Red Flags During Bikini Prep (When to Adjust Instead of Push)
This post is part of The Ultimate Bikini Prep Guide – check out the full guide for more!
We all know contest prep is supposed to suck. Right?
Right?
Well, often yes. But just because it sucks doesn’t mean it’s working. And it CAN work without sucking too bad.
So what are the red flags to watch out for? The kind that tell us that things might not be ok, or that they are now but they might be trending in the wrong direction? Let’s dive in.
Discomfort Is Expected — Deterioration Is a Different Signal
Raise your hand if you’ve done a show and not been hungry in prep? Yeah, no one? Thought so.
Raise your hand if you’ve done a show and not been tired during prep? Still no one? Everyone awake out there?
Moody? Yeah – ALL of those things are normal and expected during prep. They aren’t signs that anything is wrong.
Now what if your appetite continue to ramp up and up even when you’re not changing anything?
What if your mood tanks AFTER a refeed? What if you get lots of great sleep AND regular afternoon naps and you’re still tired?
These are signs that something needs to be checked out in greater detail. If you have a hard week, that’s ok. Three straight weeks where each one is harder than before is potentially an issue, depending where you are in prep and what your program looks like.
What we’ll do here is give some guidance on when to know something is off – we’re going to recognize patterns, not necessarily prescribe solutions.
Yellow Flags vs. Red Flags
Let’s distinguish – a yellow flag would be something we want to make note of but doesn’t necessarily require any action.
A red flag is something we want to address immediately.
Yellow flags would be things like:
- A couple under-performing workouts
- Sudden loss or significant increase in appetite
- A few nights of poor sleep or a change in sleep patterns
- Change in digestive speed/constipation
Many of these things can be caused by random day-to-day fluctuations and will often sort themselves out given time.
Red flags would be things like:
- Any of the above that become longer, repeating patterns
- Recovery diminishing or general aches and pains increasing significantly
- Loss of motivation to train/loss of dietary focus/discipline
These are things that are either less serious issues that become serious because of how persistent they are, or things that signal overtraining which requires an immediate response because it’s EASY to address and only gets worse if you ignore it.
You don’t want to overreact to one bad day, you also don’t want to ignore more significant patterns.
Worth mentioning also a recent post I wrote on stress and sleep dysfunction as that is closely related to this topic as well:
Hormonal Disruptions Worth Monitoring
I recently made a longer post about this worth a quick read also:
Loss of cycle regularity
Keeping in mind that during a highly effective prep where you get stage lean, experiencing some level of hormonal dysfunction and cycle deregulation (for women) is NOT uncommon. We don’t want to completely dismiss it, but I’ve worked with women who were adamant about maintaining their cycle during prep, and the result on stage always takes a hit with that as the backdrop. A coach can’t control how sensitive your hormonal system is to disruption so placing that expectation on a coach I would argue is unreasonable.
The key here is to get is regular between shows, and accept minimal time with dysregulation.
Track it closely also in a prep document so you aren’t guessing or relying on memory. This is not a reason to panic or necessarily change anything, but it IS worth noting and considering if any action is needed.
Other physiological signals worth noting
Be mindful of temperature regulation issues which can signal thyroid dysfunction.
Experiencing some drop in libido is normal just due to fatigue – having it disappear entirely would be something worth investigating and I would pull sex hormone labs to check values.
Prolonged digestive dysfunction can be a sign of several hormones being imbalanced. Same thing with hair shedding, much of this will come back to cortisol and learning to manage it well.
When Flags Start Clustering
Let’s also consider the patterns with which these things appear. A single red flag gives us something we can act on and there’s usually a stepwise approach to troubleshooting it.
Sleep becoming an issue? Ok, as a coach I have an arsenal of 3-4 questions I typically ask and there are anywhere from 10-14 actionable steps we can take depending on how we define the issue in detail after some questioning.
But let’s say it’s sleep AND digestion. Ok, there will be some overlap there but now it’s like the kid plugging the hole in the dike with his thumb, now you’re using both thumbs and having to stretch to reach both holes.
It’s likely a third hole is about to spring open – what do you do then? This is where you start to look for systemic, plan-driven elements that are causing these problems. The plan may be “fine”, but this particular person isn’t responding well to it so we need to change something big picture.
The fact that several things are happening at once or in rapid succession is the sign that the body simply is not ok with what it’s being asked to do, and it’s asking for some help (change the program).
And having done ~40,000 client check-ins over the years, my check-in process is designed to make these flags easier to spot. The experience of having handled that many also means there aren’t many scenarios I haven’t dealt with.
A lot of these things that can go wrong tend to feed other things.
Example: sleep quality drops -> appetite increase from that -> training performance drops -> irritability increases -> staying on plan becomes harder. Each problem then leads to another.
The answer here, VERY rarely, is to push harder. Usually we need to pull back and re-evaluate some big picture metrics.
Responding Early Is a Competitive Advantage, Not a Weakness
The problem I deal with in less experienced competitors is the feeling that the answer is ALWAYS to push harder, and pulling back is seen as failure or weakness.
This is often the hardest bit of reprogramming that I need to do with people. Even when they KNOW it’s right because of how they feel, they don’t feel they have “permission” to dial back and focus on recovery. It’s a hard pattern to reprogram.
Pushing harder is the best way to turn a yellow flag into several red ones. You push harder when things feel GOOD, not when you’re already struggling.
The first tool is always stress management and I start with this on clients in the off-season. If you can’t manage stress well then, your prep is going to suck – period.
We can also make small calorie tweaks, do a refeed, take a deficit break for a few days, scale back cardio or take an extra rest day from training. These are all tweaks that can really move the needle.
The main goal is arriving at peak week both LEAN and also feeling good – at least tired, hungry, and irritable…but reasonably so.
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