Ticks stay ticked. Nothing here nags you, and BIGFLY will not raise the labs unless you raise them first.
I said your genetics made you a poor candidate for max-effort work. That was imprecise. Your file says Power: WORSE and Strength: TYPICAL. Power is rate of force development and governs sprinting and jumping. Powerlifting is maximal strength, contested slowly enough that rate of force development barely matters. Your strength genetics are ordinary, not poor.
What the power finding actually predicts: you will be a grinder. Three consequences. Speed and dynamic effort work is a poor use of your time. Paused and tempo variations suit you, because they train the positions grinders fail in. And your HIGHER endurance plus higher PPARGC1A means you tolerate more accumulated volume than average, which is a real advantage over a nine month build.
| Minutes | Block | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| 0-8 | Never cut | The back and core protocol. It is also your ramp-up. |
| 8-25 | Never cut | Tier A: the competition lift. This is the meet. Warm-up sets included. |
| 25-40 | Cut on bad days | Tier B: the two accessories that most support the main lift. Supersetted. |
| 40-55 | Cut first, no guilt | Tier C: everything else. Walking out at minute 30 is an approved outcome. |
RPE 6 = four good reps left. RPE 7 = three. RPE 8 = two. A percentage program assumes your capacity is stable week to week and yours is not: a night where the baby was up four times can cost you fifteen percent. With RPE, a bad night just means the same set happens at a lighter weight and the program self-corrects instead of grinding you down. Never train to failure in Block 1. Not once.
Arms is the right choice for a sixth day and I am not going to talk you out of it. It is the lowest-cost session you could add: no bar on your back, no axial load on a spine you are actively rehabilitating, nothing competing with squat or deadlift for recovery, and the triceps volume feeds straight into your bench lockout. It is forty minutes rather than sixty, on purpose.
The rule: the arm day is the first session to go, every single time. You have a seven week old, you are reporting daytime sleepiness, and Sunday is now your only full rest day. If the week was rough, Saturday does not happen and nothing is lost, because arms will not decide what you total in May. Treat it as the bonus, never the baseline. And if you ever find yourself skipping a squat or bench session to keep the arm day, that is the signal that six days is one too many right now.
Some weeks the baby wins. Do not skip and do not grind. 8 minutes of prep, then the Tier A lift only, at RPE 6 instead of 7, for 3 sets instead of 4. Walk out. Twenty-two minutes, and it keeps the technical groove, the tendon load and the habit, which is 95% of what Block 1 is for. If the whole week goes sideways, collapse to three sessions: squat Monday, bench Wednesday, deadlift Friday, Tier A only. Missing weeks derails meet preps. Short sessions do not.
Your plan averaged 2,474 kcal, 215 P, 189 C, 93 F. Protein and fat were fine. Carbohydrate was 162 g short of what five heavy sessions a week require, and your breakfast held 34.8 g of carbs two hours before a heavy squat. Combined with your higher fasting glucose and lower GLP-1, that is a plausible mechanical cause of the twenty minute checkout. Sleep debt is still the bigger factor, but this one is fixable this week. Same foods, same structure, more carbohydrate at two specific points, plus vegetables.
