Jun10

Just 7 Weeks Until Our Vegan Bodybuilding Contest!

by Derek on June 10, 2013 at 8:06 pm
Posted In: Bodybuilding, Nutrition
 

Our preparation for the Naturally Fit Supershow in Austin TX is coming right along and we’re getting ready to enter the home stretch! As you can see from Marcella’s last post, we’ve been making excellent progress on a high carb whole food plant-based diet! In fact, I’m the biggest and leanest I’ve ever been at this point in a contest prep, and I’ve been doing very little cardio! With Marcella controlling the meal plan and coming up with delicious meals that fit the calories and macronutrients I set for us preparing for this contest has been a breeze! Over the next few weeks we will be ratcheting things up several more notches and I expect things to get tougher, but considering how far we’ve come it’s been a remarkably easy process up to this point. Marcella has dropped from 29 to 16% bodyfat and I’ve gone from 9.5 to 5%!  Here’s a recap of what I attribute our success to:

  • Staying leaner in the off season: This has made a tremendous difference for me and we were able to shave several % body fat off Marcella as well by keeping to strictly clean food and a little cardio. In the past during non-contest prep times we generally ate out 2-3 times per week, with at least one being a decadent meal, and our daily menu was less reigned in. This go round we kept eating out to a minimum and got onto a clean diet 6 months ahead of time! It’s an easy switch that has definitely been worth it!
  • Making gradual changes: We’ve never dropped calories by more than 200-300 per day, and never more often than at 3 week intervals. We will continue to make incremental changes for the rest of the prep so that we minimize the risk of muscle loss while still creating a calorie deficit. Another perk of starting the preparation with higher calories is you leave yourself a lot of room to make changes before hitting the extremely low calorie meal plans that often stall out progress. Similarly, with cardio I like to start out with a little and add slowly so that it’s less mentally daunting and easier to make adjustments as we go. Like giant calorie cuts, huge increases in cardio can stall out your metabolism in a matter of weeks!
  • Attempting to ‘grow into the show’: Everyone’s dream, losing fat and gaining muscle! I think it’s natural for all competitors that the nearer a show gets, the harder you will train – I know it is for me. Keeping all our fat loss strategies slow and steady makes it much more likely that our bodies with retain and even add muscle as we up our game in the gym. Following our plan I’ve dropped from 9.5 to 5% body fat over 9 weeks, and only lost 3 pounds, which means I’ve gained over 5 pounds of muscle on a ‘contest diet’ and am now the biggest/leanest I’ve ever been! Marcella has made even better gains and we’ve both improved our strength in the gym.

Training:

  • Our training has centered around the same basic exercises for each muscle group, but we’ve made shifts in volume (number of sets and reps), intensity (how heavy the weight is), and for Marcella, frequency (how often you train each muscle group).
  • I’ve been sticking to the same exercises I have all along, but have reduced my overall volume from about 25 working sets per session to about 15-18. Marcella was doing even more volume and the same twice per week frequency that I use to really push her recovery limits to the edge of over-training and get as much in before showtime as possible, so now that her calories have gotten lower and cardio has increased a bit we’ve adjusted that  to training once per week with almost half the volume and much more focus on intensity (15-20 working sets per session instead of 30ish, and lots more sets in the 5×5 and 6-8 range to really challenge her strength). Her program now resembles her initial off season strength gain plan because maintaining strength is the best way to preserve muscle mass on a calorie deficit, and cutting volume will decrease muscle break down. This makes workouts a little easier to recover from, and have the psychological benefit of making her training seem a lot easier than it has been, so that it’s more fun and easier to go all out. She’s reported her desire to kill me during her workouts has dropped substantially, and she’s making great strength gains so it appears to be working!
  • I’ve also had to alter my training a bit due to recovering from a shoulder impingement and am always being careful of my longtime abdominal/psoas strain. I’m currently experimenting with a new training method to work around these issues and if it has the results I’m looking for I’ll be posting on it soon!
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Jun06

