Water Retention: 2 Types - One Good For Bodybuilders And One Bad
There is two kinds of water retention… one good, and one bad…
One kind of water retention will make your muscles big and full, and the other will make your muscles look smooth, ruining their detail, separation and definition.
I’ll now tell you how to avoid the bad kind, and to get more of the good kind, so you look your absolute best.
Let me explain…
You have two types of water retention:
- Muscle water
- Subcutaneous water (under the skin / in the flesh)
Muscles are 75% water. The more water we have in our muscles, the bigger and fuller they look. This is the good kind of water retention; the kind you need to promote more of.
Subcutaneous water retention is the bad kind. Water builds up in between the skin and the muscles, smoothing out the appearance of the muscles underneath and making the physique look bloated and lacking in definition. Subcutaneous water retention is the kind of water retention bodybuilders try hard to reduce…
But… most (even many Pro’s – but oodles of rookies) get it completely wrong!
(Seriously, I’m not blowing smoke here. Arnold, in his classic book The New Encyclopedia Of Modern Bodybuilding mentions how a ridiculous amount of Pro’s are woefully undereducated on this, and even mentions a Pro bodybuilder who died from using diuretics when he needn’t have used them at all…)
Anyway, onward. Besides the side effects of muscle cramps and so forth from using diuretics, they tend to remove water from the muscles too – which is precisely what you don’t want.
The way around it is as simple as drinking water…
In fact, it is drinking water. Lots of it. Stay with me here…
If you drink a lot of water, the body flushes it out by making you urinate more. And, if you drink hardly any water, your body turns itself into a cactus by holding onto as much water as it can.
Therefore – the more you drink, the less you retain, and the less you drink, the more you retain…
But, what about the water you retain in the flesh, you ask?
Easy. The approach you need to take is simply this:
Continue drinking a lot of water right up until the night before the competition. On the evening, you then halve your water intake. Your body will then continue to flush out a lot of water for several more hours (as it had been up until this point), and, because you are now drinking only half, you ensure the body doesn’t hold any water subcutaneously in the flesh.
On the morning of the competition, drink moderate amounts and you will avoid any of the side effects from this method such as dehydration and cramping.
