Jack Radford-Smith

January 9, 2025

Unconventional Tips For Bodybuilding Success

Jack Radford-Smith

Improving as a physique athlete and successfully pursuing the sport of bodybuilding requires far more than just nailing your daily training and nutrition.

If you want to thoroughly enjoy your journey and achieve more than just a muscular physique then it’s important to strive for overall self-improvement!

Featured

How to Meet Your Micronutrient Needs From Food

A food-first reference to eight commonly under-consumed nutrients, with realistic serving sizes, the amount each food delivers, and how to get the most out of what you eat. Covering iron, zinc, calcium, magnesium, iodine, vitamin D, B12 and omega-3, built on Australian data.

How to Structure Peak Week: Five Carb Loading Approaches

Peak week can be structured in several ways, and the right one depends on the athlete rather than a single correct protocol. Here are five carbohydrate loading approaches, what each suits, the role of the adjustment days, and the factors beyond carbohydrate that shape how you present on stage.

How to Break the Cycle of Cutting and Regaining Weight

Losing fat is often easier than keeping it off, which is why so many people end up cutting repeatedly to re-lose the same weight. Here is how the cutting cycle works, why maintenance is the harder phase, and how planning for it from the start of a diet breaks the pattern.

Why Habits Beat Motivation for Diet and Training Consistency

Motivation rises and falls with sleep, stress and life, which makes it an unreliable foundation for consistency. Here is why habits beat motivation, how they actually form, and how to build ones that keep your nutrition and training on track even when motivation dips.

How to Recover From Comp Prep: A Post-Show Guide

The phase after a bodybuilding show can be harder than prep itself. A practical guide to restoring energy availability, managing weight regain, choosing between a recovery and reverse diet, and rebuilding training, cardio and flexibility around food.

Which Carbs Are Most Filling Per Calorie?

Some carbohydrate sources keep you much fuller per calorie than others. Here is how carb sources compare on food volume and fibre per 100 calories, and how to use that to choose the most filling carbs for fat loss and around training.

How to Set Your Macros for Fat Loss, Muscle Gain or Recomp

Setting your macros works best as a sequence rather than four separate guesses. Here is how to set your calories first, then protein, fat and carbohydrate, with the numbers adjusted for fat loss, muscle gain or body recomposition.

Saturated Fat and Heart Health | Why the Debate Needs More Context

The saturated fat debate usually gets reduced to saturated versus unsaturated, but the type of fat, its food source, and what replaces it in the diet all shape its effect on cardiovascular health. Here is what LDL cholesterol and ApoB show, what the outcome evidence from a 2020 Cochrane review found, why the food source of saturated fat matters, and the practical approach it all points to.

Six Nutrition Facts You Probably Don't Know (But Should)

A second set of nutrition facts worth understanding more precisely than they usually get: why whole nuts provide fewer absorbable calories than the label says, what a 1,000mg fish oil capsule actually contains, why lactose-free milk tastes sweeter, what elemental magnesium means on a supplement label, how cooling rice changes its starch, and why protein costs more energy to digest than carbohydrate or fat.

The Skills That Make Dieting Easier (and How You Build Them)

The first time you diet is the hardest, because you are learning how you respond while also trying to get a result. Dieting is a skill that improves with experience, not a fixed set of rules. Here are the specific skills that make fat loss easier, from managing hunger to recognising your own patterns, and why each phase you complete makes the next one more manageable.

The Cost of Convenience: How Much Extra Are You Paying for It?

Pre-cut chicken, single-serve yoghurt, microwave rice, and instant oats make eating well easier, but the convenience often carries a steep price premium, from around 1.4 times the basic price up to more than twenty times for some pantry items. Here is how much extra you pay, when the nutrition changes and when it does not, and how to decide where the premium is worth it and where a little preparation saves a lot.

Simple vs Complex Carbs: What Carbohydrate Structure Means

Carbohydrates are classified by how many sugar units are linked together, from single sugars through to the long chains that make up starches and fibre. Here is the carbohydrate hierarchy explained, why complex carbs are still built from sugars, and why a food's structure and what comes with it matter far more than whether it technically contains sugar.

Convenient High-Protein Meals | No-Cook Options

When time is short, eating well is less about knowledge and more about what is easy to execute. Here is how to build balanced meals around four anchors (a protein, plant matter, a carbohydrate, and a fat) using convenient, pre-packaged foods, with ready-to-assemble examples for each meal and why this matters most for consistency on busy weeks.