No point in cutting water. Cutting water is a huge myth and makes you look worse.
Water is needed to move the nutrients to your cells and help you fill out. Cutting water can make you look very flat and cause you not to be able to metabolise or push the sodium, carbs etc to your body and fill out.
https://www.biolayne.com/articles/contest-prep/sodium-water-carbs-oh-my-what-to-adjust-for-a-proper-peak/
[video=youtube;19JZdP3ElbI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19JZdP3ElbI[/video]
Cliff wilson says it real good here:
One of the most common practices in a peak week is the time honored tradition of cutting water. I can’t begin to describe the looks that my clients get at shows when they walk in drinking their gallon-jugs of water. People think they have lost their minds. It is understandable why people think this though.
Common sense tells us that if you don’t drink water you can’t hold water.
Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work like that. You must continue to drink water or else your carb up will be essentially pointless. As I said earlier, carbs draw water to them wherever they go and this is also true of carbs within the muscle. In the absence of water carbs will be preferably stored as fat rather than glycogen.
This is because glycogen can ONLY be stored in a hydrated state. (2)
When carbs get stored within the muscle they store 2.7 grams of water for each gram of glycogen. This means that when you carb up and your muscles become full and round, water accounts for about 75% of that size.
So if you stop drinking water you can kiss those nice, full muscles goodbye and say hello to flat, small, sagging muscles. So cutting water will not only leave you smaller but also not nearly as lean. If you muscles are full they will push out against your against your skin making it tighter.
Even when I explain to people the importance of water to the peaking process, they still have a fear that drinking too much will cause water retention under the skin.
The culprit for holding water under the skin is actually carbs, not water. Your muscle tissue is a lot like a bathtub with the drain open. No matter how much water you let flow into that tub it will just empty through the drain. The water in that tub needs something to stop it from emptying through the drain.
The same thing happens when you drink water. Anything you drink will just be urinated out unless something stops it from leaving the body. Now let’s say I start throwing sponges into the tub. The sponges will start soaking up the water and prevent some of it from emptying out. This is very similar to what carbs do within the body. They soak up water wherever they go. When you eat carbs and drink water you body will always fill your muscle tissue first.
The issues with water retention arise when you throw too many sponges into the tub. If this happens some of the sponges and water will start spilling over onto the floor. The same happens if you eat too many carbs, they will start to spill over into the out tissues, drawing water with them. This is why it is so important to eat precisely the correct amount of carbs for your carb up. The water will never find its way to the outer tissues if you do not eat too many carbs much the same way the water would not have spilled onto the floor had I not thrown so many sponges into the tub.
