An off season bodybuilder is not on a different diet. The off season is the building season: the same food as contest prep, more of it, and training hard enough to earn every extra calorie. What separates a good one from a wasted one is not how much weight goes on, but how much of it is muscle.
Most of the competing cycle has rules everyone talks about: the prep, peak week, show day, the weeks after. The off season is the longest part of the year and the one with the least structure, which is why so many lifters treat it as a break from discipline. The guide behind this article, The Bodybuilding Nutrition Blueprint, gives the off season a chapter of its own, built on how Shawn Ray ran his across a career on the Mr. Olympia stage.
In short
The off season is for building muscle, which means more food, but the same food: the foundation stays the same as in contest prep, and only the level of control changes. A lean gain is a quarter to half a percent of body weight per week. Gaining faster mostly adds fat. Training has to justify the food, cardio stays in, and if the waist climbs faster than strength, the food comes back down. The season ends on purpose, not on emotion.
What the off season is for
The off season has one job: building muscle. That means eating more than you burn, because new tissue needs material. The guide's picture for it is a sculptor working in clay. In the first season he adds clay, handful by handful, building the mass of the figure. In the second he puts the clay down, picks up the fine tools and carves. It is the same statue the whole time, and two things follow. He cannot carve detail into clay he never added. And if he throws clay on carelessly, he only makes more work for himself later.
That is the whole case for a disciplined off season, and it is what separates off season bodybuilders who come back better from those who only come back bigger. Every pound of fat added while building is a pound that has to come off in the next prep, and the longer and harder that prep is, the more muscle it puts at risk. Build clean, and the carving is easy.
Same foundation, different control
People asked Shawn for years what he ate in the off season and what he ate before a contest, expecting two diets. His answer surprised them. His bodybuilding diet was the same in the off season as it was when he was getting ready for a competition. The foundation stayed the same. What changed was the level of control, and how tightly he managed the details.
That matters because the alternative is so common. On Competing, his book on the competitive side, describes the competitors who eat junk food for nine months and then try to eat clean for sixteen weeks, and why those sixteen weeks feel like punishment: the diet is unfamiliar. The lifter whose foundation never changes arrives at prep already knowing what works for their body. The transition from off season to prep, in Shawn's career, was not a switch. It was a slow tightening.
How Shawn Ray ran his off season
His off season was six meals a day, numbered one through six, with a protein shake in between, and two shakes when he was really pushing for size. The proteins stayed constant: steak, chicken, fish, tuna and eggs. The vegetables stayed too, broccoli, asparagus, green beans and a leafy green salad, even with all that food coming in. Breakfast was almost always oatmeal, some fruit and a dozen egg whites.
The rhythm never changed. He ate every three hours in the off season and every three hours before a show, so contest dieting never meant walking around hungry. Same clock, fewer calories. And he never counted a calorie in either season. He knew his portions, his clock and what he saw in the mirror. The full structure behind that clock is its own chapter in the guide.
The bodybuilder off season trap: the license to eat
The off season is about building muscle, which means more calories. But, in Shawn's words, more calories does not mean hamburgers, french fries, pizza and whatever gets put in front of you. He watched men use the word bulking as a license to eat like teenagers for six months, then spend the next six months trying to dig the muscle out from under everything they piled on top of it. That is not a building season. It is a mess to clean up later.
The research has put a number on what he saw. In 2023, Eric Helms and his colleagues compared trained people eating at maintenance, at a small surplus and at a bigger surplus. It was a small study, and the guide holds it loosely, but the people who gained weight faster mostly gained thicker skinfolds: more fat, not clearly more muscle. The guide's target for a lean gain is a little more food than you need, not a lot more, around a quarter to half a percent of body weight per week. And one rule keeps it honest: if your waist is climbing faster than your strength, you pull back.
Training in the off season: earn the food
The most important part of the off season is not on the plate. If you are going to take in all those calories, Shawn's rule is that you had better be working hard in the gym, because calories do not automatically turn into muscle. You have to earn that muscle. That means putting weight on the bar, pushing a set further than your mind has taken you before, and taking weight off at the end of a set for a drop set. Train like that and the body craves the food. Food without the signal from training has nowhere to go except your waistline.
The off season is also where the training habits for the next prep are set. Whatever rep range works for you in the off season is the rep range you keep during the cut, according to The Cut Protocol. What changes later is volume: a body that recovered from twenty sets per body part in the off season cannot recover from twenty sets per body part deep into a cut.
