 I gotta go do a video about bodybuilding. Oh yeah buddy, I've got my pre-workout. Got my pre-workout, I'm gonna do some cardio after this video, so I figured I'll drink a little bit of it. Now it'll probably help me with this video since I am a little lacking in energy today. So yeah, here we are, let me have a sip first. Okay, it was more than a sip. Cherry lime flavor, ugh, tastes like life. Today I want to talk, but instead of just doing another bodybuilding competition update, I want to get into some specifics. Oh wait, I just realized. I didn't turn off the fridge again, so I'm gonna do that now. See I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm gonna get this right, and the AC, so. Wait, ugh. See, the only thing I'm afraid of with turning off the fridge is that knowing me and being ADD and just my mind going everywhere, million places at once is that I am gonna forget and then all of my food is gonna perish. Yeah, I'm not even concerned about the food that I had to buy, I'm concerned about the food that I have meal prep I spent so much time meal prepping. If I came home and I had four or five days worth of food that I had meal prep that was just spoiled, that would be a big downer for me. On to the content of this video. Today I want to talk about some things that I think those of you who follow me at least for fitness, for wellness, and maybe for some of you who are interested in possibly building muscle and bodybuilding and maybe competing one day, I think this is gonna be really interesting, cool, informative stuff. So let's see, I wanted to talk about what it feels like to really get down into the low body fat percentages. Like I'm talking single digits, I'm talking like eight, seven, six percent and below. What that feels like, what does that do to you? What does that do to your body, to your psyche, to your energy, all of that stuff. So we'll cover some of that at least from my perspective. And then also how you strategically use diet and cardio to burn proportionately more fat than anything else. So when you're losing weight, you're not just losing fat, your body's starting to catabolize muscle and it's starting to use up stored muscle glycogen which is how your body stores sugar. So it's fat, glycogen and muscle tissue that's breaking down for as needed for different nutrients. And so there's a strategic way to diet and to do cardio so that you encourage your body to put the most emphasis on using up its fat stores and preserving the muscle that you worked so hard to build. And then at the end, I will show you what we'll do, I'll show you my torso and compare that to when I announced that I wanna compete in May and what my body looked like then. So the date of the competition is October 12th. It's in Muscle Beach, which is in Venice, California. Muscle Beach is like the Mecca of bodybuilding. There's a Gold's Gym there, it's known as the Mecca. That's where like when bodybuilding was like a huge thing in the 70s and 80s, it was all about Muscle Beach. So it's really cool that the competition's gonna be there. It is the Federation is INBA and PNBA for the pros. This is my first competition that I'll be competing as a pro, so I'm really excited about that. And this is also the first tested competition that they're having in Muscle Beach. And I know that INBA, PNBA is really trying to create some credibility as a tested, credible bodybuilding federation. And they're using Olympic testing standards, it's WADA. It's the World Anti-Dubbing Agency Standards for Drug Testing because eventually their goal is to be accepted into the Olympics as an Olympic sport. That's their goal. So we wanna make bodybuilding credible and the only way to do that is to create a level playing field just like any other sport in which there's no performance enhancing drugs that are allowed and there's enforced testing and stuff like that. So as of today, I am just over seven weeks out and it's exactly 51 days out until showtime. Every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up is I go to the scale and I weigh myself and I track that every day. So today my weight was, what was it? So today my weight was 167.6 pounds, 167.6. When I started dieting, I was at 178. I was hovering about at that weight. So I've lost basically 11 pounds of weight, which is great. But the thing I wanna communicate to you guys and for anybody who's trying to lose weight is that it hasn't been a linear line of lost weight. My weight fluctuates daily. Here, I'll show you. I put it in my notepad every day, what my weight is. And you'll see that on certain days I've had cheat days. So I'll have like a refeed meal of like usually I choose to have in and out at night for dinner and you'll see the next day after the cheat, my weight goes right back up. Recently I think you could see one time, let's see. Okay, so you'll see on August 13th, my weight was at 170. The next morning I clocked in at 0.8 pounds higher than I was the night before. And this is just a small example, but and I've had like way more drastic variations like that when I didn't have a cheat meal and it just like went up the next day and I'm like, what the heck? But you have to understand there's a lot of variables that contribute to your daily weight fluctuations. There's definitely been times where it has gone up way more than that. Why is the weight going up? When I've been doing the same thing every day, dieting and not having enough calories every day, it's going down, it should be going down every single day. But the truth is there's a lot of variables that contribute to weight fluctuation. Some of those are say one day I put extra sodium in my food. Well, now my body's gonna hold on to more water because of the salt in my body. And just the added water weight is enough to bring my body weight up a pound or two. Sometimes I'll have a really intense workout. I told my coach this recently because he's like, hmm, it's weird that after your cheat meal, your weight didn't go down as quickly as it should have. And I go, well, I just had a really intense leg day and legs is one of the biggest muscle groups in the body. So when I do a really intense leg