Vegan Bodybuilding Contest Prep: Marcella’s 8 Week Update

by Marcella on June 6, 2013 at 9:19 pm
Posted In: Bodybuilding, Nutrition
 

I first posted on my progress here and Derek posted a brief update here. I began this journey, 8 months after the birth of my son, at 29.1% body fat and significantly weaker than I had been pre-pregnancy with serious post-pregnancy spine and pelvis problems due to scoliosis. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to be able to lift heavy again or get back to where I’d been…

Six months have passed. I’m now at 16% body fat and stronger than ever! Am I going to be competition ready in 7 weeks? I still have a minimum of 4% body fat to lose in the remaining 7 weeks, as well as some loose skin on my stomach (again – thanks pregnancy!) so I’ll just have to continue to do the absolute best I can and see where that takes me. I’m already damn proud of myself!

Oh this? It's just me and the two vegan bodies I built!

Oh this? It’s just me and the two vegan bodies I built!

Finding the time to train has been hard. Getting through Derek’s insane high-volume workouts has been hard – sometimes I’ve had to rely on fantasies of knocking him out upon my return home just to get through them. You know what hasn’t been hard, really? The diet. Up until about a month ago we’ve continued to eat a whole foods, plant-based diet that was high in carbohydrates from sweet potatoes, quinoa, beans and other wholesome things. You can see a sample day of our diet in the article linked above.

Not only have I lost 11% fat and gained seven pounds of muscle doing this over the first 5 months of our contest prep, Derek has also gained muscle and been the leanest he has ever been at this stage.

Back shot at 9 weeks out

Back shot at 9 weeks out

We have done this with minimal supplementation, far far less protein powder than is common, because we want to demonstrate what is possible with nutrition from whole plant sources. Because I know you’re wondering: Derek now takes a maximum of 3 scoops and I take a maximum of 2 scoops of PlantFusion protein daily and we started out with less. PlantFusion is our raw multi-source protein of choice, and the company has been incredibly supportive of all the vegan athletes competing as part of PlantBuilt – please support them if you’re looking for a new source of vegan protein powders but remember that the vast majority of your protein should come from whole foods!

In the past month, we’ve restricted whole grains and sweet potatoes and fruit – for example, I was having a BIG sweet potato with lunch every day as per this recipe and am now having an itty bitty potato. My calories have also dropped in stages from 2500 to 1800 per day. At six weeks out, I will begin carb cycling and cut calories further and I expect that to be hard to do. However, if you compare our vegan contest prep menu I mentioned above to these you’ll see just how fortunate we are!

It has been interesting to see this process, of building muscle and losing fat within a set period of time, unfold. And that’s the key – it is a process, that begins counterintuitively with eating a lot of calories to stimulate your metabolism and then continues with gradual adjustments to caloric intake and macronutrient profiles over a period of time – it’s surprisingly logical and scientific and that may be why it appeals to me! Most interesting has been the contrast between the success I’ve achieved thus far, with Derek coaching me along using these methods, versus what happened to me pre-pregnancy when I had been eating far fewer calories and doing far more cardio than I do now…for months…without making any progress whatsoever. I could not get past about 20% body fat. After mocking Derek mercilessly for his seemingly arcane contest preparation strategies I am now a believer.

Derek will be posting a progress update in the next couple of days, detailing our training. We’re also sharing all of our complete meal plans, fat loss strategies, and nutrition guidelines to download as well as our library of exercise and cooking dem0s and more at our online personal training studio! You can preview all of the videos here as well as view some that are completely free and, as always, the diet planner we’ve used to get here is free to download.

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May25

Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpea Bowl

by Marcella on May 25, 2013 at 3:00 am
Posted In: Bodybuilding, Main Dish, Recipe
 

Actually this recipe has more components than listed – I just didn’t want the title to get out of hand. This meal, which Derek and I just enjoyed for the first time, is filling and really flavorful in spite of being seasoned only with salt and pepper. This is one of my cutting phase concoctions, based on some recipe ideas from the cookbook Appetite for Reduction, created to meet our contest prep macronutrient requirements. The quantity of roasted cauliflower stands in nicely for rice!

