My Turn on the Wheel

I hadn't done Wheel Wednesday with the barbell (50 lbs), so I decided to jump in while my guy client was taking a break.  It wasn't so bad, actually.  I thought it would be wicked hard because my client is so strong on his lower body by comparison, but I think my endurance and core strength made up for it.

Wheel Wednesdays (aka. Our Tire-Dragging Workout)

I have a crazy 40 year-old guy client (just about as crazy as I am) who helps me come up with harder, more loco tricks to do with weights and body movements to build his muscle and lean out.  Mondays are upper body, Tuesdays are legs, Wednesdays we use our tire and chains and barbell, Thursdays are off and Fridays are chest and back.  Saturday and/or Sunday I expect him to swim or cycle.

Here are some pictures of what we do with our tire -- I call it "our tire" because he helped me pick it up (in the rain) and gave me the ideas for the chains, hooks and barbell:

Trying Something New

A few of the trainers at Crunch were standing around chit-chatting near the equipment that I wanted to use, and one of them accused me of showing off.  I don't need to show off at my gym.  I'm not looking for attention ... unless it's from a prospective client who might be interested in training with a woman who legitimately exercises to stay in shape.

I was just trying something new, having fun with the equipment on my "bonus workout day", when all of a sudden a female trainer friend came up and asked if she could take my picture.  It was kinda hard to pose for these pictures, but I think they came out quite nicely.  Super fun!

Back to Business

I'm back to training heavy again and even learning some new tricks of the trade.  After 4 1/2 months of routine oral surgeries and dental appointments, I'm finally pain-free and have my strength back.  Today, I was super pumped after my workout, and I even had trouble carrying my little one out of the gym.  It was a good feeling to know that I was back to the good old days of training, but 2 hours later it was time for Advil.

I thought I'd show off my striations because they were gone for a while, but they've come back in just three weeks of eating right, training right and stretching appropriately.  I think muscle memory is so cool.  Muscle memory is a physiological blueprint for rebuilding muscles.   Muscle memory stems from your body's learning not just how to perform a task, but also how to break down muscle tissue and then repair and rebuild it. That physiological "knowledge", stored in the neuronal pathways between brain, spinal column and muscles, lets you come back from injury, surgery and even pregnancy faster, easier, and often better than before.

A Winner, Regardless of the Competition

I watched with pride and joy as one of my trainees stepped on stage to compete in her first muscle contest.  She has undergone 3 months of rigorous training and dieting in order to drop body fat, gain muscle and take pride in her athletic accomplishment.  The picture below shows her 3-month transformation.  She knows she still has a bit of toning to do in order to be competitive with other fitness models, but she's motivated and excited about taking it to the next level.

Look at the definition in her quads, abs, waistline, hips, arms, calves!  She's around 20% body fat currently.  For her height and age, it should be more like 14-15% to be in the "athlete" category, by medical standards.  Keeping up with her rigorous program and diet, she should lose about 1% body fat per month/month-and-a-half.  That will make her nice and lean and cut for her next competition in October.

Abject or Object?! Can a Female Bodybuilder be Feminine?

I came across this excerpt from a journal article published in 1991: From Abject to Object: Women's Bodybuilding By: Marcia Ian.  Read it and see if you agree, in the context of today's woman.  I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment that women's bodybuilding marginalizes women's femininity.  I'm not an object, and it does not seem abject, or vulgar, as described below.

When I'm lifting heavy with my straps or belt, building muscles, competing for "bragging rights" about my muscles, I feel just as feminine as when I'm at an afternoon tea in a frilly dress with girlfriends from church.  I feel different in each setting, but that's part of the majesty of the female brain: we are adaptable self-preservers. 

When we are emotionally healthy, we feel comfortable expressing ourselves, regardless of the perception of others (unless it is a harmful form of self-expression).  We embrace our femininity to suit our surroundings without compromising who we are -- we aren't pandering, just enjoying different settings in different ways, according to our "style" and bent.

Why can't big biceps, traps and shoulders (as well as shapely glutes, quads and hamstrings) appeal to a woman's sense of self-worth and beauty without detracting from her femininity?  In 2014, most women I've interacted with in any context comment, "I'd kill for your arms (or glutes)".  Maybe I'm less bulky than some female bodybuilders, so I appear more fit than huge, but I'm still a bodybuilder.   AND I love wearing sparkles, heels and makeup when I'm in a muscle contest, the now-required uniform for women's bodybuilding competitors.

Popular Culture: From Abject to Object: Women's Bodybuilding

by: Marcia Ian

From: Postmodern Culture
Volume 1, Number 3, May 1991
| 10.1353/pmc.1991.0014

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Do muscles have gender, or are they, on the contrary, ungendered human meat? Other than the few muscles associated with their sexual organs, men and women have the same muscles. Does this make muscles neuter, or perhaps neutral? Is there some "difference" between the biceps of a male and those of a female other than, possibly, that of size? If a woman's biceps, or quadriceps, are bigger than a man's, are hers more masculine than his? In the eyes of most beholders, the more muscle a woman has, the more "masculine" she is. The same, of course, is true for men: the more muscle a man has, the more masculine he is too. Bodybuilding in a sense is a sport dedicated to wiping out "femininity," insofar as femininity has for centuries connoted softness, passivity, non-aggressivity, and physical weakness. Eradicating femininity just may be the purpose of both male and female bodybuilders. Even so, for men to wage war on femininity, whether their own or somebody else's, is nothing new. For women, however, it is. Insofar as women have for centuries obliged cultural expectations by em-bodying femininity as immanent, bodybuilding affords women the opportunity to embody instead a refusal of this embodiment, to cease somewhat to represent man's complementary (and complimentary) other.

At least this is how it seems to this author, who is: a forty-year old, divorced, atheistic Jewish mother of two teenaged girls; an assistant professor of British and American Literature at a the state univerity of New Jersey; a specialist in modernism, psychoanalysis and gender; and a dedicated "gym rat" who has trained hard and heavy without cease (knock on wood) for about eight years now and during graduate school even entered bodybuilding competitions. As such, I confess, I obviously have various axes to grind (pun intended) which intersect "around" the body as uniquely over-determined site of ambivalent psychosocial signification. From this point of view women's bodybuilding appears to be roughly equal parts gender vanguardism and exhibitionistic masochism; men's bodybuilding could in theory be the same, but I have seen no evidence that this is so. Male bodybuilders, on the contrary, seem mainly out to prove that they are conventionally masculine-- hyperbolically, FEROCIOUSLY so.

Furthermore, the sport of bodybuilding, as marketed and represented by those enterprises founded by Joe and Ben Weider, including magazines like Flex and Muscle and Fitness(published by "I, Brute Enterprises, Inc.") and contests like the Mr. and Ms. Olympia, as well as various less powerful rival organizations, reproduces ad nauseam all the cliches of masculinism from the barbarous to the sublime. This remains true despite the fact that in recent years the top female competitors have displayed increasing amounts of hard striated muscle. I had hoped to find in the gym a communal laboratory for experimental gender-bending, perhaps a haven for the gender-bent, or at the least a democratic republic biologically based on the universality of human musculature. This laboratory, this haven, this republic, however, remains a utopic and private space, a delusion in effect, because what goes on in the gym, as in bodybuilding competition, remains the violent re-inscription of gender binarism, of difference even where there is none. As Jane Gallop pointed out, in Western culture gender is no "true" binary or antithesis but rather an algorithm of one and zero. Bodybuilding expands the equivalence "male is to female as one is to zero" to include the specious antithesis of muscle and femininity.