| When | What | Macros | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5:45 AM | 1 banana + 1 scoop whey in water | 20 P / 30 C / 0 F | New You coach from 6:00. Small, fast, no dairy. |
| 8:30 AM pre-training | 2 eggs + 3 egg whites + 3 slices (90 g) sourdough + 1 cup berries + 1 tbsp honey | 30 P / 90 C / 12 F | The big one Carbs 35 g to 90 g. One extra slice, berries, honey. Ninety seconds of work. |
| 9:45 AM | 200 mg caffeine + 15 g collagen + 500 mg vitamin C | none | New 45 minutes pre-lift. |
| 12:00 PM post-lift | Protein of the day (200 g cooked) + 300 g cooked rice or potato + 1 cup cruciferous + 1/2 avocado | 60 P / 100 C / 18 F | Starch roughly doubled here specifically. Vegetables added. Creatine with this meal. |
| 3:00 PM snack | 1 scoop whey in water + 1 cup Greek yogurt + 1 banana + 40 g oats | 35 P / 70 C / 8 F | Whole milk out (casein cap is 1 serving), banana and oats in. 46 more grams of carbs. |
| 6:15 PM dinner | Protein of the day (200 g cooked) + 200 g potato or rice + 2 cups vegetables + 1 cooked tomato + 1 tbsp olive oil | 50 P / 60 C / 47 F | Vegetables and the daily cooked tomato added. Smallest carb feed, per your MTNR1B finding. |
| 7:30 PM | Kitchen closed | none | Blood sugar, reflux and sleep, all three at once. |
| When | What | Macros | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00 AM | 2 eggs + 3 whites + 3 slices sourdough + 1 cup berries + 1 scoop whey | 40 P / 80 C / 14 F | Bigger and later, no 5:45 client. Carries you through the 10:00 call and the 11:15 class. |
| 11:45 AM | 200 mg caffeine | none | Thirty minutes before arms. Collagen optional today, the joint load is low. |
| 1:15 PM post-lift | Steak (235 g) + 250 g cooked rice + 1 cup cruciferous + 1/2 avocado | 55 P / 90 C / 18 F | Your red meat day. First 5 g creatine. |
| 4:00 PM | 1 scoop whey in water + 1 cup Greek yogurt + 1 banana | 40 P / 70 C / 8 F | No oats today. This is where the 50 g carb reduction comes from. |
| 6:30 PM | Protein + 200 g potato + 2 cups vegetables + 1 cooked tomato + olive oil | 60 P / 60 C / 40 F | Zinc. Second 5 g creatine. |
Drop the 5:45 feed entirely. Breakfast goes back to 2 slices of sourdough and skips the honey. The snack drops the oats. Lunch and dinner unchanged. 195 P / 238 C / 80 F. Sunday is your only full rest day now, and it is where the weekly deficit gets made.
| Day | Protein | Carb | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Ground beef 85/15, 270 g | Potato | Red meat 1 of 3. |
| Tuesday | Chicken thigh, 225 g | Rice | |
| Wednesday | Salmon, 290 g | Sweet potato | Oily fish 1 of 2. |
| Thursday | Salmon or sardines, 290 g | Potato | Changed Was chicken thigh. Your second oily fish day: triglycerides and joints. |
| Friday | Shrimp, 240 g | Potato | Strong zinc source, which you are flagged as needing more of. |
| Saturday | Steak, 235 g | Rice | Arm day. Light training day at 2,700 kcal. |
| Sunday | Chicken breast, 190 g | Rice | Your only rest day. |
| Once weekly | Beef liver, 4 oz | none | Add this Your top-ranked food across 40 reports. Covers B12, zinc and iodine, all three flagged as increased needs, and directly relevant to the fatigue question. Capsules count. |
Version 1 had you removing gluten and dairy for four weeks from week three. Do not do that now. A clean elimination needs cooking discipline and a stable baseline and you have neither, and running it while sleep deprived gives a result you cannot interpret because you will feel bad throughout regardless. Scheduled for Block 2, January, when the baby is five months and your sleep has consolidated.
One shop, one day, same list. Quantities are one week of the plan in the Meals tab. Tap an item to cross it off. The whole list clears itself every Sunday.
Your plan had zero vegetables. Fiber, cruciferous, cooked tomato and potassium are all things you are short of. Cook the cruciferous rather than eating it raw, which was the resolution to the thyroid conflict in your original reports.
Cook three days of protein. Cook a large batch of rice and roast a tray of potatoes. Roast two trays of vegetables. Portion the Greek yogurt. This is the habit that makes everything above survive contact with a seven week old. Run the oven while you do your Sunday client programming.
Your genetics do not say you have a fragile spine. Herniated disk: LESS LIKELY. Spinal cord injury: LESS LIKELY. Low back injury: TYPICAL. Back pain: TYPICAL. Disc degeneration: TYPICAL. Fractures: LESS LIKELY. Bone health: GOOD (62). Nothing in 40 reports suggests your back is built to fail. You have a mechanical problem, and you told me you are pain free with good form and the ache comes from sitting and standing. That is the pattern of a positional issue, and it is the version that gets better.
