Be Your Own Bodybuilding Coach is for bodybuilding enthusiasts who relish the rewards the endeavor, both learning and doing, as much as the physique that comes from their efforts. Dr. Stevenson has poured decades of personal experience as a competitor, scientist, coach, educator and gym rat into a highly detailed strategic plan for setting goals, and navigating the Post-Contest, Off-Season and Pre-Contest periods of the "bodybuilder's year."
The book's purpose is to put you, the reader, in the driver's seat as your own bodybuilding coach by providing a structured reference guide that covers nearly every topic you might encounter along your bodybuilding journey:
- Setting goals and keeping to them: The Personal Bodybuilding Inventory.
- Dietary manipulations to gain size, drop body fat and maintain insulin sensitivity.
- The most important resistance training program variables, choosing and rotating training programs, an integrated approach to bringing up weak muscle groups, and dealing with overtraining/overreaching.
- Tracking and enhancing recovery: Sleep, sauna, heart rate variability, perceived recovery status, adaptogens and CBD oil.
- Peak week without pharmaceutical diuretics and an Advanced Loading Strategy that can be used, for instance, when making weight is a priority!
- Moving up a weight class, estimating body fat, bulking in the Off-Season, cheat meals, Off-Season "damage" control, and how / when to use cardio.
- Nutrient timing, probiotics, low FODMAP diets, fiber, and strategies to both increase and decrease appetite.
- Protein, Carbs, Fats and Alcohol: How much, what and when!
- Nutritional supplements for performance, fat loss, sleep, and cardiovascular, liver, gastrointestinal and kidney health, etc.
- Intermittent fasting and eating organic.
- Strategies for post-contest rebounding and avoiding the ghost of "metabolic damage."
- Bodybuilding performance enhancing drugs, side effects, and inter-individual variability.
- Posing, presentation, and travel: Being ready on game day!
- Training after 40 and beyond: Training strategies for the weathered lifter and dealing with aches n' pains.
- Insights on gender/sex differences.
- Being a critical thinking consumer of bodybuilding knowledge.
- Bodybuilding resources including trusted medical practitioners and sources for equipment, apparel, food and supplements.
