I tried bodybuilding for 1 year: Here’s what happened (Renaissance Periodisation review)
Where I started
I did an RP program for over a year and here are my results, my experience, and some advice if you’re considering doing one of their programs. I’ve been working as a doctor for the last 3 years and the hospital environment has not been kind to me. It’s a very catabolic environment: constant beeping alarms, elevated cortisol, circadian carnage, constant stress, 13-hour shifts. Surprisingly, not very good for your body composition.
I managed to lose muscle and gain fat at the same time. So I needed to recover some of the lost muscle and did a one-year bodybuilding cycle.
Why everyone has bodybuilding goals, whether they admit it or not
I’m not a bodybuilder, but you’ll always hear me say that everyone has bodybuilding goals. They just don’t realize it. Everyone wants more muscle and less fat, but they often don’t want to admit it because they don’t see themselves posing on stage in little trunks. Most people just kind of fart around the bush by doing things like training with kettlebells because they don’t want to admit to themselves that they’ve got bodybuilding goals.
You have to have a period of time where you just go all in and use an overwhelming force to get out of the inertia and shake yourself loose of the homeostasis.
The RP program and why I chose it
I also went through the fitness menopause after I herniated my L5S1 and could no longer powerlift competitively. The RP physique program fit the hole perfectly. I believe that if you want to hit any goal in life, you have to blast and cruise. You have to have a period of time where you just go all in and use an overwhelming force to get out of the inertia and shake yourself loose of the homeostasis. So I did one year of proper muscle-gain focus followed by a 4-month fat-loss phase.
If you don’t know who RP (Renaissance Periodisation) are, they’re a team of highly qualified doctors, sports scientists, and coaches. They’re pretty legit for hypertrophy training. I thought: outsource all of the decision-making to them, because as a coach, it’s very easy to start meddling with your own programming when you’re dealing with your own stuff. If you can just do something out of the box and hand over the decision-making, you tend to make better decisions.
How the training was structured
The program started off deceptively easy and then it really crept up on me. It was a great lesson to drop the load, forget percentage-based programming, and focus on thinking like a bodybuilder.
The main differences from how I’m used to training were that there were a lot more movements and quite often you’d only do two sets of maybe five to seven movements per workout, rather than coming in and doing endless sets of squat or bench. It was very much focused on training a muscle group and hitting it from multiple angles, which is not a mindset I’m used to.
I did the physique template. It’s semi-customizable, so I picked the movements that fit my preferences. Who would this program suit? Anyone who’s an intermediate or advanced lifter who wants to outsource the decision-making, or shake loose of old habits and learn something new.
Key training lessons
The main lessons I picked up:
- Think like a bodybuilder. Use straps. Use the tools. Embrace it.
- Learn to get more out of less. Advanced bodybuilders focus on getting maximum stimulus from minimum weight and minimum sets. That’s a shift from powerlifting where you’re trying to move the weight from A to B as legally as possible.
Focus, stricter, slower, deeper. If you can improve those four dimensions of any rep in the gym, your results are going to improve.
It was also psychologically liberating to let go of having to hit certain numbers each week and instead focus on quality of movement, pump, soreness, range of motion, and really exploring the movements themselves. Bodybuilding can often seem quite boring from the outside, but there’s a huge amount of depth and enjoyment in what looks like a very mechanical act.
Nutrition mistakes I made
In terms of diet, the main mistake I made was revenge bulking. When I’m stressed and overrun with work, I tend to eat less. After a 13-hour shift, you’d end up not having time to eat. So I tried to revenge bulk by compressing my surplus into a shorter period. The results were ugly.
You can’t bully your body into gaining more muscle than is physiologically possible. I tried to jimmy the process and it didn’t work.
When I did the fat loss phase, I dialed in the diet but I was too slow. When you’re planning fat loss, you can afford to be more aggressive with a deficit early on in your diet. As you get leaner, you have to start walking the tight rope more carefully. I was too conservative. Some people prefer a long, slow burn. I should have been more aggressive with the deficit to get through it quicker.
The differential principle: applying it beyond the gym
Final lesson: you’re always dealing with some kind of differential. The obvious one is calories in and calories out: two levers you can pull at any time. The same applies in business with revenue and costs, or with intake and fullness in a diet.
Sometimes we see one of those levers as immovable. If we challenge that assumption, we can really supercharge our progress.
In the fat loss phase, I kept getting hungry quite early on. The question became: how can I make myself more full with the same calorie intake? That’s when you start playing around with calorie density and food volume. Worth applying that idea of differentials across the board: maybe the lever you think is fixed can actually be moved.
Overall, great experience. I would recommend the program to anyone who’s resonated with what I’ve said, particularly if you’re in a training rut and want to focus on hypertrophy for a bit. This isn’t a sponsored video. I just like the guys at RP and thought you might get some value from it.