| Movement | Dose | The point |
|---|---|---|
| Couch stretch or half-kneeling hip flexor stretch | 60 sec/side | Lengthen rectus femoris and psoas. Squeeze the glute of the down leg hard and tuck the pelvis under. Without the glute squeeze you are stretching your lower back instead of your hip. |
| 90/90 hip switches | 10/side | Hip internal and external rotation. |
| Glute bridge, hard posterior tilt | 2 × 15 | Wake the glute max and teach the tucked position. Tuck first, then lift. Do not arch at the top. |
| Dead bug | 2 × 8/side | The best anti-extension drill there is. Lower back stays flat on the floor the whole time. If it lifts, shorten the range. |
| Band pull-apart | 2 × 20 | Shoulder health for your rotator cuff flag. Ribs stay down. |
| Cat-cow | 8 slow | Teaches you to feel the difference between lumbar flexion and extension. |
The evidence that you can permanently change your static, standing pelvic angle is mixed at best, and some of pelvic tilt is skeletal. What reliably improves, and improves a lot, is the pain and your ability to control the position under load. Judge this by whether your back stops aching after long days and whether you can hold a neutral ribcage at deadlift lockout, not by whether a posture photo looks different in March. Escalate to a physical therapist if the ache becomes pain that does not settle in a day, if it radiates below the knee, if you get numbness or weakness in a leg, or if you are no better after eight consistent weeks.
Low drive, daytime sleepiness, a twenty minute workout ceiling, trouble sustaining focus. That is not four problems, it is one problem with four faces, and it sits ahead of the meet and the recomp in priority.
| # | Cause | Likelihood | The case, and how you would know |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sleep debt from a 7-week-old | Very high | Every symptom you listed is textbook accumulated sleep loss: daytime sleepiness, collapsed sustained attention, reduced exercise tolerance, flattened motivation. Seven weeks is close to the worst point. It improves when the baby consolidates sleep, typically three to six months. This is why the plan holds ground rather than chasing progress for two months. |
| 2 | Disordered breathing at night | High, and it stacks | Daytime sleepiness is its cardinal symptom, and it sits behind 14 of your 15 sleep recommendations. The trap: a new father has a ready-made excuse for exactly the symptom that would otherwise send him to a clinic, which is why this goes unlooked-at for years. How you would know: the home test, whenever you decide you want the answer. |
| 3 | A correctable lab abnormality | Moderate, cheap to rule out | Four candidates, all flagged in your genetics, all on one panel: vitamin D (GC transport LOWER), ferritin (lower TIBC, RBC and MCHC; low ferritin causes fatigue before it causes anemia), B12 (INCREASED NEED, lower TCN2), thyroid (free T4 LOWER in three reports). One draw answers all four. |
| 4 | Blood sugar swings | Moderate | Higher fasting glucose, higher HbA1c, lower GLP-1. Post-meal crashes produce exactly this. The Meals tab is designed to flatten it. If your dips come reliably 60 to 90 minutes after eating, this is real. |
| 5 | Your dopamine genetics | A modifier | DRD2 and DRD3: LOWER ACTIVITY. Dopamine drives motivation and effort tolerance. Likely why low drive is the symptom you notice first and why the checkout feels like a wall rather than a fade. A dial that makes everything worse, not the thing that turned the light off. Responds to morning light, exercise, protein at breakfast, sleep, and short committed blocks. |
| 6 | Mood | Worth checking | Raised carefully and once. Paternal postnatal depression affects roughly one in ten new fathers, peaks in the first six months, and often shows up as low motivation and fatigue rather than sadness. Your genetics are favorable: low mood TYPICAL, seasonal low mood LESS likely, neuroticism SECURE. But predisposition is not protection. If alongside the tiredness you notice you are not enjoying things, feeling flat, or unusually irritable with people you love, that is worth a conversation with your doctor. Common, treatable, and not a character problem. |
| Lever | Detail |
|---|---|
| Caffeine, 200 mg, 45 min pre-lift | Your one clean genetic advantage. Fast CYP1A2 metabolizer, LOWER caffeine sensitivity, LESS likely to get caffeine-related sleep problems or anxiety. It works on you and clears fast enough not to wreck an already fragile sleep window. 9:45 for a 10:30 session. Never after 2 PM. |
| Carbs 60-90 min before | You train at 10:30 off an 8:30 breakfast. Make that breakfast the 90 g carb meal it is now supposed to be. A heavy squat on a low-carb breakfast with your glucose genetics is a guaranteed checkout. |
| Cut decisions, not effort | Open this board before you start. Standing in the gym deciding what to do burns the exact resource you are short of, and your "carefree" personality reading makes pre-deciding worth more to you than to most people. |
| Superset the accessories | Everything after the main lift is paired, so the back half is 20 minutes of work rather than 35 minutes of standing around. |
| The 20-minute nap | 1:00 to 2:30 PM, alarm set, never after 3:00. You are genetically MORE LIKELY to nap. In version 1 that was permission. Now it is prescription. |
If sleep debt is the main driver, and I think it probably is, the fix is not a supplement, it is time, and it arrives on the baby's schedule rather than yours. The next two to three months are for holding ground, not making progress. Block 1 is deliberately the easiest block of the nine months for exactly this reason. You do not need to be impressive right now. You need to still be lifting in January, un-injured, with a back that does not hurt, so the eight months of real work after it actually land.
