3 More Days to Go

I've been drinking a gallon of water daily since Sunday. The only way to make it happen is by adhering to a strict schedule involving consumption of a 16 oz. bottle every 90 minutes, for a total of 8 bottles. That works out to be one bottle at the following intervals:10 a.m., 11:30, 1 p.m., 2:30, 4, 5:30, 7 and 8:30. The mechanics behind this regimen involves training my body to process the water at a continual rate because it's going to keep on coming all day long. When I stop at night, my body continues to process it, and by morning, I've expelled everything (that includes getting up once every night to pee) and can be considered "dehydrated," not in the sense of the medical condition but in terms of water depletion. Essentially, the biology of drinking lots of water is counter-intuitive. It makes you retain less water.

I've also subtracted from my diet all added salt. This does not suggest that I'm not getting any salt because many foods contain it including the staples in my diet right now like chicken, turkey, spinach, sweet potato and eggs. I'm ingesting between 650 and 725 mg. of sodium each day (tracked through my sparkpeople.com page) and the daily recommended amount is anywhere between 500 and 2,500 mg. I think you'd need to eat cardboard to keep it down to 500 mg. So my numbers are low, but nothing extreme.

My weight today is 102-point-nothing and trainer Glenn will do a final body mass assessment on me tomorrow for which I'll post the results here.

Some readers might note that I'm not following "traditional" bodybuilding procedure whereby I "carb deplete" then "carb load" a few days before competing. My reasons for departing from tradition are simple. I feel like that process merely brings you full circle - you wind up back where you started, but maybe you think you're more pumped up only because you just made yourself look and feel like crap. So why bother? You're not actually making any gains. Also, I've achieved my muscle increase and fat reduction through a gradual process - nothing extreme - and now is not the time to mess with that. The carb cycling doesn't always work, either, meaning that it's not always timed right and people return to their original condition too late. Plenty of people will say they look better the day after the show, once they return to more regular food consumption. Of course, the majority of people in this sport will disagree with me on this point. I accept that. But I've been following a semi unconventional path all along - low cardio, 4 days in the gym per week, not 5 or 6, low rep/high weight for some of my training, and a steady and healthy amount of carbs the whole way.

Whether I place or not in the competition does not entirely determine whether my methodology and strategy are correct. It's genetics that largely determines the shape your muscles can grow to be. Massive Mark once said to me "Poor genetics? Then work harder." I applaud that mentality and I certainly have striven as much as I can and I definitely have increased my muscle mass since March 1. But there's a limit to how far I can go, especially without drugs and that's not an option. I accept my reality.