The Real Purpose of the Improvement Season
This post is part of The Ultimate Bikini Prep Guide – check out the full guide for more!
Bodybuilding (noun) /ˈbädēˌbildiNG/
Bodybuilding is the practice of developing muscle hypertrophy and improving body composition through intense resistance training, specialized nutrition, and rest. It focuses on maximizing muscle size, symmetry, and definition for aesthetic purposes, often for competition. It is considered both a competitive sport and a lifestyle.
This is the actual dictionary definition of bodybuilding. What’s the main take-home point here?
Not surprisingly, bodybuilding is about (drum roll please) building the body.
It’s not about staying lean while you do it, or maximizing health, or whatever – it’s about building big-ass muscles because it’s cool as shit.
So if you aren’t deliberately taking the time to do exactly that, you aren’t bodybuilding. In today’s culture especially we are overly fixated on “showing abs” and being lean that people – even competitive bodybuilders – lose the plot and become overly fixated on looking ‘in shape’ all the time and don’t actually prioritize BUILDING their physique.
Without the building, there’s little value in leaning out and showing a physique that hasn’t really been built.
I feel if I stopped there, I’ve made my point for this point (ha!) – but let’s continue anyway!
Physiques Are Revealed During Prep — But Built Long Before It
In terms of competitive bodybuilding, the growth or improvement season is necessary to avoid looking exactly the same show after show, year after year.
Happy with how you look currently? Great, you’re in a tiny minority of people. And in all earnestness I say more power to you – I wish I was there, but most of us are programmed in our brain to want to continue to chase improvement. For us, a growth season is non-negotiable.
When you go through a prolonged cut prior to get on stage (or hitting the beach, or whatever), you’re not MAKING anything during that phase – you’re showing what you built during this phase. If you don’t build it – or improve it – there’s nothing to show, or at least no changes to show.
This season determines who wins shows, period. It’s fair to say that among experienced competitors, everyone can execute a prep well. You can follow your diet, hit your marks, suck up and embrace the hunger and cravings and hit the cardio and come in lean. The off-season or growth phase is the separator – you can tell who put in the work and who didn’t. It’s easy to be complacent and more relaxed during this phase, and those who take that approach will lose to those who treat it as seriously as they treat prep.
It’s hard to maintain that focus through all phase – but many do, and those are your show winners in almost all cases.
In addition to actually building muscle it’s also a great opportunity to build up your metabolic rate – handling more food and handling it effectively and efficiently (monitoring health markers and keeping those in check) will set you up for a better and easier prep phase as well.
The Improvement Season Is a Construction Phase, Not a Break
I tell my clients 2 things that sound mutually exclusive but aren’t.
1 – the off-season is where you can relax a bit and be less psychotic on your diet, and enjoy living a bit more like a normal person.
2 – if you remain super diligent and consistent, you will have a better outcome on stage the next time.
You CAN split the difference – be largely on plan, allow for some indiscretions, life, vacations, etc – and still improve season to season.
You will improve MORE with less balance, assuming you avoid burnout. The longevity question is worth considering here as well. If you pour every ounce of yourself into those and burn out after 2-3 years, you’ll probably achieve more success and develop a better physique with a more balanced approach and a career that last 10, 15, or even 20 years.
Your mindset here should be determined by how well you know yourself. I’ll use me as an example, since I know myself better than anyone else:
I live bodybuilding every day, literally. It’s my full-time job. In the middle of my work day I “take a break” and go to the gym to train. I’m doing client check-ins all day, writing blog posts (hi!), recording podcasts, building courses, posting on social media. It is the thing I spend the most time thinking about every single day of my life.
In the off-season, I am happy – if not NEEDING – to back off a bit and take a break from being a psycho with regards to dietary adherence. I allow myself one-off meals, I pull back on training days, I slack on cardio a bit (ok a lot). I need to do this or I burn out and it impacts my ability to be present and effective for my clients and with my business. When I take a vacation, that’s a complete vacation from training and diet and I don’t think about any of that stuff. That’s my balance. I need that to continue to be successful professionally because otherwise I never take a break from it, and it becomes exhausting and frankly just not fun.
Would I be a better bodybuilder if I was less balanced? Yep, probably. But I’d be less effective at my job, would enjoy it less, and therefore going “all in all the time” is simply not a line I want to walk across, and I accept the results of that.
You’ve got to find the right balance for YOU, which might be very different from mine and for very different reasons.
What This Phase Is Actually Trying to Accomplish
So what are we trying to do in this phase beyond just “grow”?
It starts with your needs analysis – pose by pose strengths and weaknesses so we know what your growth priorities are. Success in this phase is determined EXCLUSIVELY by how much we improve those areas. Not by staying lean or being disciplined, but by how much we improve the areas that need to improve. Period. If we can avoid getting sloppy in the process, that’s a huge bonus.
Make sure you’re familiar with the standards and criteria for your category and are conducting that needs analysis with an eye towards those standards.
Additionally another goal here is to eat as much as possible without overdoing it. Getting your caloric intake high is building a metabolic system that’s going to respond better to future preps. This CAN (but doesn’t necessarily) mean that you’ll cut effectively at higher calories, but that the process will be easier, smoother, and more predictable.
Why This Phase Gets Measured in Months or Years — Not Weeks
“How long should I run this phase for?” is the most common question I get at this stage. And the answer is (of course) “it depends”.
What I can say is that it should be measured in months or years, not weeks (depending on how much growth needs to happen). This is one spot where classic physique and bodybuilding have a leg up on other categories – you have weight caps to be concerned with so it’s a bit easier to know how much muscle you need to be (or can get away with) building. If my classic physique weight cap is 209lbs and in my last show I came in super conditioned at 207, I don’t really have much room to play with – and if I want to aim for significant growth, I need to either get taller or make a switch to bodybuilding and compete as a heavyweight.
Women and men’s physique competitors – without weight caps – have a more ambiguous picture that really needs to be totally driven by a good and thorough needs analysis.
Very generally I would say you should plan on a growth phase being AT LEAST twice as long as your prep, 3-4x as long (or longer) is typically ideal, especially for people earlier in their bodybuilding journey when more growth is likely needed.
In Bikini Blueprint, I have an entire module dedicated to setting up and managing a growth phase as well as details on how to perform your needs analysis, which is also something I can help with personally in the private community if you get stuck and have questions.
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