| Supplement | Dose | Why, for you, now |
|---|---|---|
| Creatine monohydrate You take this | 10 g, split 5 g + 5 g | Keep the 10 g but split the dose, and read the box below: it changes two things, one of which affects your kidney labs. Muscle saturates at 3-5 g, but brain creatine saturates slower and that is the case for your dose given lower BDNF and brain fog. |
| Caffeine New | 200 mg, 45 min pre-lift | Fast CYP1A2 metabolizer with LOWER caffeine sensitivity. It works on you and clears fast. The most direct lever against the checkout. |
| Vitamin D3 + K2 | 2,000-4,000 IU + 100 mcg | In 12 of 40 reports, #1 in your Health Overview, GC transport gene LOWER. Also a fatigue candidate. |
| Omega-3 | 2,000 mg EPA+DHA | Triglycerides HIGHER, omega-6:3 ratio HIGHER, joints. Buy on total EPA+DHA on the back label. |
| Collagen + vitamin C New | 15 g + 500 mg pre-lift | Added because you are now loading heavy. Worse ADAMTS5 cartilage genetics, higher COL5A1, joint stiffness MORE LIKELY, rotator cuff flag. The evidence is reasonable rather than overwhelming and the downside is zero. Nine months of heavy squatting is the right time for a cheap bet. |
| Magnesium glycinate | 300-350 mg at night | Sleep quality, cramps, blood sugar. Matters more now that sleep quantity is out of your control: quality is what you can still work on. |
| B12 methylcobalamin | 500-1,000 mcg | INCREASED NEED in three reports, lower TCN2 transport. Fatigue candidate. |
| Zinc picolinate | 15-25 mg with dinner | INCREASED NEED. Testosterone and immunity. Immunity matters more with a newborn and a low neutrophil flag. Cap at 30 mg without copper. |
| Probiotic | 10-30 B CFU | B. breve and B. longum specifically. You are predisposed to lower levels of both. |
| Ashwagandha | KSM-66 600 mg, morning | Cortisol HIGHER, DHEAS LOWER, plus a newborn. Cycle 8-12 weeks on, 4 off. Skip if you ever go on thyroid medication. |
DHEA (a hormone, needs labs and a doctor), iron (not without a ferritin panel), vitamin E (your reports contradict each other), the seven testosterone herbs (your testosterone is TYPICAL and bioavailable T is HIGHER, so you do not have a testosterone problem), EDTA and zeolite, high-dose calcium. Reasoning unchanged from version 1. Two more are on the list for reasons that belong in your doctor's office rather than on a dashboard, and you know which two.
Is 10 g too much? No. It is safe, well inside the range studies have used for years, and there is no evidence of kidney harm in healthy people at that dose. But be clear-eyed about what it buys: muscle creatine saturates at around 3 to 5 g a day, so for muscle purposes the second 5 g is mostly being urinated out.
Why I am still not telling you to cut it. Brain creatine saturates more slowly and less completely than muscle, and the work suggesting a cognitive benefit, particularly under sleep deprivation, has generally used doses at or above this level. You have slightly lower BDNF, brain fog flagged MORE LIKELY, and you are describing low drive and short attention on broken sleep. That is the one profile where the higher dose has a rationale beyond the muscle. Keep the 10 g.
Change one: split it, 5 g at lunch and 5 g at dinner. Ten grams in one serving is where people start getting bloating and loose stool, and you have bloating, reflux and low stomach acid all flagged MORE LIKELY. Splitting removes almost all of that and costs you nothing.
