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.

March 1, 2006

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

Part Three: First Month’s Nutrition and Posing

In last month’s article about Natalie’s three-month transformation, I first gave an overview of our three-part preparation program; next, I explained the concept of "shaping" the physique to make her really stand out; and finally, I described Natalie’s first month of training. This time I’m going to talk about Natalie’s nutritional program in that first month, and I’m also going to describe how we incorporated posing practice into the whole program, which is often neglected by novice and experienced competitors alike but is crucial come competition day.

First month’s nutrition

I don’t pretend to have reinvented the wheel when it comes to nutrition. As someone who coaches competitors, I don’t have time to conduct elaborate experiments and come up with some whiz-bang nutritional program that I can write a book about. Quite frankly, that’s not my thing. Instead, I rely on the work done by nutritional experts who have vast knowledge of nutrition, and who have spent decades experimenting with various diets to see what works and what doesn’t. Mostly, I follow the nutritional advice given by Vince Gironda, whose exercise methods already form the basis of Natalie’s weight-training regime and whose nutritional concepts are just as sound. As well, I look to Dr. Maura Di Pasquale, a Canadian physician who’s an expert on nutrition and has developed what he calls "The Metabolic Diet." I follow both of these men because their methods are more similar than different, and each brings something to the table without really conflicting with the other.

The next thing I will tell you is that there isn’t just some page out of book that I can cut and paste into here to give you a "by the numbers" diet, although some supposed "gurus" try to do just that. Something that simple just doesn’t exist – at least, not something that works. I also believe that a good diet doesn’t mean eating the exact same thing every day. The human body is a living, breathing, adapting thing that thrives on variety. Instead, what I’ll outline here are some guidelines that form the basis of Natalie’s nutritional program, which will give you a good idea about what we did.

Natalie’s nutritional program was surprisingly simple – too simple for those people who are looking for "magic pill" solutions – and very safe. The reason is that it mostly involved eating natural foods to achieve results and relying on common sense to guide our choices.

For example, our bodies are designed to ingest protein, fat, and carbohydrate – not massive amounts of any one thing, and not very limited amounts of any one either. There’s a thing called "balance," and the real key is figuring out what amount of each macronutrient is the right amount and exactly when you should consume it. This runs contrary to some of the diets that completely eliminate one macronutrient, usually fats or carbohydrates – hence the phrases "low fat" and "low carbohydrate."

I believe eliminating something completely is downright dangerous, and it’s simply a recipe for disaster if you want your body to look good. Your body needs these macronutrients, and a severe deficiency of any one will likely result in problems. So, Natalie’s diet didn’t eliminate any one thing completely – she ate protein, carbohydrate, and fat. The trick for us was when and how much of each. I’ll describe that more fully below.

The only thing that some may deem "controversial" in Natalie’s nutritional program is that we incorporated what’s called "food combining," which is simply a way of avoiding eating certain foods together that may cause digestive problems. Gironda was writing about the benefits of this in bodybuilding magazines over 40 years ago, and people have been practicing it since long before then. Admittedly, though, there are people on both sides of the fence on this one. To some, avoiding eating certain foods together is nonsense, arguing that our digestive systems are advanced enough to accommodate "incompatible" foods; to others, however, the benefits they reap by avoiding certain food mixes seem akin to finding the Holy Grail. Personally, I find it very worthwhile.

By eating certain foods together, and more important, ensuring that I don’t combine certain foods at the same meal, I digest my food more easily, my energy seems to increase, and I lose weight. Proper food combining has nothing to do with how much you eat; food combining has to do with what you eat and when.

The food combining system I use I got from my friend Ron Kosloff, who is a nutritional consultant in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He’s created a straightforward chart that’s clearly laid out and simple to follow. For example, the chart shows you that meats and non-starchy vegetables go well together, which makes a meal comprising chicken or steak, a salad, and broccoli ideal. However, it shows that meats and starches don’t go well together – a steak and baked potato eaten together, for example, would be a big no-no.

Frankly, when I explained food combining to Natalie I could tell she was skeptical, but I gave her the chart and asked her to experiment on herself, which she did during the first month. Her verdict: she found it helped quite a bit. She said her meals digested more easily, and I could tell that within just a couple of weeks she was losing weight simply by combining foods properly. Imagine that: losing weight, but still eating the same amount of food! Impossible – not really. It’s amazing how much better your body responds when you don’t have bloating and indigestion and other problems.

So, Natalie’s daily eating schedule in that first month revolved around proper food combining and getting the right amount of nutrients. Nothing was being eliminated from her diet except sugar, other refined products such as flour, and "junk foods" which Natalie never ate much of anyway. As well, there were no "cheat days" allotted – a cheat day, at least in the physique world, is when athletes go and gorge themselves at some fast-food joint. Frankly, I believe this "cheating" idea runs contrary to what’s most important: healthy eating.

With these straightforward concepts in mind, it didn’t take long for Natalie to settle into a similar type of nutritional program that Chantal Dicaire and Stéphane Bussière used – these are two other competitors whom I successfully helped to win national-level physique titles. They eat about five or six small meals a day. (Stéphane Bussière can sometimes eat eight or nine meals a day as the contest day comes closer, due to an increase in training intensity and some natural supplementation we employ in the final month, which I’ll describe in future articles). Basically, they all eat a reasonable but not excessive amount of protein, a moderate amount of fat, and they eat carbohydrate-rich foods, but their carbohydrate intake is "cycled." What this cycling refers to is consumption on a periodic basis as opposed to eating it at every meal. They also don’t eat these carbohydrate-rich foods every day.

