Muscle Ventures Podcasts

Nancy Arnold will be competing in her second bodybuilding competition, a natural drug-free event, on April 29, 2006. Her first competition was a novice event in Spring, 2004. In that competition, she placed first in her weight class and second overall. On this second attempt, she has been training since August 2005 to "raise it up a notch", and she has already decided once to delay her compete date by two weeks so she can better prepare.

After some discussion, we decided to capture what she is going through in a series of video podcasts. You can watch the first by clicking on Nancy's picture or this link. These podcasts will also include others involved in the competition preparation such as her coach, Mary Reiter. Many bodybuilding sites cover pro male bodybuilders who provide insight into pro level techniques. Few really cover amateur bodybuilding at the nitty gritty level, and fewer still cover female bodybuilders. Our hope is that this series will shed light on the difficulties and triumphs of competing as a female at the amateur level.

Additional Links

• Contest Prep Journals at Bodybuilding.com.
• Tom Venuto's natural bodybuilding blog.
• Wikipedia provides an informative, though perhaps overly intellectual, treatment of bodybuilding.

Mary Reiter has been Nancy Arnold's coach for close to 4 years. Two years ago, Nancy entered her first bodybuilding competition with Mary's help. I have been working with Mary for three years, and she started trying to get Nancy and me to partner almost 18 months ago. To say the least, Mary has been a central force in both our workout lives. Nancy and she have a particularly close bond.

Mary has played a central role in both of Nancy's competitions, and Mary has used her past personal experiences to inform how she guides Nancy. It seems only fitting then to explore how Mary herself got into bodybuilding. 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 watch the 20 MB Quicktime video by clicking on Mary's picture or this link.

We only cover the very beginning of Mary's bodybuilding experience in this discussion. In our next discussion with Mary, we will talk about how she transitioned from Karen, her first coach and a female, to Frank, a male. It turns out that female bodybuilders frequently make the transition to male coaches and training partners. It only makes sense since they quickly outstrip women who do not weight train.

Additional Links

• Female bodybuilding has been mired in controversy since its inception.
• Stumptuous is recommended as a prime source for bodybuilding women by Mich of Maspik Teruzim.
• A repository of articles on female bodybuilding.

This third conversation in our series took place with Nancy on April 3, 2006, twenty-six days before her competition date. Here, I ask her about what recovery after workouts is like as she diets to lose as much subcutaneous body fat as possible before the competition. As anybody who lifts weights intensively knows, recovery is very dependent on nutrition. This dependency only becomes more pronounced as lifting intensity increases and caloric intake decreases. It is one of the central challenges of competing in bodybuilding, a sort of separator for those who can and cannot do it. Nancy discusses her strategies for recovering on low calories, including gutamine supplementation and massage.

To download the video click here.

Additional Links

• Bodybuilding.com provides an informative article on the use of massage to aid recovery. Touted benefits are improved circulation and removal of toxins from the muscle.
• This article explains why carb depletion, a key part of Nancy's current training regimen, slows recovery.
• This article discusses protein supplementation tips to aid recovery when athletes are at a negative energy balance (taking in fewer calories than they expend).

Bodybuilders typically diet for three to five months before their competitions with the goal of gradually reducing body fat while retaining muscle. In this podcast, Nancy Arnold and I discuss the role of her diet guru, Kevin Kelsey. Nancy initially worked with Kevin in her first bodybuilding competition two years ago. In her current competition, Kevin is guiding her through a four month diet designed to lose over twenty lbs.

The role of dieting in bodybuilding is to reduce the level of subcutaneous fat, so that the muscles will show through. Typically, bodybuilders attempt to achieve at or near essential body fat levels for their gender, i.e., the minimum levels required to maintain healthy bodily function.

For men, essential body fat is 3% and for women 12%. The extra 9% in women supports reproduction and associated hormonal systems. Deviating below essential body fat for either sex can damage health. Many women bodybuilders attempt to briefly go below the 12% essential body fat figure to somewhere around 10% for their shows, putting them them in the range of athletic men.

Background Links

• Tom Venuto provides a four month road map of his diet goals as he prepares for bodybuilding competitions.
• Andrew Weil answers a female athlete's question regarding minimum body fat levels for women as well as warning signs of when body fat may become too low.
• Sports Coach provides comparative statistics for body fat levels in male and female athletes.