Change two, and this one matters whenever you do draw blood: creatine distorts kidney labs. Creatine breaks down to creatinine, which is the exact marker used to estimate kidney function. At 10 g a day your serum creatinine reads elevated and your eGFR reads artificially low with completely normal kidneys. That is the number meant to confirm 195 g of protein a day is safe for you, so drawing it creatine-loaded risks a false alarm and being told to cut your protein for no reason. Whenever that draw happens: pause creatine for five days first, tell the ordering doctor in writing that you take 10 g daily, or ask for cystatin C as the eGFR basis instead, since it is unaffected by creatine. And one note for the meet: full saturation carries roughly 2 to 4 lb of extra intracellular water, so the 183 lb target is 183 with creatine on board. Do not drop it in the final week to make weight. Plan to weigh in saturated.
You are a CYP2C9 POOR METABOLIZER: you clear ibuprofen, naproxen and celecoxib slowly, so standard doses sit at higher concentrations in you for longer. Powerlifters take a lot of ibuprofen. Use the lowest effective dose and do not take NSAIDs daily for training soreness, which blunts training adaptations anyway. Tell any doctor or dentist about this genotype, especially if a blood thinner ever comes up.
It told you to be asleep at 10:00 PM for a clean 7.5 hours. You have a seven week old. The quantity and continuity of your sleep are not under your control, and a plan that pretends otherwise just adds a nightly failure to a life that has enough of those. Stop optimizing sleep duration, which you cannot control. Optimize sleep opportunity and sleep quality, which you can.
| Lever | What to do |
|---|---|
| Bank the opportunity | Horizontal, lights off, by 9:45 PM. Earlier than version 1, because you need a buffer for interruptions. Woken twice, 9:45 to 5:30 might yield six hours. Going down at 11:00 yields four. The bedtime is the only end of this you control. |
| Nap deliberately | 20 minutes, 1:00 to 2:30 PM, alarm set, never after 3:00. Genetically MORE LIKELY to nap. Prescribed, not permitted. |
| Morning light | 10 to 20 minutes outside within half an hour of getting up, whenever that is. Night owl chronotype plus LOWER melatonin. It works even on broken sleep. |
| Split the nights | If your partner is open to it, alternating who takes the first stretch means each of you gets one uninterrupted block rather than both getting shredded sleep. One consolidated four hour block beats six broken hours. It is also a fairness conversation: she is seven weeks postpartum and recovering from something physically enormous. |
| Protect the quality | 65-68°F, blackout, side sleeping, head of bed elevated 6-8 in, alcohol under 3 drinks a week and none within 3 hours of bed, kitchen closed 7:30. All unchanged and all more valuable now: fewer hours means you need more from each one. |
Your recovery genetics are all TYPICAL: exercise recovery, muscle recovery, soreness, cramps, heart rate recovery. No built-in deficit. What you have is a temporary, severe, sleep-driven one, and the right response to that is less training stress, not more recovery gadgets.
| Practice | Dose | Note |
|---|---|---|
| The back and core protocol | 8 min training days 5 min off days | Your highest-value recovery work, because it is also the thing fixing your back. |
| Walking | 7,000-9,000 steps | Reduced from version 1. Stroller walks count, and they double as your light exposure. |
| Deload | Week 7 and week 12 | Plus an unscheduled one any time two consecutive sessions feel like RPE 9 at RPE 7 weights. |
| Lacrosse ball | 10 min, 3×/wk | Upper back and pecs. Professional massage is a nice-to-have you probably cannot schedule right now. |
| Full rest | Sunday only | Six training days means one rest day. Defend Sunday hard: it is also your grocery, prep and programming day. |
| Sauna | Reconsider | Fine for recovery, but sperm motility is flagged LOWER and heat lowers it further. If more children are on the horizon, skip it. |
Locked to Saturday 15 May 2027. Thirty-nine weeks from Monday 17 August 2026. The meet falls on day six of week 39, so your final training week and the platform are the same week.
15 May 2027 is a Saturday and your Saturdays are already booked: a 10:00 client call, an 11:15 SSC class, and now an arm day at 12:15. Block out Sat 15 May and Sat 8 May nine months ahead and tell those clients now. When you register, confirm two things with the meet director: the weigh-in format (two hours before your session in IPF and USAPL, often twenty-four hours elsewhere, and it completely changes how you handle the last day) and whether your equipment is approved for that federation.
