Contest prep, from the first week to the show

Contest prep, inside the app you already use

Dedicated prep apps exist and some of them are good. What Setpoint does differently is run the prep on the same engine as the rest of your year: the expenditure figure it has been measuring from your own logs and weigh-ins for months is the one your prep is planned from, rather than a fresh calculator starting from nothing.

Enter your show date and division and Setpoint works backwards from it. The first thing it does is tell you whether the date is reachable — and if it is not, it shows the arithmetic and the date that is. Finding that out on day one means entering a different show. Finding out at week ten costs a season.

Then one tap writes the whole thing: your targets, a meal plan with however many meals a day you want, and a training programme built for your division. Not three screens and two other tabs — one.

Prep food is expensive and Setpoint says so rather than letting you find out at the till. Your protein target during a prep is the highest the app ever sets, and protein is the costliest way there is to fill a calorie target — so if the week’s shop is going to overrun the grocery budget you set, the prep screen tells you by how much. It does not quietly rewrite the plan cheaper, because the only way to make a prep meaningfully cheaper is to take the protein out. Peak week included — that is the most expensive shop of the whole prep and the worst week to be surprised by it.

From there it is the app you already have, pointed at a deadline: targets set week by week from your measured expenditure, meals and training built against them, and a pace that runs harder early and eases as you get lean — because that is when a deficit starts costing muscle rather than fat.

Cardio is treated as a budget you spend rather than a baseline you set. It starts at an hour a week and climbs — slowly at first, steeply near the end, because the extra work is only worth its recovery cost in the stretch where the deficit can no longer come out of food. The common way to get this wrong is starting high: six long sessions at sixteen weeks out feels productive and leaves you nowhere to go when the scale stalls at week six. Mostly low-intensity, because intervals compete with your lifting for the recovery that is already scarce, and none at all in peak week — that week exists to put glycogen in, and cardio takes it back out.

It is never converted into calories and never subtracted from your food. Setpoint already measures what you burn from what you logged and what the scale did, so the cardio you actually do is in that figure — counting it a second time would cut your food twice for the same work.

Through the middle of it, the question that actually matters is whether you are on the line. Setpoint draws the trajectory your plan expects — a curve rather than a straight line, because losing faster early and easing off as you get lean is the plan, not a deviation from it — and compares it against your weight trend rather than this morning’s reading.

And when you are behind, it shows you what that costs rather than telling you what to do. Two futures, both real: carry on at the rate you have actually been losing and be ready some weeks after this show, or hold the date and here is the rate that takes — including when that rate is past what muscle survives. Setpoint will not pick. It knows the arithmetic and none of the things that actually decide it.

The final week is planned day by day: depletion, the carb load scaled to your lean mass, the training taper, and show day timed backwards from when you are called to the stage. Water loading is explained properly, with the risks at both ends, and you set your own figures — Setpoint tracks them, it does not prescribe them. Diuretics and sweating weight off it will not plan at all.

Then it walks you back up, and it reads you rather than a textbook. Steady weight means room to feed you faster; a real climb eases the pace. It deliberately ignores the first fortnight, because weight after a show rises whatever you do — that is glycogen refilling and bringing its water with it, and treating it as fat would leave you under-fed for weeks on the strength of the one gain the app already knows is not fat.

That stretch decides whether the next twelve months are good or miserable, and it is the part people are most often left to work out alone.

The coach knows about it too, so “why did my calories change?” gets an answer about your show and your week rather than a general one about expenditure.

Fourteen divisions across both sexes, and one for anything a federation has added that Setpoint has not heard of yet — the timeline and the targets work the same either way.

Then one more question: novice, experienced, or masters. A first show gets four extra weeks of runway, because nearly every prep people regret is one that started too late and got made up for with crash dieting in the last month. Masters gets three extra weeks and a lower ceiling on how fast the weight comes off — muscle is harder to hold and harder to rebuild than it was, so the same deficit costs more. If you are over 35 and it is also your first show, pick masters: it is the more careful of the two, and nothing here decides which classes you enter on the day.

Stop it whenever you like. Setpoint works out a fresh target for the bodyweight you are at now — not the one you started on, which is a number computed for a body you no longer have — then rebuilds your meals and your training around it, in the background, while you carry on using the app. A prep programme is not what you go back to, and a prep plan built for a deficit is not either. Everything you have logged stays exactly as it is. And when you finish, it asks the one question worth recording: did you come in flat, about right, or spilled? That answer, the weight you came in at and whatever you wrote down are waiting for you when you set up the next one — and in peak week, which is the only week you can still act on them. A year is long enough to forget what you loaded on. Setpoint does not change anything on the strength of it; it puts last time in front of you and the call stays yours.

Never used if you do not compete. It is one card on the Diet tab, and the rest of the app is unchanged.