Michigan Muscle Boy

The Culture of Female Bodybuilding

Female bodybuilders often choose male coaches.  In part, this is because male coaches are much more abundant.  In part, it is because the mass building required for bodybuilding is more naturally a male domain.

We've just posted the third in our podcast series on Mary Reiter's journey into bodybuiding.  We cover how she transitioned from Frank to Kevin, her second and last male coach.  In addition to the podcast, we have links to articles that discuss the differences in weight training for men and women.

Bodybuilding Periodization and Powerlifting

Nancy and I just posted a podcast that we recorded as we were starting Week 2 of our Bodybuilding Periodization program.  Here's the interesting thing.  Periodization does not seem much practiced in bodybuilding, but powerlifting, particularly as practiced at the Westside Gym seems to have embraced it hook, line, and sinker.  Eric Cressey even recommends periodizing the diet (which oddly makes sense when I think about how I suddenly lost weight after my eating extravaganza in Prague this past Spring).

It's interesting to me how performance driven sports like powerlifting have been quicker to adopt regimens like periodization.  I suspect this is because the end goal is much more easily observed.  Each month, you can either lift more or you can't.  Bodybuilding is a different animal.  You train for months for a contest, and then a judge tells you whether you physique meets the criteria or not.

There are things to recommend bodybuilding:  the focus on both strength and body fat in the best circumstances can translate into a healthy focus on leanness and conditioning, something powerlifting frequently lacks.  But, powerlifters definitely have their heads screwed on straight when it comes to doing things that are measurable.  It's easier to apply science.  After all, the basis of science is measurement.

Mary Reiter Returns to Talk About Her Start in Bodybuilding

Over on Muscle Ventures, Mary Reiter continues her story of how she got started bodybuilding.  In this episode, she explains how she got started with her first male trainer, Frank Nuñez.  In the next week, we will air how she got started with Kevin Kelsey, and her current plans to leg press 900 lbs. for 10 reps.

Video from Nancy Arnold's Bodybuilding Show

We're a little over a month after Nancy's show, and it seemed like we ought to post some of our materials.  So, earlier this week, I posted a compilation of all of Nancy's appearances show day.  If you've never seen a show, it's really quite something else. 

It's also very demanding on competitors as Nancy and I discussed during our series on her preparations leading up to the competition.

A little later this week, I'm going to close out the series on Nancy's show with a podcast showing the evolution of Nancy's posing routines as she got ripped in the last two weeks before the show.

Bodybuilding Poses as Isometric Exercise

Over at Muscle Ventures, Nancy Arnold presents an interesting analysis of bodybuilding poses as isometric exercise.  The thing you might not realize is that, although the poses are named for body parts they showcase, they are actually full body displays.  The athlete has to hold his or her body fully tensed during the time of the pose.

As I've mentioned before, the thing I find interesting about bodybuilding is the combination of components and discipline.  The issue I see with bodybuilding is the extremes people go to to achieve a certain look.  The emphasis on looks just goes too far.

Nancy gives a nice insight to the discipline side.

A note on female bodybuilding

Nancy and I have  recorded a podcast on her observations about male vs. female bodybuilding and another about why she is doing this at all.  We'll be posting this material over the next week at our podcast site.  Some of these conversations were in direct response to a comment Scott Bird had left on the podcast blog about what Nancy might think the future of female bodybuilding was in light of some recent trends.

Specifically, it is hard to get sponsorship as a female bodybuilder, although Nancy has done OK for limited amounts.  Further, the number of female competitors is quite small relative to men, and both sides of the sport are starting to be overshadowed by the female shape competition.

A simple synopsis of shape is that it consists of grown women adopting the pose of Barbie Dolls and executing quarter turns at the judges' cue.  It's somewhat remarkable that this sport has taken off at all.  It's the most boring thing to watch, ever.  Any version of bodybuilding is infinitely more interesting to watch.  The competitors actually do something in that sport.

However, an insight that came to me while I was at Nancy's show was that promoters are doing these shows as much for what the competitors personally bring to the table as for an exernal audience.  Competitors had to pay $50 per event with many of them competing in multiple events.  The shape competition easily had 30 competitors with each in an average of 2 events, dwarfing male and female bodybuilding.  That's $3K on shape alone.  For the evening show, there were probably two hundred audience seats that went for $30 dollars and another 150 at $20.  That's $9000 total.  So, competitor receipts from shape alone were about 1/3 the audience total.

