Competition season: 6 honest tips for getting in shape
Competition season can easily mess with your head: your weight fluctuates, your physique changes under every light, and suddenly everyone seems to know better. Here are six practical ideas to help you stay calm while preparing for the stage, listen to your coach and avoid shooting yourself in the foot on competition day.
Why does competition season mess with your head?
“Sometimes I wonder what you eat to be so smart, yet before a competition your mind just disappears completely,” Marek Kalmus once told me. It stuck with me because it was true. Getting into competition shape isn’t just a question of chicken, rice and a treadmill. It’s a game of nerves.
I’ve never been pregnant, but the emotional rollercoaster before a competition can feel just as wild at times. One morning you look in the mirror and think it’s finally coming together. The next day it feels like all your work has vanished. In reality, the change may be down to light, water, salt, sleep, or simply your head.
That’s exactly why you need simple rules. Not to make life boring, but so that in the final weeks you don’t start rebuilding your plan every time someone makes a comment.
Competition season starts with listening to your coach
There are many approaches, and plenty of them can work. Good condition has been built on a higher-fat diet, a higher-carbohydrate diet and a higher-protein diet. Some coaches keep the training load up for longer, others pull it back earlier. Some track weight very precisely, others look more at the mirror and the overall picture.
One thing is certain, though: you can’t take from every system only the part you happen to like. If you choose a coach, give the collaboration a real chance. If the method doesn’t suit you, you’ll at least find out what doesn’t work for you. If you mix five approaches together, it’s impossible afterwards to tell what improved your condition and what ruined it.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. That applies especially to a competition diet.
And one more uncomfortable thought. If you’ve already been through five coaches and still can’t get into shape, the problem could be a poor choice, an unusual body, or simply that you aren’t doing the things you agreed on. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
Don’t let outsiders take the wheel
This sounds like the previous point, but it deserves its own mention. During competition season, advice comes from every direction. Someone thinks your calorie intake is wrong. Someone says you should switch sports.
Honestly, I’ve taken outsiders’ advice myself. Sometimes with regret. People tend to treat their own beliefs as sacred. And it often seems that the less a person knows, the more sure of themselves they are. If you don’t know how much there is to know, it feels like you know everything.
The problem is that an onlooker doesn’t see the whole training process. They don’t know whether the athlete has just finished a tough three-month block and is now in a lighter phase. They don’t know how sleep, joints, stress and weight are moving. You can’t judge an entire preparation from a single workout.
Competition season is no time for tricks
Stage makeup matters, but rarely as much as competitors claim after a poor placing. Small imperfections that you can see from 30 centimeters away may not be visible at all to a judge standing a couple of meters off. If the makeup is applied by someone who has competed a couple of times themselves, or who has genuinely done this before, a large part of the risk is already covered.
When muscle and condition are equal, makeup really can decide it. But more often, what decides it is whether the condition is ready. If the love handles are still hanging there, no shade will miraculously save you.
The same goes for manipulating water, salt and carbohydrates. I don’t think I’ve ever reliably improved my condition with them. Made it worse, yes. If the fat hasn’t been burned off, last-minute tricks won’t turn it into stage condition. They can instead bloat your stomach, leave you looking flat under the skin or ruin how you feel.
Competition day is not a day for experimenting. If you want to know how your body reacts to some kind of loading or a change in water intake, try it earlier. Even then there’s no guarantee your body will behave the same way with stage nerves. But at least you won’t be playing blind on the most important morning.
Keep your eyes on the goal, not the number on the scale
“Keep your eyes on the prize” doesn’t mean looking at the prize money here. In Estonian bodybuilding, that’s more likely to make you cry. The idea is simpler: keep your blinders on, do your own thing and don’t swap horses midstream.
That doesn’t mean you can’t adjust your calorie intake or training load based on your condition. Of course you have to. But a weight gain on any given morning isn’t a crisis. Anyone who has been in the sport for a while knows that weight goes up and down. Sometimes salt is to blame. Sometimes a late meal. Sometimes poorer sleep. Sometimes the body is just doing body things.
If you let every fluctuation throw you off, you start making emotional decisions. Today you cut carbohydrates. Tomorrow you add cardio. The day after, you’re empty, grumpy and weaker. So what is actually happening? You’re no longer steering the process, you’re reacting to fear.
Focus on what you can control
You can’t ask more of an athlete than their best. If you’ve done an honest job in your prep and a competitor with miracle genetics beats you on stage, at least you have nothing to reproach yourself for.
Flex Wheeler and many other top competitors have said the same thing: don’t live in your rivals’ shape. You can’t even control your own body one hundred percent. So why spend energy on things that aren’t in your hands at all?
The simple truth: sleep as well as you can, eat according to the plan, get your workouts done, practice posing and keep your head as clear as possible. It sounds boring. But at the end of the competition season, the winner is often the one who manages to do the boring things most consistently.
FAQ: competition season and stage shape
Should you switch coaches before a competition?
Generally not, unless the collaboration is truly broken. Changing coaches in the final weeks causes more confusion than benefit, because the new person doesn’t know the whole process so far.
Can makeup cost you a placing?
It can, but it’s usually not the main reason. If your shape is good and the makeup is very bad, it can be distracting. If your shape isn’t ready, perfect makeup won’t work miracles.
Is manipulating water and salt necessary?
Not for everyone. If you do it at all, its effect should be tested beforehand. Experimenting on competition day is a bad idea, because under stress your body can react completely differently.
A wise saying goes: “God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Author: personal trainer Kristjan-Johannes Konsap
Come and train! ArtGym
