It’s now 4 days since I stepped on sta
ge at the IDFA Int’l Pro Championships, and I’m back in Monteal, enjoying a week “off”. In contest prep terminology, this is a de-loading week. I’m going pretty light in the gym, just keeping my muscles stimulated but not pushing too hard really, and doing my regular Bikram Beginner Yoga classes every day, but skipping out on the advanced series. In the kitchen, I’ve been eating whatever I want, upping the starch and fruit intake, and not keeping to an eating schedule. I have a pretty good sense of what my body needs, and no real cravings, so it’s okay for me to eat like this. Some athletes might need to stick to a clear diet in their “off” week to avoid binges and over compensation of carbs. It really depends on the person.
What I have noticed is that I’m getting a lot of bloating after eating, a lot of abdominal distension, and that my appetite in general is quite low. It doesn’t take much to fill up the tank, and I’m experiencing longer gaps of hunger between meals. I was on a very low carb, high fat/protein diet for the last 5 weeks, so I’m most likely sensitive to fruit sugars and cereal grains. I find fruit the worst of all. Even an apple or a few cherries will cause my stomach to gas up and get quite acidic. Interesting to note. The next few days I am going to cut back on the fruit and only eat it by itself, and I’ll also cut out the grains and stick to protein, fat and vegetables until my stomach settles down a bit.
So far the new training program feels solid. The feedback from the judges of my two shows was not to get any leaner, and just build on my glutes, and punching my poses, so that is what we are focusing on at the moment. Posing every day for 15 – 20 minutes, and activating my glutes with some light rowind and various stretching exercises before hitting the weights. My nutrition for the next 4 weeks will be the same as the last four weeks: carb-cycling, sticking to low caloric density carbs for almost all of my meals except for 2 or 3 high density carbs on my weekly metabolic day. Now that I’m back in North America I have access to a wider variety of vegetables and condiments, so I’ll be coming up with a lot more recipes throughout the next several weeks!