Now, consider that most audience members were at this competition only because they knew someone there.  You realize that shape is taking over bodybuilding because it generates the most competitors who bring the most friends and family to watch them.  Shape doesn't have to have external appeal.

People claim female bodybuilding is dying because it does not have external appeal.  At the local level, I suspect it is dying because there are not enough competitors bringing enough friends and family to the shows.  Basically, there's no external appeal for any of it at the local level.

So, the question has to be why there are not more female bodybuilder competitors.  I suspect, as I mention to Nancy in one of our upcoming podcasts, it's because bodybuilding is based on a male ideal.  Most women don't want to try to attain that ideal, and large parts of it are unattainable anyway because men and women have different morphs no matter how much they chemically alter themselves. 

The women's sport has to find its own ideal.  It will be interesting to see if women like Nancy can help them find it.

Nancy Wins Open Heavy Weight Bodybuilding Title

I've posted some photos on Nancy's site of the celebration dinner after she won the women's open heavy weight title at her bodybuilding competition in Flint, MI yesterday.  Flint is an hour north of Ann Arbor.  Nancy's site has more details on her placements and immediate future plans.

As she reveals over on our podcast site, she was feeling a little tense the day before, and so was I.  It was good to do it and have her succeed.  I can't imagine what it would be like to go through that much preparation and get nothing.  I was so happy for her.

Scott Bird and I have been having some discussion regarding the future of female bodybuilding.  My wife and I both enjoyed the show (her first time at one of those), but there were some issues.  I'll have more to say on those in a future post here.

The Big Girl Rising

Click the picture at left to go see an update I put on The Big Girl's site concerning her upcoming competition.  It's this Saturday in Flint, MI, about an hour from here.  As you can see in the larger photo available on her site, she's peaking for her competition.  She's expecting a good show but has hit a few obstacles as I describe on her site.

What does a bodybuilder do between competitions?

Well, The Big Girl's competition is exactly one week away.  We've been discussing it quite a bit over at our proto-site, Mucle Ventures Podcasts.  The site is not just media; each podcast has a blog post describing what's in it and provides links to relevant outside resources.

Needless to say, these last nine months training side-by-side for this thing have been quite a ride.  In the fall, we started with mass building.  That phase lasted from August through January.  Nancy's training consultant Kevin recently estimated that she must have gained 8 lbs. of muscle mass during this period based on how she looks now.  That's great gains for a woman.  Next, from January through mid-March, we entered an intermediate phase between mass building and sculpting.  In mid-March, we came into this pure sculpting phase, which in many ways is just an act of brutality perpretrated against your body to make it lose fat.

I have to say, I'll miss this.  It's very exciting, and it's been great developing my training partnership with Nancy.  When you're training partners with someone, you really get to know them.  It's probably that way in any intense project that completes successfully.

What do we do next?  I'm not sure.  We seem destined to train together, and we have the Muscle Ventures activities.

Carb Depletion and Carb Loading

So Nancy is entering the final stages of her bodybuilding preparations with less than two weeks to go till her show date on April 29, 2006.  We've had interesting discussions of one aspect of this final preparation, carb depletion and carb loading, over at our podcast site, Muscle Ventures Podcasts. 

In carb depletion, the athlete dramatically lowers his or her carb intake over three days.  This draws the glycogen out of first the layer between muscle and skin and then the muscle.  At the end of three days, there is no more glycogen to deplete.  At that stage, the athlete then carb loads.  Since the body first reloads the muscle, this stage should make the muscle look relatively larger than it did before.  Needless to say, there are many subtleties which we discuss in the following two podcasts.

	In this discussion, recorded last Wednesday, Nancy gives us the low down on how carb depletion works and how she expects it to go for her upcoming show.  The show notes for this conversation give links to various articles on other bodybuilders' experiences with carb depletion.  We also discuss her new reduction to 1100 calories, potentially the last drop she will face before show time.
	In this discussion, Nancy's diet guru, Kevin Kelsey gives his perspective on carb depletion, noting some of the pitfalls he has seen people go through in his 31 years of bodybuilding experience.