 Our next caller is Gilda from Pennsylvania. Gilda, what's happening? How can we help you? Hi. So thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to hear your information. I am, so I'm 45, 5'9", way about 150, 18% body fat. I'm prepping for, well, actually, I'm kind of in the building phase for a bikini competition in probably June of 2022. And I've been pretty persistent and consistent with my weight training six days a week, cardio six to seven, like 30 minutes steady state. I have a trainer. And I also hired a nutrition coach from one of those bikini, you know, competition, I guess groups, I don't know what you call them, but anyway, my coach who resistance trains me gave me a set of macros. And then the nutrition coach also gave me a set of macros and they're pretty different. And I just don't know which one is the right one for me. And I wanted to know what you guys' thoughts are on me. Okay. Well, I got, I got a couple of questions before we get to the macros. Okay. So the competition you want to do is in, is next summer, correct? Correct. And right now you're in the building phase. That's right. Okay. So your lift, I have here your written question. It says you're lifting six days a week. You said you're doing fasted cardio also six to seven days a week. Yeah. That's right. Okay. So where do we go from here? Yeah. When it's time to, to get ready for the show. Yeah. Um, I, I was told to cut back on my cardio, but honestly it's more for my mental. Um, Walk instead. Yeah. I'm going to suggest you do something else for your mental because, because, and you can, you can do things that are active that are not what you're cause here's what's going to happen when you get time to, to cut down for your show. You're going to be left with, you know, three times a day cardio and even more weight training or cutting calories even more. You really want to take advantage of this off season so that the prep is easy and, or you don't damage your body after your show because you're already doing a lot with your training. So I would cut back on the cardio or just walk or do yoga or do mobility instead of doing the cardio, your resistance training six days a week. Uh, depending on the routine, that might even be a little too much right now as well. And then I would looking at the two sets of macros. Uh, it looks like one is higher calorie and one is a little lower calorie. Um, I would go with the higher calorie one to start with, uh, and, and, and stay there and see how you feel. Well, I'm not going to disagree, but here's the thing. If anyone gives you a macro breakdown, just based off of a inputting into a computer or, you know, jumping their calculator out and writing on with a pencil without assessing you. Uh, I think they're both bad. Uh, I would not do this with you. So what I would do with you, first of all, we'd have to agree that we're going to eliminate the, the fasted cardio every morning. You can walk if you really need to, and you want to for mental cause I don't want to cut something out that is de-stress as you or helps you gather yourself the day. Like that's totally fine because that's something you'll probably do forever. So I, you can keep that, but I definitely would back off the intensity, make you walk. Then I would, what I'd want to do is minding your goal for the next two weeks is to see, can we find what your calorie maintenance is? So in other words, I'm going to, I'm going to put you somewhere around maybe these calories because maybe they figured it out off a calculator that says, this is where you should kind of be. But really what I want to do is, is figure out what your individual maintenance is based off of your habits and behaviors, not some calculator. We have a calculator, right? We have a maps macro calculator where we offer this to people, but I, if I'm training a competitor, I've got to be way more precise than this. Like, so I'm going to tell you, okay, we're going to, we're going to track your steps daily. We're going to track how many, how many days a week you're training. And we want it to be as, as, as precise and consistent for two weeks as possible. So we can decide together. Oh, it looks like when you hover right around 2200 calories, you don't really gain or you don't really lose. Okay, that's your maintenance. Then from there, we're going to build a reverse diet type of protocol where I'm going to add probably 150 calories a day for a couple of weeks to see how your body responds to that. Our goal from the next like two or three months is to build muscle and to build your metabolism, which if that is the goal, we want zero cardio, all the focuses on building strength and slowly adding calories. And so a good place for you and I to get is two months to three months out from showtime and you're up to 25 to 2700 calories a day without any sort of cardio. Then you're in a beautiful place for me to prep you for this show. And I actually wouldn't even take you on as a client until I could get you up to that point because I don't want to send you into prep already doing six to seven days a week of cardio, only being able to eat 2000 calories. Cause like, like Sal was saying, where do we go from there? Whereas if I could get rid of all your cardio, slowly build your metabolism up, build strength for the next couple of months, get you ready to where you're eating 2700 calories and no cardio and you're not putting body fat on, we're in a beautiful place to slowly reduce calories and then eventually slowly start to kick up your cardio to get you ready for a show. So that's kind of what it would look like and anybody giving you generic numbers just like me, I wouldn't be able to tell you for sure until together we track for a couple of weeks and have some conversations around, okay, where are you at? How many steps are you taking per day? Okay, and then from there. And by the way, when we start our process to cut, so this is how I did every one of my bikini competitors, is we actually didn't add cardio. Cardio was the last thing we did. We actually managed steps first. So let's say on average, my female clients were stepping 60,000 during the bulk phase or where you're at right now, six to 8,000 steps a day. And when we decided to transition to our cut phase, I would move their step goals up. I'd say, okay, just make sure you get 10,000 steps a day for the next week. Okay, and then the next week would come and I'd say, okay, now just make sure you get 12,000 steps. And I would keep them, I would keep increasing their activity through steps before I say, okay, now get on the, because get on the treadmills are running to get those steps. I would want you to try and get them through just daily movement until you look at me and you go, Adam, it's hard for me to get 17,000 steps in a day without getting on the treadmill and kind of getting after it for at least a half hour hour. And then at that point is when I say, okay, let's start to do that three times a week. Yeah. And looking at the two macro pieces of advice that you got, this is going to go along with what Adam said. It looks like the biggest differences between your trainer and the nutritionist advice, besides the fact that