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.

April 1, 2006

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

Part Four: Moving into Month Two

The second and third parts of this series of articles on Natalie Waples covered the training, nutrition and posing that we did in the first month of her preparation for a figure competition that was to take place in three months’ time. Now I’ll tell you how we continued in September, the second month of our preparations.

Training

As I described in Part Two, Natalie started with a full-body weight-training routine done three times per week. The emphasis was on using effective exercises, proper form, and increasing the difficultly with every workout. We lived by this mantra: "Make it harder." In other words, the current workout was made more difficult than the one that preceded it. This increasing difficulty stresses the body, which, in turn, responds by growing more muscle.

The concept of "making it harder" continued in September, but one important thing we also did in this second month was to change her routine from a full-body routine to a split routine. Whereas the full-body routine trains the entire body in one workout, a split routine divides the worked-on bodyparts over two or more days.

We did a two-day split, working the upper body one day and the lower body the next. Both workouts were repeated again after a day’s rest. Therefore, a typical week had us doing upper body on Monday and Thursday, and lower body on Tuesday and Friday. That would leave Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday as rest days from weight training.

While we could have maintained the full-body routine in September and still made good gains, I felt the split was important because it allowed us to focus a little more effort on each muscle group. Where we had been doing three sets per muscle group in the full-body workout, we would now do six to eight sets for larger muscle groups such as chest, back, shoulders and thighs. For smaller muscle groups like the biceps, triceps and calves, we did three to six sets.

Although the number of sets increased per bodypart, each workout actually took the same amount of time, since the body was now being worked over two days instead of one. I mention this because the length of each workout is important, since it affects your recovery ability. When workouts are too long, you risk overtraining, and, if that happens, at best your gains are stifled and at worst you start going backwards and looking worse. Therefore, it’s important to avoid overtraining at all costs; keeping workouts short is one way to help do that.

With a focus on always making each workout a little harder and by employing a well-thought-out split routine to thoroughly stimulate the body but not overtrain it, Natalie continued to improve rapidly. In fact, you could see positive changes every week. As well, to help gauge her progress, Natalie kept a journal, logging the weights she used for a particular exercise, along with the sets and reps she did each day. Although I have never kept a journal, I admire her for doing so, because it’s a good way to continually monitor yourself to see if you’re improving. We referred to it often.

Besides focusing on making each current workout harder than the one that preceded it, we ensured that she didn’t get stale or in a rut by "switching up" the exercises. In other words, we varied the exercises on a regular basis to keep the muscles "guessing" as to what would come next.

However, although the exercises varied somewhat, it wasn’t as though we changed things to the point where one workout was completely different from another. I’m a firm believer in certain exercises being more beneficial than others, and these superior exercises were a staple in our training program.

The rep range for all muscle groups was 6 to 12. The exception was calves, which were worked 15 to 30 reps. A sample of the split routine looked like this:

Upper body

• Chest: 6 sets of incline dumbbell presses
• Back: 3-4 sets of seated cable rows compounded with 3-4 sets of medium-grip pulldowns to the front
• Shoulders: 3 sets of seated dumbbell presses compounded with 3 sets of seated side laterals
• Triceps: 3 sets of overhead rope pulls
• Biceps: 3 sets of standing dumbbell curls

Lower body

• Thighs: 3 sets of squats followed by 3 sets of lunges
• Hamstrings: 3 sets of stiff-legged deadlifts with dumbbells
• Lower back: 3 sets of hyperextensions
• Calves: 6 sets of calf raises

Some people may look at this workout and say, "That’s hardly any sets for each bodypart!" Many people today have been led to believe that you must do two or three times that many sets per bodypart to get results, falling into the trap of thinking that more are better. But more often than not this idea of "the more sets the better" comes from the mass-market magazines, where training articles can be made up by people who don’t actually train, or ghost-written by someone pretending to be a top-level pro. Whatever the case, these over-the-top workouts you often read about seldom work because they’re rarely, if ever, real. What’s more, doing all those sets is, to me, a colossal waste of time. Quite simply, you don’t need to. My proof: Vince said so!

As I mentioned in previous articles, the methods I use are not my own – they are Vince Gironda’s, who was the greatest trainer who ever lived. Gironda’s motto was the most amount of work in the shortest possible time. When it came to training, he believed in doing a limited number of sets per bodypart in a very short time – not unlike the way a sprinter attacks a race. This high intensity is what builds muscle. On the other hand, people who rely on a large number of sets usually don’t train with anything close to that kind of intensity. More often than not, what they’re doing is low intensity. In fact, I’ve trained people who claimed to do 15 or 20 sets per bodypart and had them crying for mercy within five sets done Gironda’s way.

