on stage and do it in
record time, but you're not going to win if you don't get lean enough. So how do we work our path to achieving goal number one? First, we have a few questions to answer. Firstly, we need to know our current body fat and weight. The best way to do this is with a scale and calipers. If you don't have calipers, then you can find a personal trainer in your area who does. Sorry. No mercy here. We're trying to get you sharpened up for the stage. Now a lot of people will say, what about things like DEXA or underwater weighing and whatnot? All those are fine. The problem is, is that people typically can't do them consistently. I want you using a measure that you can use consistently. Calipers are much easier to be consistent with because most anyone can do them and people have wide access to PTs that have them. Then we need to determine our body fat percentage. This is going to vary based on how the individual presents, genetics, and the target division. People are unique. One competitor might look very sharp at 10% while another has to get down to 5% to achieve stage level leanness. From this target, you can determine how much body fat you'll need to lose and based on that, you can extrapolate how much total weight you'll need to lose, including lean tissue. Set a rate of fat loss anywhere from 0.4% to 1.2% of body weight per week, and that's going to determine how long your prep is going to be. Let's walk through a sample calculation. Say we've got a 100kg male at 12% body fat as measured with calipers. We determined that we'd like him to get to 3% body fat on stage. Now, whether or not he actually ends up there, we're not sure, but that's just where we're going to start. That's the goal we're going to go with. And obviously if he gets to 3% still doesn't look lean enough, regardless of what calipers are telling us, we'll have to push harder, but we're just using this to get a rough estimate. So that means he'll need to lose about 9% body fat. So to determine how much fat mass that is, we take 9% of his weight which is 9kg. Cool. So we need to lose 9kg, but remember, he's not going to lose just fat, most likely. He's going to lose some lean mass as well. So to determine total mass reduction we need to lose 9kg of lean mass, assuming 70% of that mass reduction will be fat mass, we divide the 9kg of fat he needs to lose by 0.7, which gives us 12.9 kilograms of total body weight that he will need to lose.
Next. If we determine the rate of loss, I usually like to go with somewhere in the middle between 0.4% to 1.2% per week of body weight. I think 1.2% per week is really pushing it. I think 0.4% is probably too slow. I like anywhere from 0.6% to 0.8% really, so let's just go with 0.8%. So 0.8% of his body weight is 0.8kg. So we're targeting 0.8kg per week of weight loss, of which 70% we predict will be fat mass and 30% we predict will be lean mass. So we've already calculated how much he needs to lose, which is 12.9 kilos in total. So to determine how long this is going to take we can divide 12.9 kilos by 0.8 kilos per week, which gives us 16.125 weeks, which we can just round 16 and so 16 weeks in the deficit is how long his prep is going to need to be at a minimum. Now, there's some caveats here. First 16 weeks assumes no diet breaks or high days, and if we want a program in, they're going to extend the duration of prep. We'll cover diet breaks and high days in much greater detail in a later module of this course. Second while we're calculating the duration of prep in a linear fashion, it most certainly will not be linear in reality. Unless we've done this with the same client before, and know from experience that that's how it will work, we're better off giving ourselves some wiggle room. This 16 week prep might be better executed over 20 weeks. Third, while we could try to speed things up with going with a more aggressive weekly weight loss that can come at a cost. The more aggressive we are with cutting body fat, the more likely we are to lose lean mass with it. Remember, while we want to get stage lean, we also want to prioritize minimizing lean tissue loss. So how do we hit these goals? First thing's first, we have to track. If you're serious about getting on stage, then weight needs to be tracked daily. I've already explained to you the weight loss is not linear and that it ebbs and flows. So why would I say weigh yourself daily? Well, it's because weight loss isn't linear and comes in ebbs and flows. You see, the only way to get a really solid read on the trajectory of your weight is to look at trends, not a single data point. If you weigh weekly and your weight went up by one kilo, what does that tell you? The truth is it might mean nothing. Did your weight actually go up by one kilo or did you just weigh yourself the previous week at a really low body weight or a really low fluctuation, and this week you weighed yourself at a really