In this clip, which you can access by clicking Nancy's picture, we discuss the different posing requirements on the day of the competition scheduled three weeks from the day of filming. At the female amateur level where Nancy competes, there are seven mandatory poses:

• Front double biceps
• Rear double biceps
• Front lat spread
• Rear lat spread
• Side triceps
• Side chest
• Front abdominal and thigh

She will perform these poses at the behest of the judges during the day portion of the competition which begins at 10 AM. In the evening she will perform free form posing. As the name implies, free form posing gives contestants the chance to exercise their creativity. It must include some mandatory elements as well as elements the contestant chooses. In her free form routine, Nancy has decided to include the front double biceps, the rear lat spread, and perhaps the rear double biceps, in my opinion, one of her best poses. Competitions are won and lost in the posing rounds.

Additional links

• David Robson provides a good overview of the mandatory poses at the pro level with pictures.
• Mark Tilden provide brief video guides to the poses.

In this conversation, Nancy Arnold and I discuss the intense workout regimen we have been undertaking as a final stage in her contest preparation. As will become even clearer in later podcasts, Nancy has struggled with weight loss in this competition. The current workout regimen was designed in part to break the plateau. To watch, you can click on Nancy's picture to download the 28 MB Quicktime file.

However, truth be told, the workout is clearly doing more than removing fat. It is hard for both of us to recover from this workout regimen, and I am doing more than double Nancy's calories. I suspect we are overtraining, not an uncommon occurrence in the final phases of bodybuilding contest preparation.

The danger of overtraining is that it removes muscle and generally drains you for the day of competition.

Additional Links

• Tom Venuto discusses a dressing down he received from a fellow bodybuilder for overtraining nine days out from a 2005 competition.
• Tom Venuto discusses the need to resist overtraining during the final phases of competition preparation.
• Wikipedia provides an overview of overtraining symptoms and several possible causes. Nancy and I currently fit this profile.
• The Physician and Sports Medicine provides an in-depth treatment on overtraining.

Nancy and I discuss carb depletion in the final week of show preparation. To watch, you can click on Nancy's picture to download the 34 MB Quicktime file. Carb depletion is one of those aspects of preparing for bodybuilding shows that has nothing to do with weight lifting or any other athletic endeavor. Rather it is all about manipulating your body chemistry to achieve a particular look, a constant theme in bodybuilding.

As Nancy, and later her diet consultant Kevin Kelsey, will explain, carb depletion works as follows. First, the competitor starts to reduce carbs the Sunday before a Saturday show. The idea is to reduce glycogen stores both between muscle and skin and then within the muscle. By the Wednesday before the show, the competitor is eating perhaps 25 grams of carbohydrates, and all glycogen stores are depleted. Thursday and Friday, the competitor begins to increase carbs. These carbs are added first to the muscle's glycogen stores, pumping the muscle up but not the space between muscle and skin.

At the same time, water binds to the glycogen increasing the size even more. However, water also can cause puffiness between the muscle and skin. So, the competitor reduces water consumption as he or she is increasing carbs.

Additional Links

• Carb depletion is not universally lauded as an approach, and it is generally recognized that it is differentially effective for different people.
• Tom Venuto provides a detailed description of his carb depletion strategy for a 2005 competition.
• Dehydration is flat out dangerous.

This past Thursday, I had a conversation with Kevin Kelsey, Nancy's diet guru and bodybuilding contest consultant. For ease of exposition, I am breaking the conversation into four separate episodes based on topic. In this first episode which you can watch by clicking on Kevin's picture to download the 10 MB Quicktime file, we discuss Kevin's background and the general differences he finds in training women vs. men for bodybuilding competitions.

As I mentioned in the notes to my discussion with Nancy's coach Mary Reiter, it is not odd for women in bodybuilding to seek male trainers and consultants. Women are also rare in bodybuilding. Of the 40 people Kevin has trained in the past 10 years, only 10 have been women. Kevin himself has been in bodybuilding for 31 years; he started as a teen. He competed for 12 years and has been retired for 8. He is considering re-entering competition at the masters level.

After discussing his general strategy for training women, Kevin and I turned toward the specifics of training Nancy. To watch this conversation, click on Kevin's picture to download the 24 MB Quicktime file. Nancy has trained with Kevin for two competitions. In both cases, she has come to him 4 or 5 months before the show. He provides an evaluation of where she is and what she needs to do to get ready.

Kevin shares training duties with Mary. He finds it works better that way as women feel more comfortable with other women for some things.

In this 26 MB Quicktime file that you can download by clicking on Kevin's picture, Kevin and I go over carb depletion, a topic I had covered with Nancy earlier in the week.

Kevin goes into much more detail than Nancy on the type of foods he believes a person should eat to obtain complex carbohydrates, a bodybuilding staple. He also believes people should stay on pretty much the same type of carbohydrates throughout their training to keep the body from overreacting to a sudden change, particularly in the carb deplete/ carb loading cycle. We finish the conversation with a discussion of some of the pitfalls he has seen other bodybuilders face when they have consumed too many simple carbs in the loading phase.