workout, you know, there's inflammation. That's what the soreness is, is your muscles inflamed. So it's enlarged, locked in all this extra water to help with the healing process. So I'm carrying more weight just because of that. Although I track it every day, I also keep in mind, you know, that there's gonna be fluctuations. For those of you who want to weigh yourself every day, that's okay, but just keep in mind that it's gonna go up and down and don't let that dissuade you. You have to think about over the long term, what's the pattern over an extended period of time, not just from one day to the next. Cool? All right. Looking at the past two weeks of weight loss, you'll notice that I've lost about three pounds of weight. And you might think, gee, well, if you're dieting that hard and you're going through all that with your clean eating and cardio and all that work, and you're only losing three pounds in two weeks, like that doesn't seem like that much. And I know other programs where you can lose more weight quicker and if you do this diet or that diet or whatever. The point is when you're getting a competition ready, the idea is not to lose the most weight in the shortest period of time because when you lose weight, you're not just losing fat. Typically when you're losing weight, you're losing a combination of fat. Your body is catabolizing or eating its own muscle tissue, breaking that down and turning that into nutrients that it needs. And also glycogen, which is stored sugar. That's the form that our body stores sugar. The goal of a diet for a competition is to lose as much of that weight being fat. You want to train your body to go, okay, I'm going to take the fat. I don't really need to take apart the muscle. And the muscle glycogen, it's there when it's needed. It's really fast, easy to burn energy source. So, but we want to hang onto that hard-earned muscle. We work so hard to body build and to create muscle. The last thing we want to do when we're losing weight for a competition is to suddenly break all that down. So how do we do that? There's a few strategic ways to really emphasize burning fat and retaining the muscle. This is why there's such a big emphasis on protein intake for body builders who are getting ready to compete. We want to hold onto the muscle so if we keep feeding our body lots of protein, the body doesn't have to break down muscle for protein. Another tactic is with cardio. So a lot of people when they want to get shredded really fast and show off those muscles, they make the mistake of just going ham on the treadmill or running or whatever cardio it is. And unfortunately, just like the intense dieting too quickly, you are also gonna be breaking down your muscles. And we don't want that. We want an emphasis on fat. So that means we want to keep our heart rate in the fat burning zone. You'll notice on a lot of treadmills, it'll show a table for where you want your heart, what range you want your heart rate to be in in order to stay in a fat burning zone. Which is essentially the zone where your body is gonna disproportionately consume more fat for energy. That's what we want. So what that looks like is basically a light, it's a light cardio workout. When I'm doing cardio, it's essentially a fast walk on a slight incline. It doesn't look like much, it seems really easy, but the reality is that's exactly where we want to be, where we want a heart rate to be so that we're burning primarily fat as a fuel source. So here we are, 52 days out. I get tired, I get run down by the end of the day. I am feeling a little sluggish, but overall, especially compared to past reps, I'm feeling, I'm okay, I'm doing all right. I'm constantly sore as always because I train really hard all the time. So I'm trying to maybe go to the gym a little bit less, but overall, no complaints. However, what I do want to talk about is once your body starts getting into the single digit body fat percentages, this is where things start to get a little bit tricky. Now, for me especially, I'm talking about like 8% and lower. Every half percent to percent, once you get to 8% lower that you go is just exponentially more difficult. Here's why. Essentially, you're depleting your body of all its energy sources. Storing fat is like a battery. You have a battery on board that you can pull energy from whenever you need to. Now, imagine that battery being gone or basically that battery being at 10%. You have such little like reserve energy on board. So all the energy that you get is gonna be from the meals you consume. Workouts start to get a lot harder and more difficult and the crash starts to happen a lot quicker. You know, I'll go strong and then all of a sudden, boom, I hit a wall. That's it, there's no more energy. My body's not able to draw from anywhere really, not very efficiently. And so my energy just tanks until my next meal. Also, now that the body is really scrambling to find energy, it's trying to prioritize what it puts its energy into. So if you're working out a lot and training really hard and you're getting muscle inflammation and all that, your body's like building muscle at this point is not a priority. We are talking about survival. We need enough energy to sustain our body to get through the day. And if you're putting demands on your body to not just survive, but grow muscle, your body's like, mm-mm, I ain't doing all that. That's not, we don't have enough energy for that. So get out of here, stop doing that. So what that feels like is recovery is just starts to get longer and longer. It's more miserable, it's more painful. This is when you can start to notice the more occurrence of things like tendonitis and other injuries. This is when you start to become a more injury prone. There's just not enough resources in the body to keep you well lubricated and moving and repairing and doing all the normal functions that it can do when you're getting plenty of calories on a day-to-day basis. This is when I start to wake up every day and I never feel quite fully rested. I'm always just a little bit tired, not quite getting enough rest. And the big challenge for me personally is that I currently