Ask Mr. Canada

Carbing up is the final piece of the pre-contest diet and is a greatly misunderstood area. Again, pros and amateurs alike make mistakes when it comes to this issue, which is why it’s essential for you and your nutritionist/trainer to understand your body, how you react to certain foods, and what will work best. This can make or break you onstage, making the difference between a flattened-out physique and one bursting at the seams with sinewy, dense muscle.

What The Research Says:

A number of published studies look at carbing up for endurance athletes, and I’ve even seen one that looks at bodybuilders, strength athletes, and marathon runners. The takeaway from this study is simple. When we carb deplete for a number of days, our muscles become “starved” for the glycogen it requires for energy and muscle contraction. It has been proven that the average human body can hold somewhere in the range of 300 to 500 grams of carbs in its musculature and somewhere in the 100- to 150-gram range in the liver. Now, I’m not sure about you, but most bodybuilders I know don’t carry the “average” amount of muscle an endurance athlete would carry. According to the study I’ve seen and to input from my extremely knowledgable trainer, a bodybuilder who is shredded at 225 pounds could probably store around 1200 grams in the musculature and 200 to 300 grams in the liver. So, that means a lot of carbing up.

Test Drive Your Carb-up First

The key here is to figure your body out ahead of time. Personally, I have a tendency to bloat, and we learned that during my trial run. So instead of carbing up the entire 1500 grams on Thursday, we learned that breaking it up between Wednesday night and Thursday worked best. That’s right, folks, no enormous gorging of food on Friday. Some bodybuilders can get away with it, but most can’t. Carbing up early, getting that muscle glycogen in and full a couple days before you hit the stage is the best practice, in my opinion. Friday should be a relaxing maintenance-food day, enough to provide energy for what you’re doing, but your muscles are already completely filled. The bloating from eating 1500 grams of carbs the day before will subside before Saturday morning, and you’ll pump up to beast-like proportions.

Diuretics

Now, keep in mind, over the past few weeks we've covered 3 of the different components of dialing in. There are, of course, "other ergogenic aids" that bodybuilders use to get hard, but I want to stress that with this method, the use of diuretics is not required. This method will get you dry and tight, without the harmful usage of compounds that can leave you looking flat at best, and in the hospital at worst.

The Importance Of A Trainer

Always consult an experienced trainer or nutritionist to help dial in these guidelines for you. Everybody’s body is different, and everyone requires a little tweaking of different variables, in addition to proper training, rest, and diet all the way through to make sure it’s water that we’re trying to get rid of at the end, not fat.

IFBB Pro Santana Anderson can be contacted for training inquiries at Santana.delmar@ns.aliantzinc.ca or through his sponsor Fusion. See you next time with more tips to become the best bodybuilder you can be.