Who this module is for

#Before you read this

Everything in Brut and DUOX up to this point is about training and eating to build muscle for a normal life — the gym, not the stage. This module is different on purpose: it exists only for the reader who has actually decided to compete.

If that isn't you, the correct move is to close this module rather than read it out of curiosity. Nothing in it makes you better at training. What it covers — peak week manipulation, and a taxonomy of the practices that have killed competitors — is only relevant once the decision to compete has already been made, and reading it earlier just imports risk-taking ideas into a context where they don't belong.

#The two rules this module follows

No doses. Not for anything unregulated, not for anything prescription-only. Where a real published case documents a specific number — a lethal blood concentration, a therapeutic-vs-misuse dose gap — that number appears as evidence of harm, never as a usage guide. The full reasoning for this rule is in The Reference Protocol, which follows it for the same reason.

Danger and evidence run in opposite directions here. The practices with real supporting research — carbohydrate manipulation, a modest sodium taper, a planned refeed — are also the least dangerous ones in this module. The practices that dominate the folklore and the cautionary tales are the ones with the weakest evidence of working and the strongest evidence of harm, up to and including a measured, population-level death rate at the top of the sport. That asymmetry is the single most useful thing in this whole module, and it is worth carrying into every lesson that follows.

#Before you go further

Two or three questions, before any teaching. Answer them from what you already believe — being wrong here is fine, and is in fact the point.

The full primary-literature version of everything in this module — every case report, every citation — lives at /protocol/showprep. This module teaches the framework; that page is the reference to come back to.