they both might have done what Adam said, which is kind of spit out a generic number, is the carbs. I see your trainer is recommending around 130 grams of carbs and your nutrition coach about 240. And the fats and proteins are a little different in both recommendations, but it looks like the carbs is the biggest difference. That's going to be up to personal preference because some people do very well, lower carb and other people do very well, higher carb. So I would mess around with that a little bit and see how you feel, how your energy is and your performance in the gym. And it's pretty wide the variance in terms of how people respond to lower carb or higher carb. I mean, I've worked with people where higher carb is just, they feel so much better. And then vice versa. And this is the perfect time to be doing that. We're in our building phase right now. We're adding calories. So this goes back again. I wouldn't ever do a generic thing with you. For one week, we might run a more higher carb diet. I'm asking you as your coach, how are you feeling? Do you feel strong? Do you feel sluggish? Do you feel like you're bloated? Yeah, how's your digestion going, your stool? And you're giving me that feedback. So I know, okay, she does well on 250 grams of carbohydrates. That's great. You're like, yeah, I just feel sluggish and bloated all the time. And I don't know what, and then I go, you know what, maybe we're not, maybe your body doesn't respond as well on a higher carb diet. Let's, let's increase fats. Let's lower carbs a little bit. Because calories we want to be consistent with because we're trying to reverse diet. But I may play with the macros, both protein or carbs and fats, based off of the feedback that you give me. And just the real goal is to slowly wrap, ramp that calorie intake up until I can get you to a place that's more like 26, 2700 calories and then start to bring you out ready for the show. Yeah. I hope that helps. Does that help at all? Yeah, absolutely. So gosh, cutting cardio is so hard. Well, it's always for my bikini competitors. I normally have to, I normally have to shut that down completely. And by the way, so Gilda, I'm going to make sure that Doug gets you in the forum. We have actually, we have a lot of, we actually have a lot of competitors that have gone through this process in the forum and everyone's super friendly. If you post in there, let them know what you're doing and your process and the advice the guys gave you and you can even admit the struggle you have with cutting cardio. You'll get a slew of people that have been in the same spot as you that are probably given tips and advice and like it's a great place and community for someone like you. Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. No problem. Thanks for calling in. All right. Have a good one. Bye. Yeah. How common is that Adam in the competitive world where people, they go into prep doing everything and now they're left with like, what do I have? It's how I ended up building a coaching business when I wasn't really trying to. I was just going to shows and meeting people and I would get these clients or they became clients but I get these competitors that would tell me what their coach had put them on, diet and cardio wise and a lot of these coaches actually have these competitors doing cardio in the off season. But a lot. Yeah. Not just a lot. In the off season, they're already doing it. And then when season started, it becomes twice a day, three times a day. Like it's just ridiculous. And then all they do is just keep cutting calories and calories and have no clue on how important it is for us to build their metabolism up in the off season. So the cutting phase is much easier. So it literally, it turned into me just kind of like telling, explaining that to people and they'd be like, well, would you coach me? And then I'd be like, well, I'm doing a show anyway. Sure. And then it all sudden became a thing where it turned into a side business for me where I was helping these. And bikini competitors, it was most common with. Yeah. It's extremely common that you get a client who is doing already cardio and is around this calorie and take 1500 to 2000. And they're doing cardio just to maintain where they're at. And then they want to do a show and like it's real quick and easy for me to assess that and go, no, like I know you want to do a show on this date. We're not going to even book a show until we get to a place where we both agree. This is a healthy place for your calories to be at with minimal to no cardio that now we're in the place to say, okay, let's pick a show date now that we've got a good metabolism to put ourselves in such a hard mindset to break. Oh, it is because, you know, and you're dealing with something like, yes, I will, I will go through this building phase, but also I want to shave. You make sure I shave off the fat at the same time. And so that becomes like a thought that like, I need to keep the cardio though. You know, so that way I don't get, you know, this exercise. Look, I never, I never really coached competitors, but I would get female competitors after they were done competing. Broken. Yes, busted. They come to me and they're working out like crazy and all I competed three times last year. And I'm looking at their, their food log. I'm like, you're eating 1300 calories and you're working out six days a week and you're running. Doing like three cardio sessions in a row. Yeah. Or they, or they would lose their periods for years or just to have all these signs of HPA axis dysfunction. So then it was this long process of getting their bodies to heal. And it's because of this. It's like they went into a pre-contest phase redlining, you know, all the way already. So where do you go from there? Now, how do I get my body ready for stage when I'm already doing everything? You just do more at some point. Yeah. Hopefully she goes in that form because there's actually, I know of at least three of ex clients of mine that is in our private form that I coached for bikini shows. So Rochelle's in there for sure. Melissa's in there. And I think Jessica is in there. All three girls that I, I got after either they did it with somebody else or did it on their own and can attest for the way we ramped their metabolism. I tell you, Melissa's was the last one I did. And I remember that, I mean, she's what five, what is most of five, three or shorter, right? She's a tiny little petite thing, walks around at 120 pounds, 125 pounds, whatever. She was eating 2,700 calories with no cardio before we decided to cut for show. And when I got a hold of her, she was right around here, 2,000 or so calories. And that was the goal. Let's get you up to a place where you are eating like so much food that you don't want to eat any more food. And then we're ready to reverse out. And I remember we cruised right in with no cardio to the last two weeks. She dieted higher than what she would, what I got her at. So she hit stage at like 20. More calories and 20. That's right. She hit stage at 2,200 calories when I think I got her around 1900 or 2000. That's awesome. Yeah. This is how you got your pro card in men's bikini. So awesome.