Chantal, Stéphane, and Natalie have "carb-up" meals, which occur every three to four days and usually consist of potatoes, pasta or rice. They also snack on fruits on these days. This ensures their system has enough glycogen, which is derived from carbohydrates (glycogen depletion is a problem with diets that restrict carbohydrates for too long). This carb-up cycle occurring every three or four days is precisely what Gironda described decades ago in his various instructional booklets. Di Pasquale’s "The Metabolic Diet," on the other hand, cycles carbs just like this, but he recommends using the weekends to carb-up, with protein and fat consumption staying high during the week. Personally, I’ve found the three to four day carb-up plan easier to follow than the weekend carb-up, but I’ve run into others who enjoy the weekday/weekend ritual more.

We didn’t count calories, we didn’t weigh food, and we didn’t do anything outlandish or dangerous. Natalie’s first month was just as I described it – five or six small meals per day, usually of a protein-rich food and vegetables, and a carb-up period every three or four days. As well, she took hardly any supplements, only a vitamin-mineral capsule from Monday to Friday. (We leave supplements out on the weekends, so that we don’t overload the body with certain nutrients.)

If this kind of nutritional program sounds familiar to you, that’s because it probably is. There is nothing revolutionary about it. As I mentioned, Vince Gironda and Dr. Maura Di Pasquale have been advocating this type of diet for some time. In fact, it is so old, Gironda coined the term "Stone Age Nutrition," since a diet that is made up mostly of meats, vegetables, fruits, etc., is what our ancestors were raised on. Remember, there were no McDonald’s restaurants in the days of the dinosaurs. Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale developed "The Metabolic Diet" in the ‘90s for top-level bodybuilders, in order to maximize their hormone production so that they could compete drug-free. I know that many people have followed his diet quite successfully. In fact, if you want to know more about this type of program, Di Pasquale’s books are some of the best out there, given the vast amount of knowledge he has (see: www.MetabolicDiet.com).

Posing

To this day, I’m still amazed at how many competitors don’t practice posing enough. As a matter of fact, most competitors, even some pros, get up on the stage without really knowing what they’re doing up there. As a result, they never look their best. Usually it’s because they concern themselves with only the training and the dieting, thinking that the posing will come "naturally" or something like that. It doesn’t. In fact, it takes tremendous practice to make posing look natural at all.

Natalie’s posing practices started at the same time as her training and nutritional program began. We’d sometimes practice for about 15 minutes or so after a training session, or we’d do a long half-hour posing session on its own. On average, we practiced posing three times per week, so for the full three-month period that was 36 sessions!

While that might seem like a lot, it’s not – Natalie was still perfecting her poses up until the final week before her first show. The goal was to make her posing look as natural and comfortable as possible, and also to get her to the point where she posed without thinking about it. Posing, done right, should look effortless.

Besides looking confident and natural, posing also allows you to bring out your best physique attributes. Although there are "rules" for posing, the rules aren’t so rigid as to make everyone look the same. Simply watch any figure competition and you’ll see that each competitor has a slightly different stance. There’s enough flexibility in the rules that you can do quite a few things to make yourself look your best. Whenever I teach someone to pose, it’s always to bring out those aspects of shape I talked about last month, and to try and conceal as best as possible any flaws that they may have.

Besides making the person look more comfortable onstage and having them show off their body to their best advantage, practicing posing often actually helps improve muscle definition, but not for the reasons you might think. Although there is a small amount of energy used to pose, which in turn can burn fat and bring the muscles out more, what posing practice really does is teach you to have better control over your muscles to really bring out the "lines" in the body – it’s a mind-muscle thing that takes practice to learn. For example, I’ve seen exceptionally lean individuals who should be able to show outstanding cuts and striations, but they can’t because they don’t know how to control the muscles they’re trying to show. On the other hand, someone who’s not quite as lean can bring forth wonderful separation in their muscles simply by knowing how to control them better. Those reasons alone should be enough to start posing now if you’ve got a competition in the future.

In order to begin your posing practice, the best thing you can do is simply find a quiet, secluded space with good lighting and lots of mirrors – aerobics rooms in gyms are oftentimes ideal. When you find such a place, just start practicing by finding out exactly how to hit the pose so that it best flatters you. Once you know how to do the poses correctly, begin working to move flawlessly from pose to pose – the transitions are almost as important as the poses themselves.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with the poses and have no one to help you, just get a video. There are countless competition videos available to buy, and they offer the advantage of showing not just one competitor, but a whole line of competitors. Watch each competitor to see who looks the best, and then just figure out what they’re doing to present themselves that way.

A digital camera, or better yet a camcorder, can also help. There’s no harsher critic than yourself, and seeing yourself on camera for the first time can be rather disconcerting. However, once you get used to watching yourself, you’ll also realize how each subtle movement translates into what the judges and audience see.

For Natalie, we occasionally used a digital camera so she could see what she looked like in pictures. Mostly though, we used me. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t mince my words – if the pose looks good I’ll tell you, and if it looks bad I tell you that too. Natalie had three full months of me telling her exactly what I thought about the way she looked.

Moving into month two

With her first month of training, posing, and dieting well underway, Natalie’s body was making rapid changes. However, there were still two more months to go and I wanted her to look good enough not to just place, but to win. For that, then, we had to step up our regime and push even harder at the beginning of September, since her first contest was looming at the end of October. Next time I’ll tell you about month two.

...Doug Schneider
das@seriousaboutfitness.com

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

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