Help on weight management through the Sheiko training periods to competition

[PatB]

I'm currently in Preparation Period 1 with a bench press competition in May and sights set on a full competition in July.  Also, I'm in a slight calorie surplus now hoping for some hypertrophic gains.  My body weight is only about a pound off the top of my target weight class, which is 59Kg.

For now, I assume it makes sense to keep building but I wonder if there are any guidelines for gaining and losing bodyweight around the training periods?

For example, should I continue building or go into maintenance now?  And if I need to lose 2-3Kg to hit my weight class when is the best time to do it within the programming?

I looked through several pages of forum threads but found nothing on this topic so hope it hasn't already been covered before 

[Deaddy]

In principle this is easy: The best time to lose weight is the furthest away from competetion. The best time to gain weight is when volume is high. Which is often also the time furthest away from competition, so in practice this is complicated.

You should plan your weight gain and loss in a way that it minimizes hard training days where you are underfed, and minimizes the amount of the caloric deficit on such days. So if you have a comp in July, and you are already at the top of your weight class, the best course of action (given it makes sense to stay in that weightclass) would stay at that weight so that you will have no bad training days foodwise.

In general I would recommend starting in the next weight class, unless there are good reasons to do otherwise (winning, starting with all your friends in the same weightclass, logistics when the other weightclass starts another day, you cannot change your weightclass anymore).

[PatB]

It wouldn't be a disaster to go up a weight class and I don't believe there would be any issues on competition days.

However, if I go up a class that would make all my lifts comparatively worse so I'd want to see my weight going up quite a lot to be happy with that.  It's probably something I shouldn't be thinking about but I noticed that if got a total of 330Kg in the Masters III 59Kg class that would qualify for the National Championship.  That is a total I expected to get in my last (and first) meet last November but fell short mainly due to a hamstring injury.  Anyway, I guess that just sounds like a worthy goal although not really significant.

I did try the RP, Renaissance Periodisation, powerlifting program two years ago and followed their forums and they advocated getting down to your weight class about three months before a competition and then staying in maintenance.  But there is a lot of stuff on the Internet pushing the idea of cutting just before a meet and even doing water loss to hit weight.  Anyway, you seem to be in the same mindset as RP.

Maybe the best thing is to make sure I get to the right weight in Preparation Period 2 and then keep on maintenance until after the competition 

[Deaddy]

Well, qualifying for nationals is certainly something that makes dieting worth, as it might set you up for another fun meet in the future.

Yeah I think I have pretty much the same stance as RP on that topic.

To be fair, there is something to be said about cutting towards the meet and that is just than when the meet approaches, you then have all things focussed on it, and you can really push yourself in the process of training heavy and cutting hard. Maybe that experience is something you find to be fun or it might suit your psychology more. But then you would choose fun/feeling better over optimality <imagine picture of Mike looking disappointed>.

[PatB]

I weighed in at 58.5Kg at the weekend and have revised my calories to maintenance, although that makes very little difference as the surplus was very small.  I've tried faster bulking in the past adding a pound every couple of weeks before and thought I was adding lots of muscle.  As it turned out, I just added a ton of fat and hated spending many weeks (months) burning it all off again.  Unfortunately, the only way to add muscle seems to be very very slowly

I think I'll do a mini-cut, for 2 or 3 weeks, after Easter to make up for the chocolate and give myself some breathing space below the weight limit.

Unless the Sheiko program adds a lot of lean mass or my weights go up significantly, I suspect 59Kg will be the best class for a few more years.  According to one of Sheiko's articles I read here, I should weigh over 80Kg - 80Kg and visible abs, maybe if I was 18 and could do it all over again