| Week | Dates | Out | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aug 17-23 | 39 | Baseline week. Get a real body fat measurement. Find your RPE 6-7 weights and do not touch them. |
| 2-6 | Aug 24 - Sep 27 | 38-34 | Block 1 accumulation. Smallest increment per week from week 4. |
| 7 | Sep 28 - Oct 4 | 33 | Deload Two-thirds weight, 2 sets, RPE 5. |
| 8-11 | Oct 5 - Nov 1 | 32-29 | Block 1 resumes. Add a fifth squat set if it is going well. |
| 12 | Nov 2-8 | 28 | Deload then test. Top set of 5 at RPE 8 on each lift. Those numbers set up Block 2. |
| 13 | Nov 9-15 | 27 | Block 2 begins. Sets of 6-10. Weight around 185 lb by Nov 12. |
| 14-18 | Nov 16 - Dec 20 | 26-22 | Hypertrophy accumulation. 183 lb lands around Dec 17. The cut ends there, everything after is maintenance. |
| 19 | Dec 21-27 | 21 | Deload Christmas week does this for you. Take it. |
| 20 | Dec 28 - Jan 3 | 20 | Back to volume. Maintenance calories from here, around 3,000. |
| 21-23 | Jan 4-24 | 19-17 | Gut experiment Gluten and dairy out for four weeks. Placed after both holidays and once the baby is five months, so the result means something. |
| 24 | Jan 25-31 | 16 | Deload Week four of the elimination lands here, on the lightest training week of the block, which is the cleanest read you will get. |
| 25 | Feb 1-7 | 15 | Block 3 begins. Sets of 3-5 at RPE 7-9. Reintroduce dairy alone for 3 days. |
| 26 | Feb 8-14 | 14 | Reintroduce gluten alone for 3 days. Competition commands enter training. |
| 27-28 | Feb 15-28 | 13-12 | Strength accumulation. Practise with someone calling commands. Register if you have not. |
| 29 | Mar 1-7 | 11 | Deload Decide the weight class this week. 183 strong means 83 kg. 183 hollow means eat back to 190 and take 93 kg without regret. |
| 30-33 | Mar 8 - Apr 4 | 10-7 | Heaviest work of the whole build. First heavy singles. Accessories trimmed to what serves the three lifts. |
| 34 | Apr 5-11 | 6 | Block 4 begins. Almost nothing but competition squat, bench and deadlift. Find a handler. |
| 35-36 | Apr 12-25 | 5-4 | Singles at opener and second-attempt weights. Drop the arm day from here to the meet. |
| 37 | Apr 26 - May 2 | 3 | Openers locked and never changed. Weights you could triple on your worst day. |
| 38 | May 3-9 | 2 | Last heavy session Wed 5 May. Volume falls off a cliff after it. Rehearse the day: timing, food, warm-up order. |
| 39 | May 10-16 | 1 | Taper. Two light technical sessions Mon and Tue, then nothing. Sat 15 May: you compete |
| Block | Training | Nutrition | Everything else |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block 1 · Base Aug 17 - Nov 8 · 12 wk Baby 2-5 months |
Sets of 5 at RPE 6-7. Technique and position. Deloads at week 7 and 12. Never to failure. | 2,950 / 2,450. Slow drift 190 to 185. | Back and core protocol daily. Goal: arrive in November un-injured, back not aching, still enjoying it. Deliberately the easiest block, timed to your worst sleep. |
| Block 2 · Hypertrophy Nov 9 - Jan 31 · 12 wk Baby 5-8 months |
Volume climbs. Sets of 6-10. Heavy accessories. Where the muscle gets built and your endurance genetics pay off. | Reach 183 early, then maintenance around 3,000. The recomp happens here. | Run the gut experiment here, when sleep has consolidated and the result will mean something. |
| Block 3 · Strength Feb 1 - Apr 4 · 9 wk Baby 8-10 months |
Intensity climbs, volume drops. Sets of 3-5 at RPE 7-9. Competition commands. First heavy singles. | Maintenance at 183. Decide the weight class week of 1 March. | Book the meet entry. Find a handler. Practice with someone calling commands. |
| Block 4 · Peak Apr 5 - May 15 · 6 wk |
Almost only competition lifts. Openers picked at 3 weeks out and never changed. Volume falls off a cliff in the last fortnight. | Maintenance. No aggressive cut for a first meet. | Rehearse the day. Openers you could triple. Go 9 for 9 rather than chasing a number. |
I am not telling you to cut for your first meet. Chasing a weight class at your first competition is a classic beginner mistake. But look at what you already asked for: leaner, more definition, hold your strength. Doing exactly that at a boring half pound a week moves you from 190 to 183 in about fifteen weeks and leaves eight months to get strong there.