In this 18 MB Quicktime Movie you can download by clicking Kevin's picture, we discuss the different challenges Nancy has faced in her two competitions, the one in 2004 and the current one schedule for April 29. The thing he remarks the most is her difficulty losing weight this time. About the time I went to Prague, in early March, Nancy spent three weeks on a plateau where she lost no weight in spite of consuming on the order of 1500 calories per day. While plateaus like this are not uncommon in bodybuilding, they are extremely frustrating for all concerned.

Part of how Nancy broke this plateau was to go on the extreme training regimen that we discussed in an earlier podcast and cut calories even more. Kevin remarks that one of the reasons Nancy may be having a harder time losing weight for this competition is that she has gained muscle, thereby changing her body. He estimates she has gained between five and ten lbs. of muscle.

This podcast ends the current four part series with Kevin.

Additional Links

• Tom Venuto discusses his overall nutrition strategy for show preparation. It is not unusual for a technique that worked preparing for one show not to work for another.

In this 33 MB Quicktime file which you can obtain by clicking on Nancy's picture, we discuss three changes in personal grooming she is undertaking in preparation for her upcoming contest. These include hair removal, final tanning, and body glue to keep her show costume in place.

Personally, I think of these as three small, final mortifications all bodybuilders go through as they attempt to achieve a pinnacle of perfection for the day of the show. And, as Kevin Kelsey has noted previously in this blog, it really is just day of the show. It all disappears pretty quickly afterward.

Based on my conversation with Nancy, it works like this. Bodybuilders darken their skin to enhance their apparent muscular definition. Before the show, they tan. They day of the show, they deepen their tan with pro-tan and oil to keep their skin moisturized. They remove their body hair, both to keep the muscle from being obscured by thick hair and to keep from looking an unsightly mess mixed with all of the skin treatments. The body glue, bikini bite, makes sure the extremely brief garments they wear stay in place.

Additional Links

• Needless to say, bodybuilding.com has a whole series of articles on hair removal. Some long-term bodybuilders opt for permanent laser removal of all their body hair.
• Pro-tan is a commercial product and costs almost $2.50 an ounce.
• This article provides expert advice on tanning and using body paint to achieve the perfect color the day of the show. The painting process itself can take days, and as I have observed with Nancy, tanning can go on for months.
• Bikini Bite can be obtained for under $6 at flexyourmuscles.com.

Nancy and I had an interesting conversation regarding what had gone right and wrong in her show preparation to date. You can download the 33 MB Quicktime movie by clicking on Nancy's picture. As I've thought about the conversation, it has occurred to me that what we were really discussing was the mental difficulty of preparing for a bodybuilding competition.

In the conversation, we discuss a three week weight loss plateau Nancy went through about the time I was in Prague. It was extremely tough on her. We emailed every day and chatted on Google chat about a day before I came back. She would constantly cut calories and get no results. It took its toll. At one point, she told me that she hoped she would just get back to where she had been two years ago.

Fortunately, that time is past, and things are going much better for her. We're able to talk about it now. It would appear many bodybuilders go through similar mental anguish, so it seemed worth reporting.

Additional Links

• Ron Harris discusses a dialog with a novice bodybuilder and the crisis in confidence this individual was experiencing about a month out from the competition.

It's hard to believe, but we are one week from Nancy Arnold's competition on April 29. In this conversation, I talk with Nancy about her final game plan (download the 35 MB Quicktime video by clicking on Nancy's picture). Nancy has decided, in consultation with Kevin her diet consultant, to alter her carb depletion regimen by supplementing with Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCT). The theory behind MCTs is that they provide a more easily digested fat that can act as an energy source, raising the metabolic rate, and thus increasing the rate of glycogen reduction. Recall that the goal of carb depletion is to initially reduce glycogen before reloading it back into the muscles so that they look relatively larger.

The press on the effectiveness of MCTs is highly mixed. Even sellers of MCTs, such as bodybuilding.com, note that they may only be effective in certain cases, and even then provide scant evidnce. Other sources are less charitable, flatly stating that MCTs have no athletic benefits, although they may show other therapeutic benefits.

In the podcast, Nancy is in an upbeat mood, typical for a Wednesday during these last two months. Later, as we worked out, the owner of Outback Gym offered to sponsor her entry fees in the contest. We discuss her good fortune as the podcast closes. And, it is good fortune. Female bodybuilding is a dying sport. Most sponsorships are going to more “feminine” aesthetic sports such as figure competitions.

In this podcast, recorded April 23, Nancy and I discuss her first day of carb depletion. You can download the 22 MB Quicktime movie of the conversation by clicking on Nancy's picture.

