Please note: This series of articles details the experiences of training one individual and is not meant to be used for your own training needs. Everyone's needs are different, so every training and nutritional program will vary from person to person. It's intended for informational and entertainment purposes only and we cannot be held responsible for any accident or injury that may result by following any part of this program.

February 1, 2006

Natalie Waples: A Two-Time Figure Champion in Just Three Months

Part Two: The Three-Part Program, Understanding Shape, and First Month’s Training

Last month, I described how Natalie Waples and I started working together. Our aim was to create a knockout body for her in just three months so that she could enter her first figure competition. In that article, I talked about some of the planning we did beforehand to help us achieve her goals. In this article as well as in the next, I’m going to describe what we did in our first month, which was August, in order to get the best start possible to meet our fast-approaching deadline.

The three-part program

The program we created was divided into three areas: weight training, nutrition, and posing. I consider all three are critical for someone entering a figure competition, and not one can be neglected. Technically, there is also a fourth area – suit selection, makeup, tanning, etc. – but I left that mostly to Natalie, only giving feedback where it was necessary. Therefore, we won’t be covering that aspect in great detail in this series.

Weight training was used to build muscle and create the shape we wanted for her body. Proper nutrition was necessary to provide the essential nutrients to fuel that muscle growth. However, muscle growth wasn’t everything – the diet had to be structured such that bodyfat would be reduced too. Furthermore, the nutritional program had to be adequate in order to provide her with energy throughout the day to allow her to function properly and to continue to take part in the various sports she participates in. Basically, we were focusing on building muscle, losing fat, and ensuring she had ample energy. Finally, there was the posing, which is the presentation aspect of figure competition. Many competitors neglect practicing posing and focus mostly on weight training and nutrition – I feel this hurts them tremendously when they get to their competition day.

However, before we get to the nitty-gritty of these areas of the program, it’s important to understand what we were trying to achieve with Natalie’s body. In other words, how we wanted her to look at the end of it all.

Understanding shape and working toward it

The concept of "building" and "shaping" the body is often misunderstood, or sometimes even completely neglected. However, the concept is so vital to creating a really outstanding physique that it simply can’t be overlooked. In fact, I think so strongly about this that I wrote an article about it last October called "Your Own Custom-made Body." You can control what you look like to a large degree if you have a clear goal in mind and you know what to do in order to achieve it. Too often, though, I see people prepare for competition with no real concept of creating a pleasing shape for their body.

My concept of the ideal feminine physique is one that has wide shoulders, sweeping back muscles, a tiny-as-possible waist, and, finally, well-developed muscles throughout the lower body, all the way from the glutes, through to the thighs, to the hamstrings, and to the calves. If you get that right, you’ve got a lot going for you.

As well, the muscles should be full and round, but not overbearing. After all, most women don’t like hearing, "Hey, are you ever big!" In fact, most women who come to me say, "I don’t want to be huge!" I tell them not to worry; in fact, they’re often surprised to learn that the women who compete are often smaller and lighter than the average woman on the street! As trainer Vince Gironda always said, it’s all about creating an "illusion."

In summary, I don’t think it is good enough just to have muscles and be lean to enter a figure competition – I believe the body must be appealing by having flare, curves, and flow. Some people mistakenly call this "symmetry," but symmetry actually refers to the left- and right-side balance of the body. What I’m talking about is called shape, and my goal is to create as pleasing-looking a shape as possible.

All the women I’ve worked with, Natalie included, have agreed with me in terms of the look we were trying to achieve. Obviously, though, genetics play a large role and not everyone can achieve this look. However, what you can’t overcome with training due to some genetic limitation, you can often overcome with effective posing, which is why that aspect of the program is just as important as training and nutrition when it comes to creating the "overall package."

First month’s training

With a clear goal in mind for the shape we were trying to achieve with Natalie’s body, various exercises were chosen to build up the muscles in the areas I mentioned. Likewise, we avoided any exercises that might add muscle to places where it was not wanted – like the sides of her waist, for example, which would diminish her "taper."

We had a rather short timeframe to work with, so we had to implement a training program to get the best results in the shortest possible time. As I mentioned in the last article, the training methods I use are from the legendary trainer Vince Gironda. Why? First, his methods work amazingly well; they’re the best I know of for someone who is natural. Second, properly implemented, they work incredibly fast. In fact, in his heyday, Gironda was the "go to" guy for the movie studios – he was known as the trainer who could achieve results faster than anyone. He whipped actors and actresses into shape in seemingly no time at all – sometimes within just a few weeks! He also did the same for countless bodybuilders. For Natalie, we didn’t have weeks, we had three months, but that was still hardly any time at all.

The first thing I had Natalie do was a full-body routine, which is precisely what Gironda prescribed for new students to his gym. She did this type of workout three times per week.

Implementing a full-body routine might surprise some people who think that in order to make maximum progress you have to go on a "split" routine (i.e., one that works different bodyparts on different days). Not true. The full-body routine can work extremely well for building muscle, packing on an appreciable amount of muscle size in quite a short time. I wrote about this already in January of last year in an article called "Starting Out Sensibly: A Beginner’s Workout Routine." Although Natalie certainly wasn’t a beginner, this type of workout is grueling, and the way I had her execute it helped build up her stamina so that we had a good basis to progress from in the future when we actually did start using a split routine.

In terms of frequency, we normally worked out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or, occasionally, Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. This schedule allowed us to attack the body three times a week, which resulted in tremendous improvement quite quickly. The key is to allow at least one day of rest between workouts, and sometimes two. Your body "grows" on these rest days, so you need to give it that time – you don’t want to work the same muscle day after day or it won’t have time to recuperate.