still, I work five nights a week bartending at a restaurant and we don't have a bar back. So not only am I in the well, which is where the bartender makes his drinks, making drinks for the entire restaurant for all the servers and all their orders, but I also have a bar top of guests that are sitting there. They want to order drinks as well and making all the drinks. And then there's no bar back, so that means I have to wash my own dishes and I have to polish them. If I need more garnishes, I gotta run over the fridge, grab them, put them out. If I need to cut more, I gotta cut it. All of this simultaneously, while taking care of the guests with a smile on my face, I gotta have a pleasant demeanor. And the thing is, as the day goes on towards the end of the day, my energy really starts to tank. And this is when my body wants to shut down, it wants to rest. But this is when I have to turn up the most because I'd really have to turn it on and be present for my job, right? So this is very, very difficult. I'm very tricky for me. And this is definitely the hardest part of my competition prep, because I'm always starting to get tired and I have to counter that with caffeine. Sometimes I'll work seven, eight hour shifts. That's been really difficult for me in the past. And I know from here on out till competition day, it's gonna be a struggle and it's only gonna get more difficult. Not only that, but I'm working in a restaurant. I'm constantly surrounded by food. I'm getting food on my fingers and my hands because I'm taking people's plates away and then bussing stuff and I'm smelling the aromas of all these amazing fishes and noodles and beef and what have you constantly wafting through the air and I'm surrounded by alcohol. I'm literally holding alcohol in my hand. I have glasses of delicious liquid, refreshing cocktails the entire time. It's so hard. It's like I'm surrounded in temptation. Yeah, that's my life five nights a week until I hit the stage. Whew, it's not easy. And as I said, when you're in the low body fat percentage, once the energy from my last meal is consumed, boom, I hit a wall, it's done. My energy goes, and everybody around me sees it. It's like I just power down and now I'm like dead tired rave. I'm moving really, really slowly. My thoughts are just like are also moving very slowly. My motor skills suffer. My hand-eye coordination at that point, I start to get clumsy. I start to knock things over. I'm like a bull in a china shop. I'm also, I've become irritable. I start to get a headache and I'm just not very personable and that's so hard, especially on a Friday, Saturday night when we're open till 11 p.m. We're open until 11 p.m. in the restaurant. And a lot of guests sometimes will come in at 10 30, 10 45 and they're like, hey, yeah, we wanna come get a drink. And I'm just like, I hate you, I wanna go home. But I gotta get through it. And everybody around me knows that my coworkers, they're like, oh yeah, raves hit that wall. Don't fuck with rave right now. And then last but not least, how does this all relate to HIV? Honestly, it doesn't. I don't do anything differently. I don't take anything into consideration because of the fact that I have HIV. I know a lot of you guys are worried about my, about dieting when you're on HIV or working out or supplements. For me, there's no consideration there. And I've had doctors appointments. I've had lab results that I've had just before competition and pretty much just after a competition and they've all been really, really good. In some cases, even better than normal when it's near competition because I'm eating so cleanly. And so it's actually been really good for me. I have kidney, liver results have all been really positive. So there's no concern there for me as of yet. I've been doing this for about three years now. Anyway, that's it for you guys. I hope you guys found some value in this. Let me know if this helps you or what you get out of it and I will keep you guys updated. Whoa, hold up. I just came from doing cardio. Like I said, I was gonna do, but I realized, do you mind, please, just one moment? I'll be right there. I'll be right there. One moment. Thank you. So I just came back from cardio and I realized, can you wait, please? I realized that I never did my comparisons. So let me do that now. This is the front. I'm gonna try to splice this side by side with the other video. Okay, we got a side, other side. There you have it. That is what my body looks like right now. And while I was on the treadmill, I was posed with an interesting question. So someone saw my story today with my picture of my torso and he asked me, Nick, thank you for asking this question, Nick Rydel. So there was a point where I had some definition but not that much and then all of a sudden it seemed like overnight in the course of a week, suddenly I have all this muscle definition and he's like, how, what did you do? How did that happen? What happens when you're at a certain body fat percent range? You might be losing weight but your body's pretty much gonna look the same. When you look in the mirror, your body's pretty much gonna look the same. But once you start getting low enough, for me it's like sub 10%. Once I get low enough, then all of a sudden it's like the muscles start to appear because there's enough fat that's gone now that you can really start to see details. And then once that happens, anything I lose from there on out is gonna be very pronounced. So it seems like overnight I go from a little definition to oh my God, this guy's ripped as fuck. It's just the result of getting finally down to that body fat percentage where everything starts to peek through. But yeah, that's the answer. I didn't do anything differently, it's just the same, it's just getting to that body fat percent level. And people who ask me like, how do you get abs? What do I need to work out? What do I need to do? The answer is you just gotta lose the weight and once you get to a low enough body fat percentage and your abs just will, they'll show up. All right, for realsies this time, I'm out. See you guys, stay tuned. 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