Sorry for the terrible picture – I blame Derek:

Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpea Bowl

Ingredients:

Makes 2 big bowls

  • 1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
  • 1 block extra firm tofu, cubed
  • 1 red bell pepper, roasted (instructions below)
  • 2 Tbsp slivered raw almonds, toasted
  • 1/2 head of cauliflower, roasted (instructions below)
  • salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 450. Chop the cauliflower into very small pieces, about 1/4 inch around or so. Cover a baking pan with a fine layer of salt – not a ton – and spread the cauliflower out on it. Roast in the oven along with the red bell pepper, flipping with a spatula about every 10 minutes for 30 minutes or so. You’ll need to keep an eye on it. The red pepper should be turned over midway through this period and taken out when it’s skin is blackened and blistered. Let it cool off a bit, then peel off the skin and remove the stem and seeds and chop finely.

Meanwhile: Toast the almonds by tossing them about in a medium hot pan until lightly browned. Remove and set aside. Saute the tofu cubes until lightly golden. I don’t cook with oil and instead add a pinch of salt to the pan and carefully flip with a metal spatula to keep it from sticking. Add the chickpeas and warm up a bit in the pan.

I like to make a nice presentation out of these austere (but in this case truly delicious) meals by serving them in big ceramic bowls in layers: tofu, then chickpeas, then cauliflower, then red pepper and a sprinkling of the almonds finished with some black pepper.

 

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Apr30

What Vegan Bodybuilders Eat for Lunch Every Day

by Marcella on April 30, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized
 

This lunch, of basic things like lentils and sweet potatoes, does great things. It makes our lives easier by being simple to make in advance, satisfies sweet cravings on a daily basis, makes our one-year-old happy, and wins bodybuilding competitions. We’ve been eating this lunch almost daily (and now daily as we prepare for a competition 13 weeks from now) and have yet to get tired of it. What is this amazing meal you ask?  Three things:

  • Curried red lentil soup
  • Baked sweet potato
  • Blackened tofu salad

IMG_1148

You can find the soup recipe here with two changes – we now use 1/2 or less of the ume vinegar because it turns out it has a LOT of salt and we add a large floret of minced broccoli. Sweet potatoes are easy to bake: poke them with holes and bake them at 415 degrees for 45 – 75 minutes; you will have to pierce them with a knife here and there to check for sufficient softness as cooking times vary a lot by size and ovens. While orange sweet potatoes are, of course, delicious, I urge you to try Japanese sweet potatoes. They’re purple-skinned, white-fleshed, and far sweeter than the orange variety. I love them. LOVE. Eat them daily and you will find junk food cravings disappear. As you can see above, we like to mix it up and split one of each!

The salad is easy: it’s just a standard green salad with some grape tomatoes, cucumbers, a few olives and balsamic or red wine vinegar dressing. The fun part is the tofu. Use 1/2 a block of extra firm tofu for two people and dice it or cut it into strips. Preheat a pan on medium high and sprinkle with a bit of salt to keep the tofu from sticking. Toss the tofu on, let it “blacken” a bit on one side, then throw in about 1 1/2 – 2 tsp of either Jamaican jerk or Blackened Cajun or Creole seasoning then flip over and toss around, preferably with a metal spatula. Cook a little more than serve over the salad.

What makes this lunch easy is that each component is not only easy to prepare but can be prepared in bulk in advance for the week. Make a big batch of soup: One batch makes 3 bowls – that’s 3 lunches worth! Bake a few sweet potatoes in advance and then they only need to be heated a bit each day. Prepare a block or two of tofu for the salad in advance and you have all of your work lunches done, knowing that they’ll be low fat, filling, healthy, and you’ll actually WANT to eat them instead of going out for Chipotle because it tastes better.