At this stage, Nancy had completely substituted MCTs (Medium Chain Triglycerides) for carbohydrates per her previously announced plans. That meant she was only eating chicken and taking MCTs which come in the form of an oil. As we discuss, the idea was that the MCTs would help her burn just a little more fat and lose a little bit more water. One thing that comes across very clearly is Nancy's emerging singular focus on the competition.

Nancy was feeling well that day. Immediately after ingestion, the MCTs provided her a lift that slowly faded.

By the time we recorded this podcast, she had already worked out 2 hours and 15 minutes. We had at least an hour more to go.

Additional Links

• We previously discussed Nancy's plans to use MCTs in this podcast.
• This podcast discusses the growing role of the mental game during the final stages of competition.

In this podcast recorded April 24, Nancy and I discuss her decision to drop MCTs shortly after recording a podcast describing her experience with them. She was going back to a carb depletion diet "with food". You can download the 17.5 MB Quicktime movie by clicking on Nancy's picture.

Stomach difficulties are a commonly cited side effect of MCTs. Perhaps just as significantly, Nancy had had a sour stomach since the Friday before and had had trouble consuming her 1200 calorie allowance both days prior. Further, right before the stomach problems that precipitated her decision to drop MCTs, she had been working out for 2 hours and 15 minutes, and we were in the process of doing another hour plus of weight training. In other words, her body was under significant, general stress, and it is hard to know to what extent her difficulties were due to MCTs.

Nancy and I had this conversation on April 26, the day of her last workout before her April 29 competition. You can download the 27.5 MB Quicktime movie by clicking on Nancy's image. Nancy was doing 20 grams of carbs that day and was scheduled to go see Kevin immediately after our workout. If she was sufficiently depleted, he was going to put her on carb loading that night. We both agreed she was probably sufficiently depleted.

A large part of this conversation focuses on her experience with spray-on tanning. At the time we spoke, she had gone through two sessions and was scheduled to go through two more. Tanning experts recommend spray-on tanning as a way of receiving a final even coat before bodybuilding competitions.

As Nancy humorously describes her experience, spray-on tanning can be unpleasant. She stands in a booth, and they mist one side for a few seconds. Then she turns around, and they mist the other side. The mist is cold. She then removes the excess.

A theme that emerges during the conversation is the extent to which aesthetics are important in bodybuilding. The whole last week of her competition prep has been focused almost exclusively on aesthetic self-mortification.

Nancy and I met April 28, the day before her contest, to videotape the poses that made up her required routine. We made some excellent pictures and short videos. You'll be seeing them over in the video analysis section of our site as we kick that back off in the next few weeks.

After the video session, we talked about her final contest prep for four minutes. You can view the 9 MB Quicktime movie of the conversation by clicking on Nancy's picture.

Nancy was feeling a little uptight about the rate at which her muscular vascularity was returning. The week before, it had been possible to see veins in her shoulders when she worked those muscles. After the carb deplete, that was not coming back fast enough for her comfort with under 24 hours before the show. Carb deplete is supposed to first diminish vascularity before carb load enhances it.

The major part of the conversation, however, was spent discussing her plans to cut water to get her muscle to better show through. I had previously discussed this aspect of her training with her consultant Kevin Kelsey. The idea is to get the skin to adhere to the muscle as much as possible by removing glycogen (carb depletion) and water.

On Tuesday before the show, she cut from her standard gallon of water per day to three-quarters gallon and started taking diuretics. By the time we spoke at 3 PM on Friday, she had quit drinking water at noon and was not planning to drink any serious quantity of water until after her show at approximately 9 PM the next day.

Of course, under this regimen, dehydration is a real danger with serious consequences. So, I asked Nancy how she was going to ensure safety. You can hear her answer by watching the video.

post scriptum: I am posting this after Nancy's competition which occurred yesterday. Nancy won the heavy weight open title, competed in a pose down for the overall open title (did not win), and placed in the master's competition. Afterwards, she drank lots of water, and ate Pizza with ham and bacon, two very fatty meats. She was very happy, and that was good to see after all she had been through. We will likely do a post-mortem podcast. I have posted photos of the after show festivities here.

Additional Links

• Many bodybuilders follow water removal (dehydration) regimens. This one uses Preparation H to remove subcutaneous water.
• The discussion boards at anabolic minds provide a good list of the signs of dehydration through its various stages.
• Exrx summarizes scientific studies on bodybuilders' nutritional practices. Many reported use of diuretics, and all followed a dehydration regimen.
• Tom Venuto follows a rather different water strategy his last three days. While he cuts water severely on the last day, he is much more generous with water before. His goal is to get water out from under the skin and into the muscle. One of his major concerns is that too much water depletion will deflate the muscle which is, after all, 70% water.