For every top 10 Mr. Olympia participant, four weeks of the largest stage in the world is no longer about abdominal muscles, arms, veins, stripes or even willpower. This is about your mind, what you consume, your chemistry, and whether you can keep it together when every fiber in your body – and every neuron in your brain – screams – shuts down – for you.
But that is not possible. Not nowadays. The battle has become far too intense.
But it wasn’t always like that. Arnold and Franco created a lot of commotion two weeks before one of their epic Olympia confrontations. They came on their regular training time on Golds, but they were dressed in street clothing and ate ice cream kisses! Most of us immediately thought they had to grind it now, improve their physique, not eating ice!
Imagine that this news had crossed the world faster in the days before the internet and social media than news that WWII was over. But as I said, those days are over. Competing in the Olympia Today is so close to a fight if you ever get without a tank.
The enemy above
This closer to the show, your competition is no longer your biggest threat. It is the man in the mirror. Stress hormones peak, sleep is shot and you praise everything in second place. Anxiety causes cortisol; Cortisol retains water and eat muscles.
But no worries, the gurus have drug-cortisol blockers, beta-blockers, sleeping medicines, anti-anxiety instructions. On top of the normal stuff. Not just one or two. A cocktail. Although some people wrongly claim that bodybuilding is all drugs today, they have a point. You or your guru must have a very good working knowledge of a very specific and complicated to manage – not to manage dangerous – Array of Niche Medicines. Many of which are planned by the DEA in this country.
Training: less weight, more busy
Here is the thing: the training sessions don’t stop. They can’t. They just change. Nobody goes for PRs at spit distance from the Olympia, not if they want to keep their chest muscles and rotator surchets intact. Training is tighter, more controlled, every representative is belde where the sculptor puts down the big hammer and picks up the small ones along various fine chisels.
The risk of injury is too high for something else. But intensity? That goes through the roof. Each set feels like he is wearing your entire career on his back. Failure is not an option, but also not torn hamstring. Balance is everything, but often Satan laughs at those plans. And sometimes, faster than you can say for double biceps, you are sidelined – all Olympia heap for at least another year.
Diet: hungry as a state of being
Then there is the diet – then ever, calories in free fall, carbohydrates cut into ribbons. Glycogen is manipulated as a meme stock and hunger is unbearable. In the meantime it is not just a physical pain. Hunger becomes a personality characteristic. Resting bitch is not an informal reference; It is your standard setting. Ask your girlfriend.
Some boys break and find themselves outside of Taco Bell at 1 o’clock in the morning, with a trench jacket, dark glasses and a hat that pulled over their ears with taco sauce that drips from their nose. That one weak moment can undo weeks of suffering. It’s funny, until you see it happen with a man who was top three last year.
The disadvantages
In addition, water is drawn, sodium is cycled, glycogen loaded, unloaded and re -loaded as a bad Vegas slot machine. Do it well, and you have a shark skin that is stretched over granite. Do it wrong, you are spilled, flat or cramp on stage. It is chess with your physiology. And the commitment is everything.
And as if it wasn’t enough, in many countries where these champions come, the pharmacological arsenal behind this physique is illegal. Not wrist-slap illegal-federal crime, illegal in prison. In the US you can get years in a bodybuilder of a bodybuilder of a top ten years in a federal or state fine of a top ten. Overseas? Worse. So now add paranoia to the pile of stressors: hunger, cortisol, insomnia and customs agents in Vegas who may ask if those bags are yours, then tell them to go with them to a room in the back in the back
Earlier
Compare that with the golden age. At the time, boys rode in competitions as if it were only a Tuesday morning in April. No guru spreadsheets, no water games, no cortisol blockers. The competition day was just another training.
Today? It is a very complicated dance that contains some nasty elements to do well. The costs to do it wrong? Astronomical.
Jay Cutler said it best: to be a bodybuilder, you must have a screw loose. He is absolutely right. Between the training, the diet, the drugs, the law and the Chalupa Trench Coat incident waiting in the wings, you should be crazy to sign up for this life.
But thank goodness for the loose screws. There is no Olympia without them. No freak show. No spectacle. Just a sport again.
Four weeks is no longer about discipline. It’s about survival. And surviving means fighting your body, your mind, your desires and sometimes your morality at this level – all for the right to stand under hot lights with the rest of the best in the world.
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