Michigan Muscle Boy

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.

Photo Analysis of the Final Two Weeks of Contest Prep

Well, we've finally closed out our series on Nancy's bodybuilding contest, and I'd like to think it's with a bang.  We've put together an analsyis of how Nancy's body progressed in the last two weeks of contest prep.  This might have been even more interesting had we started it two months out, as that change was really dramatic.

Nonetheless, this podcast does a good job of charting Nancy's final progress and, I hope, puts the whole effort in an accessible context.

Podcast's Bane

Think of this as being like Isildur's bane from Lord of the Rings.  You think you can do just a little bit of it, but it becomes all consuming.

Chris D. has mentioned that he is not able to load Muscle Ventures Podcasts onto his iPod.  I'm investigating.  It should work, but I suspect the data rate is off.  This source may have some hints, but in production at least, I seem to be following the guidelines.  I may be forced to get a video iPod to test.

Video is a snakepit.

Lifting podcasts

I note a lot of interest out there in lifting podcasts.  Just the other day, Chris D. of Strength News listed a set of podcast sites and Blaine at Run to Win chimed in with one of his favorites.  Now, Nancy is chiming in about her and my plans for our next podcast series on our periodization program.

I've found out a couple of things from Nancy's and my experience at Muscle Ventures that I posted about on my other blog The Community Engine.  I'll summarize that rambling post here.  If you're going to do a video podcast, then publish it on your own blog to get visibility but also be sure to put it on a few services where people go to watch videos.  That means:  submit to iTunes, google video, and surprise, surprise youtube.  iTunes is getting to be the standard for podcasts.  Google video seems to get you search juice, and youtube seems to pull in a good group of viewers.  Both convert your video to flash format, not the best quality, but watchable. 

That's not the point with those; the point is to get viewers.  In a month, Nancy and I had over 5300 views on google video and most of those were not linked to on our own blog.  They came from Google by itself.  On that note, make sure you link back to your own site on all of these submissions to other parties, so people know where the source is.

Weight Lifting Periodization Training

The Big Girl and I have generated a new podcast on our upcoming periodization training program.  Our podcast notes contain a lot of links to relevant resources and some discussion of the details.  Suffice it to say here that I think the big benefit will be the addition of variety.  In particular, we will be adding stuff we have never done before, like various powerlifting speed moves. 

I suspect we'll turn this one into a series, maybe periodization training 2006.  We're doing short podcasts.  Folks we've talked to locally seem to have picked up on the story aspect of our series on the last month before Nancy's bodybuilding competition.  Food for thought.  Probably makes sense to turn this into a series.

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.

How Mary Reiter started bodybuilding

This post continues the video podcast series that Nancy and I started yesterday.  Here, I talk to Mary Reiter who has been Nancy's coach for close to 4 years.  In this conversation, Mary talks about her first steps into bodybuilding, a story I had never heard, and her motivations for starting, something I have heard about frequently.

You can go to the podcast page which contains additional links and discussion by clicking on Mary's picture.  You can access the large (20 MB) podcast directly here.

For our first podcast, Scott Bird remarked on the shakiness of the shooting.  We had noticed that also, and I took some steps to correct it here by steadying my hands on a table for this last podcast that was filmed Monday.  That worked partially.  A test of piStabilize, a plug-in for the iMovie software that we are using to produce these videos suggests that relatively inexpensive image stabilization software can fix the problem but only at the cost of some quality at the image periphery and a lot of processing time.  I have opted to obtain a $2.31 mini tripod from Amazon that sounds very versatile and should be here next week.  I think something like that is the real solution.

Video Podcast — Nancy Arnold on Bodybuilding Contest Prep

As many of you know, my training partner, Nancy Arnold (aka The Big Girl), will be competing in her second bodybuilding competition, a natural drug-free event, on April 29, 2006.  After some discussion, we decided to capture what she is going through in a series of video podcasts.  These podcasts will also include others involved in the competition preparation such as her coach, Mary Reiter.  The first is available by clicking the picture above or by going directly to the mp4 (Quicktime) file at this link.

Other bodybuilding contest journals and Tom Venuto's bodybuilding secrets site provide  insights into the training regimens of successful male bodybuilders.  We think our series adds to what you can find at these other sites because we delve into the less well covered daily training experience of a female amateur bodybuilder.

People who have been reading this blog for a while know that in late February and early March, Nancy and I started an exercise analysis series on our site, Muscle Ventures.  The podcast is there as a separate blog, but we will soon integrate the two in a coherent site.  We've been a bit delayed in our plans by extensive travel and Nancy's intensive contest prep. Although a labor of love, our Internet empire building efforts are a spare time activity.  We welcome your observations.