Consistency is the key!!!

Body building is a hard sport! Ok, so no great revelations there, we all know the demand training and dieting can have on the body and if we are ever in doubt, we get a reminder in the form of a nice little injury, which once again confirms to us the brutality of constantly shifting pound upon pound of heavy iron.

Throughout the years the competitive side of body building has undergone many radical changes (some more ludicrous than others), however those who exist in the sport now, year after year, all have one thing in common….Consistency!

AS body builders we all assume that we now all there is to know about nutrition and getting into shape. We make mocking comments at those members of the regular public who continue their unsuccessful, lifelong trail through any number of “new” and “radical diets”. AS body builders we understand that “diets” per se, do not work. Only a balanced, healthy, lifelong dedication to health, fitness and nutrition will produce the body you want. However, even as body builders, we are not immune to the disease called “yo-yo dieting”

We have all been drawn into the myth of “off-season”, you know the time, eat, eat and eat some more and if it’s still moving, save it for later. The trouble with a traditional off-season approach is:

a) You get fat

b) You become less healthy

c) It makes getting back into shape ten times harder

d) You look the exact opposite of how you wanted to look when you first began training.

Back in the mid-nineties, the off-season approach was largely in vogue. Guys were told to eat huge amounts of protein, masses of complex carbs, whilst all the while shifting as much iron as you possibly could, all topped off with plenty of rest, because it’s rest that allows muscle to be built, right?

Rest, in my opinion is hugely over rated and over training is a comment banded around far too often. In fact I’d bet that out of 100 body builders in the UK, very few, if any are ever over training. Body builders mistake slow recovery with not getting enough rest. So to remedy this, they add another extra days rest, meaning they spend even less time in the gym and even more time at the fridge.

The concept of over training is almost alien to every other sport that includes weight training as part of it’s training regime. Many track and field stars will weight train everyday in their “off-season” cycle and all this on top of their regular training.

To put it simply, in my opinion overtraining is a left-over myth from the heavy-duty era. Some may disagree, others may be outraged, yet in my opinion and the opinion of many of my fellow natural body builders, consistency is the key. Consistency encapsulates training and diet. Many of the UK’s top natural body builders will never have a traditional “off-season”. Sure, there will be times when their diets relax slightly and they may gain an extra 10-14lbs of weight, but never will they embark on the “calories are calories” approach of gaining as much weight as possible and hoping against hope that some of it will be newly formed muscle-tissue, because quite often, it wont be.

Modern-trends are now based around overall consistency. This means training 4-6 times weekly with short weight training sessions, eating a relatively good diet all year round, enabling you to actually look like a body builder for more than a few weeks in the year. Sure, well need some down-time, a little period where we relax our food intake, enjoy the nice things in life, but this is still not an excuse to get fat.

In all walks of life, if you want to be successful, you have to be consistent and body building and in essence, building an attractive, muscular physique, the same applies. So instead of spending 40 weeks in the year stuffing your face and hoping that the extra blubber will somehow help you gain muscle when and if you ever lose the body fat, eat like an athlete and look like one. Why spend 16 torturous weeks on ultra-low calorie diets, when showing a little restraint the whole year round, makes everything else so much more simple and pleasurable.

Getting in shape does not have to be torturous, it’s about consistency. Apply consistency to every facet of your body building life and you’ll have a long and successful relationship with this great sport of ours.

Catch me at Jason Rickabys Natural Training forum on uk-muscle.com or contact me at jayrickaby@hotmail.com

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