At the very beginning of this full-body routine, I wasn’t pushing Natalie to go all out. Instead, I wanted her to learn proper exercise form for many of the unique Gironda-created exercises we were doing, and I wanted her to really feel the muscles when she was executing the movements. Too many people do exercises and never actually feel the muscles being worked. It usually means they’re doing the movement wrong. It’s important that you feel the exercise you are performing. If you don’t, you might as well go home, since you’re mostly wasting your time.

So, she did each exercise for three sets of eight repetitions (reps), with the exception of calves. The calf muscles are generally considered "high rep" muscles and most people need to do 15-30 reps per set to have them respond properly (for this first month, Natalie did 20 reps for calves). As I said, though, all the other muscles were worked using sets of eight reps.

The first set would be considered a warm-up: eight reps using 50 percent of the weight she could manage for an all-out set of eight reps (for example, if she could do an exercise with 30 pounds for eight reps, she would use 15 pounds for this first set for eight repetitions). For the second set she’d use 75 percent of her maximum, and again she’d do eight reps (in our example, that would be 22.5 pounds). For the last set she’d use 100 percent of her maximum (30 pounds) for eight repetitions. The rest between sets would be long enough for me to do my own set and no more – as I mentioned in the first article, we were training together.

In total, she did nine exercises for the entire workout, so 27 sets in all, and we’d aim to complete the workout in about 40 minutes. Although the exercises varied a bit, we always used some key ones that I consider the most important for developing a certain muscle group. In the first month these were:

• Chest: incline dumbbell press
• Back: lat pulldowns to the front
• Shoulders: upright rows
• Triceps: rope pulls
• Biceps: dumbbell curls
• Thighs: barbell squats
• Hamstrings: leg curls
• Calves: calf raises
• Lower back: hyperextensions

(A number of these exercises are shown in detail in the two DVDs I produced called The Vince Gironda Exercises: Vol. 1 and The Vince Gironda Exercises (and More!): Vol. 2 that are available in our "Shop" section.)

Many people might look at the workout and think that she wasn’t doing enough; however, I’ve learned that less, not more is what often brings about better results in terms of generating muscle growth. However, I add to that these conditions: It should work providing you have chosen effective exercises that you are doing properly, and if you remember that "progressive resistance" is crucial for improvement, and train by these rules. This latter point about progressive resistance is vital, so I’ll explain it in more detail.

I see many people train day after day at the gym, simply lifting weights and forgetting, or perhaps not even knowing, about the concept of progressive resistance. Progressive resistance means that you have to consistently overload the muscles over time to have them continue to respond. This overload is what forces your muscles to adapt, responding by growing, which is exactly what you’re after when you’re weight training in the gym. If you don’t overload the muscles, not much is going to happen, which is why people who go to the gym day after day, doing the same thing every time, don’t improve and look basically the same every time you see them. Progressive resistance is crucial. Another way to think about it is to simply make current and future workouts harder than the ones that took place before.

For the people I coach, I apply the concept of progressive resistance for each exercise in four ways: 1) by increasing the weight, 2) by increasing the number of repetitions, 3) by improving the form so its stricter, which makes the exercise more difficult even though you haven’t actually increased the weight, and 4) by decreasing the rest interval between sets, which, again, makes the movement more difficult even though the weight hasn’t actually increased. There are other ways too, such as increasing sets, etc., but this is what I like to focus on doing.

With these concepts in mind, we worked each day to make the current workout more difficult than the one before it. My message to Natalie before each workout was, "We have to make it harder." However, this message has to be taken with a bit of caution. You don’t do an easy workout one day and then blast the muscles to smithereens the next. You have to do what you can manage, you have to ensure your workouts are safe, and you have to ensure that you’re progressing over time, not just over two workouts. Therefore, you just nudge yourself ahead slowly and cautiously. Natalie kept it all in her training journal – a good way to keep track and to record improvements.

Finally, although this part is mostly about weight training, I’ll also talk about cardio-type training, since the two go hand-in-hand. Something some people find odd is that I’m not a big believer in using cardio for fat loss. They find it odd, I suspect, because these days some competitors seem to do more cardio than weight training! What’s more, these marathon cardio sessions get talked about so much in the magazines and elsewhere that many people think they are mandatory. In fact, I heard of some figure competitors doing two-hour cardio sessions. My question is: Why?

Quite simply, when it comes to losing bodyfat I feel that nutrition is far more important than doing excessive cardio. Also, I find excessive cardio breaks down muscle tissue – something we were certainly trying to avoid, since we were working so hard to build muscle up – and people who do too much cardio also tax the recovery ability of their body and deplete their hormone levels. You can pick out the competitors who have overdone their cardio when they get onstage – they appear drawn, tired, and almost ill looking. That’s the opposite of the full, rounded, healthy look that I like to see in female competitors.

Still, I believe that cardio is good for overall health, and Natalie likes to do cardio for her health and well-being. So, since she was already in good cardiovascular shape and was used to doing cardio sessions, she did cardio exercises about three times per week. These were usually done in the morning, long before our weight-training session, which was held in the late afternoon. What we made sure of was that she didn’t overdo cardio and that it wasn’t breaking down any of that muscle that we were working so hard to build.

Overall, that’s what our first month of training looked like – a full-body routine done three times per week, along with some cardio-type exercise that Natalie had already been doing. Next time, I’ll describe Natalie’s nutritional program for the first month, as well as how we incorporated posing into the overall plan early on so that when she got onstage for the first time she looked like she had been there a dozen times. After that, I’ll tell you about the second and third months, and I’ll give you some insight into the tips and tricks we used to coax lagging bodyparts to grow.

...Doug Schneider
das@seriousaboutfitness.com

You can learn more about Natalie at her website, www.NatalieWaples.com.

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