And cardio does not disappear. Shawn did cardio year round, at least four times a week, forty to forty five minutes at a time, off season included. It kept his metabolism moving and his appetite up, and in all his years he never found that amount to cost him muscle.
Leaving the off season on purpose
The guide is blunt about where most lifters go wrong, and it is not the food. They do not know what season they are in. They cut Monday through Thursday, eat like it is the off season Friday through Sunday, and wonder why nothing changes. The rule is simple: pick your season, run it long enough to work, then switch on purpose, not on emotion.
When the off season ends, the next phase is a gradual tightening of the same food, not a new diet: the extras come off first, then the starchy carbohydrates come down a little at a time. The full cut is the subject of The Cut Protocol, the final seven days have their own guide in peak week in bodybuilding, and the weeks after a show, where the next off season begins, are covered in the post-show rebound.
What this article does not cover
This article covers what the off season is for and how to run it. It does not give a meal plan, calorie targets or a training program, and it does not cover the cut itself or peak week. Shawn's wider approach to eating across both seasons is in the Shawn Ray diet.
Where to go deeper
The Bodybuilding Nutrition Blueprint · Audiobook
Shawn Ray's nutrition system in audiobook form, with a full chapter on the off season and contest prep as one foundation under two levels of control, and chapters on the meal clock, the kitchen, calories and macros, and the years past thirty-five. Professional narration, with a recorded introduction on the product page. Instant access after checkout, delivered as one full MP3 plus chapters in ZIP. The download link is emailed immediately, with lifetime access so you can re-download whenever you need it.
The Cut Protocol · Audiobook
The season that follows: how to run a cut that protects the muscle the off season built, from setting up the deficit to the weeks after the show. Instant access after checkout, delivered as one full MP3 plus chapters in ZIP.
More guides in this series are collected on the BuildWithPros Education page.
Frequently asked questions about the off season in bodybuilding
What is off season in bodybuilding?
It is the building season between contest preps, when the goal is to add muscle rather than reveal it. It means more food than you burn, on the same foundation as prep, with training hard enough to turn that food into muscle rather than fat.
How long is bodybuilding off season?
There is no fixed length in the guide. The rule is to run the season long enough to work and to end it on purpose rather than on emotion.
Do bodybuilders eat junk food in the off season?
The ones who build well do not. More calories does not mean hamburgers, fries and pizza. Shawn kept the same foods all year and changed only the amounts, because fat added in the off season is fat that has to come off in the next prep.
How much weight should an off season bodybuilder gain?
The guide's target for a lean gain is around a quarter to half a percent of body weight per week. In a 2023 study by Eric Helms and colleagues, trained people who gained faster mostly gained fat rather than clearly more muscle. If your waist climbs faster than your strength, pull the food back.
Do bodybuilders do cardio in the off season?
Shawn did, year round: at least four times a week, forty to forty five minutes at a time. It kept his metabolism moving and his appetite up, and he never found that amount to cost him muscle.
About the source
This article is published by BuildWithPros and draws on The Bodybuilding Nutrition Blueprint, The Cut Protocol and Shawn Ray on Competing from the BuildWithPros catalog. The off season chapter of The Bodybuilding Nutrition Blueprint is the source of the method, the research and the examples above. The experience behind them is that of IFBB Hall of Famer Shawn Ray: 13-time Mr. Olympia competitor with 12 consecutive top-five finishes from 1990 to 2001, Mr. Olympia runner-up in 1994 and 1996, and 1991 Arnold Classic champion, across a career spanning nearly two decades. He remains active in the sport as master of ceremonies for IFBB and NPC events, as a bodybuilding contest promoter and host of the Shawn Ray Pro Am Hawaiian Classic, the annual NPC and IFBB Pro League sanctioned championship in Honolulu, and as a consultant to the Mr. Olympia. It follows the standard applied across the catalog: every method explained, nothing left to guesswork.
Educational content only, not medical or nutritional advice.
This article is published by BuildWithPros for general educational and informational purposes. It is not medical or nutritional advice, it is not a substitute for care from a qualified physician or registered dietitian, and it is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition. Individual results vary.
Speak to a qualified physician before changing your diet or training if you live with a medical condition, including diabetes, kidney disease or a heart condition.