So: pursue the leanness you already want, slowly enough to keep every pound of muscle, and let the weight class fall out of it. Arrive at 183 in November feeling strong and you compete at 83 kg. Arrive feeling hollow and you eat back to 190 and compete at 93 kg without a second thought. The decision does not have to be made until March.
At 190 lb and roughly 27% body fat you carry about 52 lb of fat and 138 lb of lean mass. To be visibly defined at 190 you would need around 18% body fat, meaning adding roughly eighteen pounds of lean mass while losing eighteen of fat. For a trained adult male not on drugs, that is a two to four year project, not a nine month one. That is the honest version.
The good news version: you do not need eighteen pounds of muscle to look completely different. Dropping to 183 while holding lean mass puts you around 24%. Eight more months eating at maintenance while training hard, with the recomposition people at your training age and body fat reliably get, plausibly lands you near 20 to 21% at the same weight. That is the abs starting to show at the top and the shoulders separating. And you will be considerably stronger.
| Checkpoint | Weight | Est. body fat | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 190 lb | 25-30% | Get a real measurement in week 1 so this stops being a guess. |
| Week 13, Nov 12 | ~185 lb | ~25% | Half a pound a week. Strength should be climbing, not flat. |
| Week 18, Dec 17 | 183 lb | ~24% | Weight-class target hit. The cut ends here. Everything after is maintenance. |
| Week 25, Feb 2027 | 183 lb | ~22% | Same weight, more muscle, less fat. The recomp working. |
| Meet, Sat 15 May 2027 | 183 lb | ~20-21% | Leanest and strongest you have been. Nine pounds on the scale, dramatically different in the mirror. |
Estimates assume you hold lean mass, which is what the protein target and the training volume exist to protect. Projections, not promises. The week 12 and week 24 measurements turn them into facts.
You are not ordering labs right now, and this tab does not think you should be. It is here for the day you change your mind, or the day a doctor asks what you would want drawn. Nothing on this page will be raised with you unprompted, by BIGFLY or by anything else.
The panel, ordered so the fatigue-relevant markers come first.
| Test | Target | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| Home sleep test | AHI under 5 | Not a blood test Highest ceiling of anything in this plan, and orderable on its own without the panel. |
| Vitamin D, 25-OH | 40-60 ng/mL | Fatigue GC transport gene LOWER. Deficiency is common and fatigue is its main symptom. |
| Iron, TIBC, ferritin | Ferritin 50-150 | Fatigue Lower TIBC, RBC and MCHC flagged. Low ferritin causes fatigue long before anemia. Do not take iron before this. |
| Complete thyroid panel | TSH 1.0-2.0 | Fatigue Free T4 flagged LOWER in three reports. Low output produces fatigue, low drive and fog precisely. |
| B12 and folate | B12 above 500 pg/mL | Fatigue INCREASED NEED in three reports, lower TCN2 transport. |
| CBC with differential | Neutrophils in range | Fatigue Low neutrophils MORE LIKELY. 27 DNA risks. |
| HbA1c + fasting glucose + insulin | HbA1c under 5.4 Insulin under 8 | Energy Your glucose cluster and a likely contributor to afternoon crashes. Ask for insulin so you can calculate HOMA-IR. |
| Comprehensive Metabolic Panel plus cystatin C | eGFR above 60 | 41 DNA risks, the most of any test. Also confirms 195 g of protein is fine, which it almost certainly is. Creatine Add cystatin C, or pause creatine for five days first. Your 10 g a day inflates serum creatinine and deflates the standard eGFR with normal kidneys. See the Supplements tab. |
| Lipid panel + ApoB | Trigs under 100 ApoB under 80 | Triglycerides flagged HIGHER. Ask your doctor which one-off cardiac marker they want added; there is one worth doing once in your life and it is a conversation for the room, not the dashboard. |
| Testosterone total and free, SHBG, estradiol, DHEA-S | Free T upper third | Mandatory before anyone suggests DHEA. Also your baseline if anything about your nights ever gets treated. |
| hs-CRP | Under 1.0 mg/L | Inflammation. Draw on a day you did not lift heavy the day before. |
| Zinc, uric acid | Mid-range / under 6.0 | Both flagged. Often bundled, so ask. |
If you ever run it. Fasted, first thing, before training, on a day you did not lift hard the day before, and ideally on a deload week, because hard training transiently raises hs-CRP and some liver enzymes.