| Cyber Contest Tips Jeff Locke - MCBB Cyber Contest Overall Champion |
|
Back to Articles List |
|
Experience is a grand teacher if you are open to learning from it. The experience of training, dieting and preparing for the first Midwest Christian Bodybuilding Cyber Contest taught me many things that I can share. The first quality that goes to the root of my successful showing was my faith in God. I believed that competing in this contest would allow me to exercise my will to push myself and give the glory to God. It encouraged me to seek a fellowship with the rest of the competitors to squeeze the potential from God’s design coupled with the exercise of free will and faith. I knew and was convinced to put forth all within my control to further the successful promotion of this style of contest. To that end I call your attention to the first order of contention. To bring quality to the competition by showing the best condition you can attain by the submission deadline. Without a clear goal to work for the days can blend together with no real distinction of where your decisions, or lack of decisions, are taking you. With a clear goal and the undeniable confidence that each decision you make will bring glory to God the result can only be one of great satisfaction. Know that the total package of muscle coupled with a tight conditioning is the key to looking good in your photos. I can’t pretend that I have a great feel for the perfect diet plan but I did shed over 30 pounds in order to get my abdominal region to look tight. I ate no less than four meals a day and most of the time as many as five meals. I ate a lot of salads mixed with tuna and cheese, garnishing them with low-cal or low-carb dressings. Chicken breasts seared in a frying pan with black pepper, garlic and spicy seasonings. I definitely limited carbs to less than 50 grams per day total. If I drifted above that amount it was on days that I worked-out and I reasoned that both carbs and protein within 30 minutes after a workout would be tolerable. It was usually lowfat or even skim milk but sometimes I mixed in some whey protein to up the ante. I used a multivitamin/mineral and took additional supplements like Calcium with vitamin D, Ester-C and Glucosamine plus MSM for my joints. Just make sure you go no lower than 25 grams of carbs a day as you will find it hard to produce a pump in the muscle when you workout. If I felt depleted I would eat a breakfast of oatmeal or shredded wheat to fill my liver with glycogen. I do not profess to know much but this approach worked fine for me and the results speak for themselves. It was a good idea to start my diet on October 1st in 2005 to give my body plenty of time to lose the weight gradually for the March 2006 deadline. The most important advice I think I can give is in taking the photos for submission. First and foremost do all the poses as demonstrated. Scott “Old Navy” Hults did a fine job demonstrating the required poses before the competition and they were posted on the site well before the competition date. I took this to mean that all poses, flattering or not, were required. The key is this, if you want to judge competitors as fairly as possible all competitors should do all the same poses. If you don’t do the pose do not expect to be judged as comparisons cannot be made. The second point would be to emphasize that full body poses were necessary for all poses. When I saw the photos for the hamstring and calf it was demonstrated showing a full-body pose, but that wasn’t the case in many submissions. Look at the close-up of my hamstring and calf and you’ll see what I mean. From the close-up angle my hamstring and calf look very large. But when seen on the level and from a distance that the whole-body can be taken-in the muscles in question do not look near as imposing. Proportion is the measurement of one part of the body against the size of another part of the body. Showing the entire body is the only way to get a true image of the proportions. But it doesn’t end there. Placing your camera on the floor to focus up would make the legs look larger in proportion to the upper body due to the close proximity of the camera to the legs. It’s like holding a fish out at arms length in front of the body. That approach will make the fish look much larger due to the perspective of the camera. To get a true image put the camera at your eye-level or even at mid-body so that both halves of the body are equal distance apart. And watch the lighting also as I messed that up. I placed a lamp so that light was coming from two different directions and were focused right at me at waist-level. That served to flatten out the separation I had tried so hard to achieve. The best method is one light source from directly above pointing down so as to create cast shadows over the contours of your body. Luckily the lighting mistake didn’t totally wash-out my hard earned definition, but it certainly could’ve been better. Remember, a winner is a winner because he/she makes fewer mistakes than those that lose. Minimize your mistakes and your odds of winning go up considerably.  Take my advice as a successful competitor and couple it with the knowledge you gain working through this journey we call life. That way we can all benefit. We can increase the level of healthy competition and bring a sparkling sheen of professional execution by adhering to the guidelines of fair comparisons, clean living and healthy exertion in the gym. Thank you Bobby and Val! Thank you for raising the torch for competition among our brothers and sisters in Christ to ultimately bring glory to His design for us. The body is a temple according to Scripture, maintain the temple and do not desecrate it with banned substances. Keep true by following Christ’s lead and pray for guidance to make the right choices to further God’s will on earth. God Bless and Godspeed!!! |
|
 |
|
|
|
|