Bonus: Babies love spicy curried lentils and jerk tofu! Seriously, this vegan beast usually finishes off three dishes of soup and gets into our tofu before he’s done! It’s just that good.

Miles's favorite foods

Miles’s favorite foods

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Apr19

14 Weeks Out!

by Derek on April 19, 2013 at 10:02 pm
Posted In: Bodybuilding, Nutrition, Workout
 

The Naturally Fit Super Show in Austin, TX is approaching fast, so over the past two weeks Marcella and I have shifted from off season into pre-contest mode! Here’s the down low on what we’re doing to prepare for this major event!:

Time Frame: Since I was less than happy with my last appearance on stage, I wanted to give us both plenty of time for a long slow contest prep, so we decided to start at 16 weeks out by reigning in the diet, adjusting our routines, and increasing cardio slightly. With this long to prepare we should be able to make easy, gradual changes and get into peak condition without too much torture or muscle loss. Plus, we’ve stayed on a very clean diet and have both been doing cardio the entire off season, so we have decent conditioning right from the get-go!

Diet: Marcella will be posting our exact meal plans in our member portal as we update them so that members can follow along, and we will also be posting pictures and recipes when we can as well. As I mentioned in my last post, my goal this off season was to increase Marcella’s metabolism as much as possible, and keep mine humming along as well, by maintaining a little cardio, doing some high intensity work, and eating as many calories from a clean diet as we could get away with. Now that we are into the preparation stage, calories will be slowly reigned in as the weeks go by, and cardio will be increased as well to make a fat-loss deficit. We’ve both calculated the body fat percentage we want to reach in 16 weeks, and the amount of fat in pounds we need to lose to get there,  so we are doing weekly assessments to decide when we will need to decrease calories and increase cardio. For now we’ve each reduced our daily calories by about 300, eliminated all refined foods like brown rice pasta and sprouted grain breads and wraps, and sources of fat like avocados and nuts. We’ve also reduced eating out to once or twice per month for the duration, and then only very healthy fare. We’ve also started adding branched chain amino acids before and after workouts, see post.

Routines: My routine has actually been staying pretty consistent, so the previous post will have the details on what I’m doing and why. The only real change I’ve made is hitting a double split (am and pm workouts) twice per week on whichever workouts fall on Tuesday and Thursday, and allowing my self a bit more creativity with the sets and reps while still hitting all the exercises I have listed for each workout. So far it’s working excellently and I’m now the leanest I’ve ever been at 190lbs – 6.5% body fat! (see pic below)

Back shot - 16 weeks out!

I’m updating Marcella’s program every 4 weeks based on feedback from her and what we both feel needs to be addressed, and for the past several weeks we’ve been working on increasing her volume and frequency (longer workouts more often), especially for her upper body so we can gain as much muscle there as possible. She’s making great progress, and has been working so hard at it we’ll probably schedule a reduced volume/frequency week in the near future to boost recovery. Here’s her most recent program.

Arnold pressing 30 pounds for sets of 8 at our gym!

Arnold pressing 30 pounds for sets of 8 at our gym!

Cardio: The major change here is the addition of a weekly sprint session and a weekly posing session. I’m sticking to the 20-30min swim and 20-30min run I’ve kept up, and Marcella is now doing 30 minutes of steady cardio 5x per week, and to that we’ve both added the timed sprints and posing on our off days. Sprints are fantastic for stimulating the metabolism and creating an excellent hormonal environment for muscle growth/recovery, and posing is literally what the sport of bodybuilding is all about so these two changes will make a big contribution to our conditioning as weeks pass. We currently do 6 sprints of apprx 80 meters, and as time passes we will increase the amount of sprints per session, as well as the number of sprint and posing workouts per week. We will also increase steady state cardio, but I’d like to keep this as low as possible for the duration to maintain our metabolic rates.

 

So goes our progress! We’ll add more info as we make changes, so stay tuned!

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