I followed a gaining/hardening cycle for ten months before switching to my pre-contest diet plan.
Here I am at three weeks
out at 8:30 a.m. after a
carb loading trial run.
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On the diet side Mark's plan was a little high on total calories (KCAL) for my needs. His metabolism must run overtime! So I just adjusted down some of the portion sizes to a level I was comfortable with. If you don't know what your approximate daily KCAL maintenance level is I would suggest that you figure that out. In other words, at what level of calories are you basically staying at the same bodyweight, not gaining, not losing. After you know what that baseline is you can gauge what your gaining and hardening diet phases should look like. It is not a difficult experiment. A good rule of thumb would be to add in no more than 500 extra KCAL/day for the gaining phase from your base line, and to drop no more than 300 KCAL below the baseline for the hardening phase. Some people may be able to go higher or lower, but I have found that staying in this approximate range allows me to add Lean Body Mass (LBM) without adding much body fat and in the hardening phase it allows me to hang on to the LBM that I added while losing any body fat that I might have gained during the gaining phase. No matter what your KCAL needs are these diet basics will apply:
• Eat 5-7 smaller meals/day with the proper Protein, Carb and Fat Balance.
• Eat your heavier carb meals earlier in the day.
• Use quality supplements where you can be confident in the nutritional values and results. (Beverly products clearly fall into this category)
The Beverly supplements that I used with this program were:
During the gaining phase: Ultra 40 and Mass Aminos with each meal, Ultra Size and Mass Maker for my meal 2 after training, Ultra Size for meals 4 and 6, ZMA (cycled 6 weeks on, 2 off), Ultra 4, 24 Mass Aminos during training and 2 Advanced Antioxidants after training.
During the hardening phase: I dropped the Mass Maker from meal 2 and dropped the heavy whipping cream from meals 4 and 6. I added 2 Lean Out before every meal. [continued on next page]
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