Natalie would work her abdominals on days she did cardio, which was about three times per week. However, as I mentioned in Part Two, I’m not a big believer in doing excessive amounts of cardio, since doing so can burn away hard-earned muscle tissue – the last thing a physique competitor wants. So, Natalie’s cardio program in the second month was the same as the first – no more was added. Usually, she did her cardio on non-workout days, but if she did cardio on a workout day, it was in the morning, many hours before our late-afternoon weight-training session. If Natalie tried to do cardio just before or just after a weight-training workout, I chased her out of the gym!

Nutrition

As I mentioned in Part Three, I don’t believe there is any one diet that the majority of people can follow and expect great results. I also said that I don’t believe that it’s wise to try and write out a generic diet and expect someone to follow it safely and successfully. Each person is different, and that’s why expert dieticians and nutritionists sit down with their clients to find out their exact needs, and why they often consult with their clients’ doctors as well to ensure that there aren’t other issues that should be considered. However, what I did outline last month were the key concepts behind Natalie’s nutritional regime, along with how we employed them in this program.

Essentially, Natalie followed the same kind of diet that others I’ve helped follow: ample protein and fats for most days, with a "carb-loading" period done every three or four days so the body doesn’t get glycogen-deprived. She had five or six small meals per day, and she structured her meals so that she was properly combining her foods for optimal digestion. She took a multivitamin tablet from Monday to Friday, but not on Saturday and Sunday. With this type of nutritional program there is no magic, no hocus pocus, and no strange foods like the things I’ve seen some trainers recommend.

Natalie felt healthy and energetic on this type of nutritional program, and by the second month she was already getting leaner. Although I don’t put much credence in scales to judge progress – I trust my eyes, which is what judges use when judging figure shows – I’d guess she carried four or five pounds less bodyfat and two to three pounds more muscle going into the second month, compared to what she had at the start of the training.

Probably the biggest difference between the first and the second months was that in the first month Natalie was adapting to her new kind of nutritional program, whereas in the second month she was well-versed and liked how her body was responding to it, and it was now part of her regular routine. To help her to continue getting leaner in the second month, we simply made her diet a little stricter by keeping her meals small and allowing no junk food whatsoever. As I mentioned in Part Three, I don’t believe in the kind of "cheat days" where the person gorges on junk food – it’s not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. Her "cheat day" was her carb-up day, which was usually potatoes – hardly anyone’s notion of junk food. And if you’re wondering if we counted calories from meals, or grams of whatever, the answer is no. I don’t believe that you need to resort to that, since getting into "contest shape" involves so much more than simply counting this or that and trying to rely on some magic numbers.

Natalie’s rapid progress didn’t really surprise me, since I saw nearly identical results with Chantal Dicaire and Stéphane Bussière, two other top physique competitors whom I helped to win national-level titles in previous years. Simply practicing plenty of commonsense in your eating plan can produce miraculous results.

Posing

In Part Three, I stressed the importance of starting posing practice early, which is what Natalie and I did. What I would like to stress this time, though, is not just to start it early but to carry on with the posing practices as religiously as the weight-training and nutritional programs. Many times, I’ve seen people start their posing practice at the right time only to let it wane after a short while. This is a mistake – knowing how to pose properly is as important as the diet and the training, so you must keep practicing regularly to keep your skills sharp.

Therefore, every week Natalie and I went into the aerobics room and practiced her poses. By this time she was getting good at them, but we still had to make them perfect, and we had to make the transitions from pose to pose seamless.

Furthermore, posing doesn’t start when you’re already at the center of the stage – it starts when you’re at the side of the stage and are about to walk on, and it doesn’t end until you’re back off the stage. Therefore, we also practiced walking onto the stage, going through the quarter-turns, and then walking off the stage, just like at a competition. To make it even more realistic, I often pretended to be a judge, positioning myself the same distance away from her that a judge would be at a competition. Doing this allowed Natalie to know exactly what would be coming in October when she did those poses for the first time in front of a live judging panel and an entire audience.

Moving into month three

Natalie transition from the first to second month was nothing short of startling. At the beginning of the first month, she looked like an attractive competitor with decent potential. By the end of the second month, Natalie’s muscles started showing, her shape was blossoming, and she was posing like a pro. It was, of course, the result of hard training, a good diet, and regular posing practice. However, although we were achieving good results, the real test was just under a month away – Natalie’s first competition. Next month I’ll describe how we modified Natalie’s training and diet so that she was able to compete at that first show, and then again two weeks later.

...Doug Schneider
das@seriousaboutfitness.com

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

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