Womens Bodybuilding Blog

If you haven’t prepared for a bodybuilding contest, than you’re going to have trouble with this. I know it seems sort of easy. You just need to get to a great looking body by the time you have the competition. But you really need to achieve that body down to basically a day before the competitions. Typically you’ll start 8-12 weeks before the competition to achieve this state, so you can tell how difficult this can be to achieve.

The first thing you obviously need is to know exactly what you’re aiming for as a body (goal). In this case you wouldn’t say ripped. You have to come up with numbers. If you want to get down to 11% body fat than that is what you have to aim for. You need that number to keep you on track.

Secondly you’re going to need to have a complete understanding of your body and how it will work at this time. If you have 8 weeks to reach your goal, than you have some work to do. In the world of bodybuilding, you can’t arrive early because the body fat percentage will be too low to remain for long periods of time. You can’t arrive late because you won’t be as cut as you should be. You have to reach your goal the day before your competition, so that requires a very good understanding of your body and how it will work during this time.

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I was just reading an interesting piece on bodybuilding that I thought was a nice read. Typically on this blog I write about tactics, methods and winning the head games of bodybuilding, but I think I really miss out on a lot of the current events. Things are happening in the bodybuilding world that are obviously important for you to hear and can be very motivational. That’s why I’m going to try to take current events and make some posts for you.

Well, I saw this article in the Citizen Times about a few 40-something year old female bodybuilders that are mothers, who are participating in natural bodybuilding. I love stories like this because it shows you that anyone can do this. You don’t need to be in your early 20s. You just have to have the mindset to want to do it and you can do it.

Lee Lance didn’t get flowers from her son this past Mother’s Day. Instead, she was presented with a gift of creatine.
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The muscle building supplement is just one of several that the 46-year-old personal trainer and mother of two must ingest daily as she prepares to take the stage in her sixth natural bodybuilding competition Saturday.

“It’s my midlife crisis,” she said of the sport.

Lance and her muscular body have brought home nine trophies through the years, but she is still without the one thing she wants: a first-place award. She hopes that the 14th annual Carolina Supernatural Bodybuilding and Figure Championships in Spartanburg is the place where she will win the elusive top prize.

“It’s like an Oscar,” Lance said. “I work very hard for that trophy … I’ll continue until I get a first-place trophy.”

Lance will be joined onstage at the Spartanburg competition by a dozen or more other Asheville residents, all of whom are hoping that months of dieting and weightlifting have produced a trophy-worthy body.

Debbie LeCroy, a full-time investigator at the public defender’s office, has been training for the past 25 weeks, getting up at 5 a.m. to work out, followed by weightlifting sessions during her lunch hour, after work and sometimes at 10:30 at night.

For the past 12 weeks, she has eaten a “clean” diet of plain chicken, fish, oatmeal, sweet potatoes and broccoli, all designed to get her body in its peak physical shape.

The 44-year-old mother of five, who is competing in her second Carolinas Supernatural, will slather herself in tanning lotion, sport a skimpy, rhinestone-laced bikini and flex her muscles on stage with the hope that her hard work has paid off.

“It takes dedication. There are a lot of times you want to quit,” LeCroy said. But she added it was all worth it when she walked out of last year’s competition and saw her 12-year-old son. “He said to me, ‘Mom, not many kids can say they watched their mom in a bodybuilding competition. I’m so proud of you.’”

“It’s a lot, with a family and a job,” she said, “but it feels so good when you finish.”
Natural bodybuilding

The Carolina Supernatural competition started in Asheville and moved to Spartanburg four years ago and is the only all-natural bodybuilding competition in South Carolina. All athletes are drug-tested to ensure that they are not using performance-enhancing drugs.

The natural aspect of the competition is something that organizer John Lankford takes seriously.

When one winner tested positive for steroids two years ago, Lankford not only stripped him of his title and banned him from further competitions, but he also sent a letter to every other competitor telling them who he was.

“Our feeling is that our body is a gift from God, and what you do is a gift back to him,” Lankford said. “It’s a lot of work, but you can do it the right way.”

Lankford expects as many as 70 men and women to compete in Saturday’s contest, including about 20 from the Asheville area. Competitors will vie for trophies, made by an Asheville sculptor, in 20 different divisions based on age, experience and weight.

Lankford said competitors range from personal trainers like Lance to dentists, lawyers and stay-at-home moms.

“These are just ordinary folks who have gone into the gym to get into better shape,” he said. “They saw results, and they are taking it further.”

The Spartanburg competition will be a first for Asheville dentist Amy Haldeman. She was inspired to enter the contest after seeing LeCroy train and compete last year.

“I had a whole different idea of what bodybuilding was, and I saw her and I said, ‘I wonder if I can do that,’” said the 37-year-old mother of three.

