Welcome to Messy Mondays, a bi-monthly 5-10 minute feature of mistakes, blunders, and bad advice podcast guests and I have encountered in our journeys & what we can all learn from the experiences.

Today we will focus on the worst advice I've received when training for physique competitions.

Corey: Today we're going to do an Ask the Experts section. What a lot of people don't know is Dr. Meredith has competed in about 30 fitness & physique competitions. She has one coming up this week. The question I have for you is "what is the worst training advice you have ever heard or received to train for a physique competition?"

Meredith: Oh my goodness. Having been on the stage since 2006, there are a lot of pieces of bad advice. Some of them I tried, and some of them I knew they wouldn't go well so I didn't try.

1. Adding stuff into my diet or routine that doesn't normally exist there. Things like steroids, fat burners, and different diuretic pills. People say "you're going to look leaner; you're going to look more ripped." I have to say, based on my last social media real life picture, if you've seen it; that was pretty ripped, and I don't use any of those things. There's a lot of danger in them.
2. Doing fasted cardio first thing in the morning. I think maybe for some people that is appropriate, but if you don't have a lot of weight to loose, you're just going to be miserable. I only tried it once because I was working out with somebody else who was prepping for a show. She said "hey I'm going to go start with cardio." I though we were going to work on posing, but I was like "OK, I'll do it with you." I was on the floor crying after 10 minutes. "I can't do this." I was sucking down carbs, and probably a whole lot more carbs than I had intended for that day.
3. Dropping a food group. I just got this advice. Somebody told me to cut my protein to 50% of what I was taking in. I though, "I've never prepped a show that way. Why would I do this?" That person didn't explain themselves and said "just do it." So I tried it for a day to see what happens. It worked for one day. Then I tanked, crashed and couldn't get through my next workout or think straight. So taking out a complete food group . . . no way.
4. Cutting down to 25-0 grams of carbs per day. I will admit that the lowest I ever go, even when we have a competition late in the evening, like 11 PM, is 160 grams of carbohydrate. Ever. I don't do carb cycling. It's right for some people, but not right for others. It we take a blanket approach or try to get everyone to cycle between 0 and 25, not only are you going to feel miserable, but you will be that competition that gains 50 pounds within one month after a show, and your hormones will be out of whack.

Those are some of the worst pieces of advice I've gotten, tried, or looked at skeptically. I hope this helps other competitors out there. Feel free to reach out to us.

Corey: So, what I hear you saying is that some of the blanket statements without modifying to you as an individual are the worst.

Meredith: Absolutely.

Corey: If you have any questions, please reach out. Put a comment in the comments section, send either of us an e-mail directly. If you see us working out, feel free to come up and ask. Have a great rest of the day, and we hope this was helpful.