I’m doing a bodybuilding show and wonder how much I should practice posing?

One of the biggest complaints I get from my clients when getting ready for a show is that they HATE posing practice. Most bodybuilders dislike cardio because they claim it is boring. Yet posing practice has the unique ability to be both boring AND painful.

When it comes to posing practice, I break it into two types. There are times where you practice technique and times when you practice conditioning. When practicing technique you should work on posing adjustments and figuring out just how you would like to execute each pose. However with this you don’t worry much about holding each pose. With conditioning practice you focus less on how you will execute each pose, but you work on holding the poses and making sure you can last as long as needed on stage.

So knowing this, I typically recommend that you should practice posing technique a few times per week from the beginning of prep or even better, throughout the offseason. This will help you improve how you perform the poses. Then starting 10 weeks out I would suggest you start slowly building your conditioning sessions. They can start as short sessions just a few times per week but as the show gets closer and closer you will want to increase the frequency as well as the duration of the posing sessions.

In the final two weeks before a show you should be posing daily and eventually be able to hold non-stop posing in a session for at least 30 minutes. If you can do this, then you will be ready for show day. On a side note, make sure you practice without a mirror. There will be no mirror on stage and if you are used to posing with a mirror, show day will be a shock.

I am on a plan where I have a refeed once per week, but if I wake up on the morning of my refeed and my weight is up, should I skip it?

This is a question I get quite often. I’m not going to lie, this is a lot more common with women than with men. On the flip side, men will be more likely to want to add food to their refeed if their weight is down. My advice to both of these situations is exactly the same though. You should never make decisions about your diet based on day to day fluctuations.

When making changes to your diet, you need to assess week to week changes. Throughout the week you are going to see the weight go up, go down, and jump all over the place. This is normal. However, if you start adjusting your plan based on every fluctuation then you will not only ruin your consistency, but also drive yourself crazy in the process. Always remember that even though your weight is up on a given day, it is likely not fat gain if you have stuck to your plan. Inflammation, water weight, GI issues, stress, sleep, work, sodium etc. can all have profound impacts on your weight and all of which have nothing to do with fat loss or gain. So with knowing this, it is never a good idea to skip a refeed simply because you have a daily weight fluctuation.