An avid runner, Haldeman said the workouts were not the hard part of her training. It was giving up donuts and pizza that she loves and she keeps in the house for her children.

“I didn’t know I had it in me,” she said. “It was, do I have the discipline and determination that it takes … I did it to see if I could do it. It’s not about winning; it’s about what you can do for yourself.”

Haldeman and some other local participants were helped along in their training by Anthony Tiller, owner of Underdog Fitness and Performance Training Studio in South Asheville. Tiller has competed in bodybuilding competitions for the past 15 years and will be up on stage alongside some of his clients this weekend.

He said it is refreshing to compete in a show like The Carolina Supernatural, which is unique in the world of bodybuilding because of its emphasis on being totally natural — and meaning it.

“The whole point I want people to get out of it is: It’s a challenge to take yourself to the limit,” Tiller said. “It is the ultimate sport of control but at the same time it is a life lesson: Do your best, and do it with integrity.”

First-time competitor Bobby Locklear said he had never heard of natural bodybuilding before he started training for the Carolinas Supernatural.

While he always lifted weights, he had never thought much about his diet, which has led him to have a much leaner, defined physique.

“There is a sense of pride, knowing that you are not doing anything against your body,” said the 46-year-old. “Young people tell me, you are an inspiration to us. When I get to be your age, I hope I look as good as that.”

I heard that the British Natural Bodybuilding Championship will start to use lie detectors in an attempt to test for any banned/illegal substance. The reason for this is that steriod use can be hidden from tests if you know what you’re doing. A lot of people would assume that when you test for steroids that you would just see if there is an elevated testosterone level in the body. I suppose that would be fine, but all humans are different and there is no universal number for what is normal and what isn’t. Some people are more naturally anabolic, which means that when they start lifting weights they produce extra testosterone automatically.

The way the tests really work is that they look for a byproduct of a specific substance. There is typically some sort of reaction that occurs, which can be measured and prove that a substance is being abused. The problem with this type of testing is that if you’re smart enough, you can mask the mask and you’ll come up fully clean.

This has been a particular problem (or at least a fear) by the British Natural Bodybuilding Championship. What they’re going to go do is give a lie detector to see if you can pass it when you’re asked questions about things like steroids.  This is supposed to help and I’m sure for the most part that it will be accurate, but there is a particular reason why polygraphs aren’t used in court rooms.

So what do you think of this kind of decision? I like it, but I always have that fear that I will fail it for some reason.

So I take it you’re looking to prepare for a female bodybuilding competition. Well, I certainly wish you luck and hope you’ve already been training very exclusively like this. When it comes to the competition, your goal changes from putting on a good amount of muscle without too much fat, to taking off as much fat as possible while maintaining muscle. The key to this whole process is definition and that comes by literally removing the fat off your body.

As you can see, the fat is trimmed completely off and it exposes the muscles. That’s what the judges are looking for. They want to see how much you can show as just muscle. That’s what it’s all about. You don’t actually have to put on a lot of muscle because when you’re that defined it makes you look like you have much more of it.

To actually to the female bodybuilding competition, you’re going to have time this all out. You can’t say at that low of a body fat percentage for a long period of time. It’s can be unhealthy if you’re like that for more than a few days. That’s why the timing is so important. You have to plan out two months in advance when you’ll reach that state and you have to make sure it lands perfectly for the competition.

Always plan it out. You have to do it because it’s the only way you’ll get it to work. I wish you the best of luck at your competition and hope you come back a winner.

Getting ready for female bodybuilding competitions is one of the hardest things to do. As a bodybuilder, you’re used to going at your own pace and seeing what happens, but when it comes to a competition, you have a schedule to meet to be in your best physical shape. This is something you have to time, which is tough for a lot of people. If you have a competition 8 weeks from today, than 8 weeks from now you have to just arrive at that perfect place. Ending up there early is detrimental to your body since it’s hard to remain in that low body fat state for too long. Coming up late, means you won’t impress the judges. I’m going to show you what you’re going to need to do.

You have to figure out your calorie maintenance on a typical day at your currency working out. A lot of people don’t know what it is, so you’re at a disadvantage. The reason you have to know this is because you can calculate how much you need to eat (exactly) to meet the weight you want. Roughly 3500 calories make up a pound. If your maintenance calorie amount is 1600 calories/day and you want to lose one pound a week, that means you that means you need to cut out 3500 calories from your total weekly diet. That’s roughly 500 calories less. You have to know these things to keep things working on a schedule.

Another important part has to do with the day before a competition. You’re going to have to do things a little different. You want to be able to drop the water out of your body, so that you become practically all muscle. There are various techniques for this, one of which is drinking distilled water.

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