Diet Introduction > Precontest Diets > Dieting Down
It all comes down to dieting down. The pinnacle of your all your work and progress, the final phase of PreContest dieting. Every minute spent sweating and working, cranking out rep after rep as you chisel your physique toward perfection. Every Twinkie passed up, every night and every day dedication and complete focus…this is it. It's the week before contest time. Now the shredding begins.
The objective body you're looking to achieve is very lean and muscular with ripped striations visible in your major muscle groups. Dieting down allows your body to achieve a leaner, ripped physique than usual.
Final Week Preparations
This final preparation plan assumes that you are pretty much "show-ready" a week before the show date. It continues with the "sensible recommendations" of your contest diet. The workout schedule is not radical and aerobics are minimal. Overtraining can really injure all your gains by making you sore, tired, and flat at this late date. If you are still holding a lot of water or too much fat, up the aerobics all week, but realize that this is likely to have a negative impact on your size and density.
The diet and supplementation plan is designed to keep lean fullness in the muscles. If you have great experience with another plan, then by all means, use it! You'll find as many strategies to final week prep as there are bodybuilders and trainers. The one below includes a moderate carb-load/sodium-depletion scheme combined with mild dehydration. This scheme will give highly variable results from person to person. The most risky part of the plan is the dehydration - if you start to feel unwell, forget the plan and drink some water! I'll also urge you at this point to steer away from any but the most mild diuretics (coffee, horseradish, creatine are probably okay); prescription diuretics can be quickly and unexpectedly deadly.
| 
