Great News! The final edited shots are starting to come in (behold one above), so I will be able to post them in all their glory soon. In the meantime, I’d like to continue with our shoot prep work.
Marcella’s first phase had caused a rapid loss in weight, including muscle, so for this routine I made several changes to help maintain muscle while losing fat. You can see her routine here.
- I greatly increased the volume of all her lifting by increasing sets, number of exercises, and scheduling 2 workouts per muscle group each week.
- Rest intervals were increased and reps were decreased on everything but leg exercises to ensure heavy weight could be used and muscle could be built/maintained. Legs were kept high rep and low rest because this is an area she wanted to lean up in the most.
- Nutritionally, I realized small portions of our regular diet might not be precise enough, so I began digging through my assorted muscle magazines searching for meal-plans to base a template on. After finding some reasonable pre-contest eating schedules used by successful bodybuilders and figure competitors I picked them apart on excel to find calories, protein, carbs, and fat per pound of body weight we should be shooting for. Naturally, Marcella took the idea and ran with it, and the Interactive Meal Planner was born!
- This tool took the guess work out of our meal schedule and greatly improved our success during this preparation.
As mentioned with my own phase two routine, I erred on the side of way too much work with this one. Since we usually work out together, Marcella also took part in some unscheduled rest days and skipped workouts due to my programming optimism, but all in all the vast majority was completed and she quickly was back on track to her goal physique.
