So you want to do a bikini competition - Part 4 - Post show
To finish off the So you want to do a bikini competition – I’ll end it with post show. Not so much what your training and diet will look like but more so the emotional part. Regarding the training and dieting – your training should adjust based on judges feedback and ideally you would like to reverse diet and get to at least your maintenance levels – again it depends on your feedback and your plans/goals.
There are many emotions and possible scenarios that can occur post show. Sometimes multiple emotions and probable outcomes can happen simultaneously or one following the other. I’ve listed probably the top 5 that I’ve experienced, coached through, and/or heard from other competitors.
These emotions could be caused by a number of factors Possibly due to your hormones being “out of whack” since you’ve most likely put your body through extreme dieting and exercise leading up to the show, maybe water/salt/carb manipulation, and mental fatigue. Your emotions can differ depending of if you had an “easy” vs “hard” prep. Also, you may experience different reactions from show to show.
In no particular order here are some possible emotions that you may experience.
Rebound, aka gaining a lot of weight quickly after your competition. The most common reason, is probably due to either your strict food restriction or low calorie intake. You are craving foods, and you were starved for such a long period of time, that when there is no end goal/competition in mind you start indulging/overindulging on all the foods you were not allowed to consume. Before you know it, what took you months to lose, you put back on in a matter of weeks. This can be prevented or lessened with the proper nutrition and post show plan.
Over it – you are just over competing all together - you give up on it all. You don’t ever want to do a competition again and you are burnt out so you don’t even want to work out. You don’t want to think about food, want to eat meal preps anymore, want to do cardio either. This can be prevented by understanding and embracing the phases of prep and off season also, if you do not gain as much body fat in the offseason and you reverse out of your cardio, you will be at a better place when you start your next prep.
Sadness/feeling lost – You had a goal – you reached that goal and now you don’t know what else to do, what to focus on, you feel lost. You were determined and motivated you trained and ate with a purpose, now there is no drive or fire. You can prevent or lessen this by making sure you have reverse plan in place before your show and come up with new goals/focus post show.
Fat– You were fit, cut, defined…your body never looked this good in your life, then you start eating a little bit more normally and a healthy amount of body fat gets put back on; however you saw and loved the way you looked like on show day, you wish you could look like that year long…..You need to accept that your body is going to change again. (it doesn’t have to go back to where you started necessarily, but holding that lean isn’t realistic. This is a hard one to swallow, so learning to embrace and love your body at every stage is very important. Your stage body isn’t realistic to maintain all year long, you would have to continue to diet and exercise like you are a few weeks out for the rest of your life, and I’m not sure that is possible to maintain physically or mentally. So have a range in mind that you will maintain (typically 10% over your stage weight) and learn to love this version of you. The more you train and reverse diet, you will continue to recomp your body and it will look tighter at different weight ranges as well.
Body dysmorphia- After spending months scrutinizing every inch of your body in preparation for the show, you might hyperfocus on all your perceived flaws. Especially if you expected a body part to look a certain way or you are comparing yourself to others. I find it helpful to go back and look at your past photos and appreciate and acknowledge all the progress you’ve made so far.
Luckily I’ve experienced all of these throughout the years I’ve competed so I am able to ensure my clients are prepared for what they might expect as normal occurrences and I make sure they are equipped prior to their show and have their reverse plan ready to ease them into their transitional period/adjustment. The more you can mentally prepare for possible outcomes the better off you’ll be and you won’t have to sit and struggle in any of these feelings, knowing they are all normal.