It’s A Female Thing

At least here in the West we women live in the most emancipated way ever; but there is a drawback: The phrase ‘Women can do the same things as men’ is often misunderstood as ‘Women should do things the same way as men’.

And there are weird contradictions: In the business world we are told that we should wear suits and use male strategies to get to the top - and we are buying into it, and in the gym we are told we should use flimsy weights and do a lot of balancing work, as opposed to men – and we are buying into it, too.

We should develop more self esteem and find our own ways of doing things. We should accept that men and women approach things differently and that this is a good thing, because it adds a different angle to an issue. We only will get the best out of life if girls and guys work together!

I am not a successful business woman, so I can’t speak for those, but I am pretty good in the gym and hence I feel obliged to set a few things straight:

• For the girls to consider getting the one or the other muscle themselves, and
• For my dear male readers to understand their female partners a bit better.

Why Muscles for Ladies?

I have been writing a lot already why muscles are a beneficial thing for women and here I only will give you the headlines, you can find the whole article on Incredible Ladies:

• Body and Mind Benefits
• Muscles Reduce Aches of All Sorts
• Muscles Reduce Osteoporosis
• Strong Muscles – Strong Mind

• Fashion and Beauty Benefits - Muscles Give Shape
• Lifestyle Benefits - Muscles Make Strong
• Nutrition Benefits – Muscles Increase Metabolic Rate
  

Where we are different

Testosterone
The one thing that governs all our performances in any sport is that we have less Testosterone than men. All of the below are statistical statements, as one always can find individuals where the reality is the other way round. In average however we are not:

• as intuitively aggressive in game sports as men, but we can beat the guys with determination, which actually is a more controlled way to achieve a goal.
• we are not as strong, in some sports we are almost able to compete on an endurance level, though.
• and with the ‘not as strong’ comes ‘our muscles are smaller and they don’t build up as easily’.

In regard to the latter: Can somebody please explain to me why women should train less, or any different from the guys, given the fact that they build muscles less easily? That is like telling an anorexic not to too eat too much in order to not get fat. Trainers in gyms are too keen to try giving women what they want, instead of giving them what they need. We actually have to train much HARDER in order to achieve similar results to men.

Oestrogen
Ahhh, see! That is the thing nobody is talking about, really. Oh well, on female beauty and health sites - sometimes - but not in the open and not in an environment where blokes are listening in. I am rather blunt in those things and addressed a few of the more harmless issues with one of the trainers in the gym. Sooo cute! One could tell he was interested, but he fell from one blush into the other, poor thing.

So guys, here is first hand female info for you to read in your den – no need to blush! It might however help you to understand your ladies a bit better.

The cycle
Everybody knows we have them and almost everybody knows that at times we become bitchy, and a lot of people think it’s just made up to get what we want.

Well, that all might be true in some cases... there however are more severe implications. Trouble is that hormone levels are a very individual thing, and hence it is hard to point the finger onto it and find a fix. What doctors are measuring are ranges, indicating normal or not normal. Within the normal range the effect on individual women can be devastatingly different. Same amounts of hormones can leave one completely unaffected while the other one is thrown into depression, which is barging into her life with a whole conglomerate of physical and psychological symptoms month after month. That’s why it is called a syndrome (accumulation of various symptoms):

PMS – Pre Menstrual Syndrome

I had times where I felt like two different people within those 4 weeks. The first two weeks are cheery and fine, during the second half a big cloud is following me wherever I go and even things I love doing are no real fun. And of course this has an impact on the quality of my training.

There is no one remedy, but there are things one can try, hoping that they will work. Here are my tips:

• Observe yourself! Knowing allows for work-arounds. I got so good in detecting changes in hormone levels that I now can almost put my finger on a certain hour of a day. My brain feels mushy, I am losing focus and the thoughts are floating rather randomly without ever finding a way into real life and effecting my actions, short term memory is non-existent and I am horribly clumsy. The drive for doing things is changing, the feeling for hunger and appetite becomes inseparable and I am getting greedy, and I am feeling physically weaker.

• Tell you closest people! Once you are starting to figure out what is happening give your closest environment a warning. In the meantime they are used to me lifting two fingers and grinning a ‘grrrrrr grin’. They firstly won’t be hard on you anymore and it is a relief to not be alone. And they can help shelter you against the outside world towards which one wouldn’t like to explain. For me it was just wonderful to have that pressure off my chest.
  
  
• Condition yourself! I so often found myself ranting in the kitchen about why I ALWAYS have to do things myself, NOTHING is done right,... and it was all about things which at other times would not have bothered me at all. The target usually was dear hubby, the person closest and easiest to reach, but the only person who actually could help to find relief. One is very much in danger to get into a vicious cycle. In my early years I actually shouted at him, later I was just ranting to myself, and now that I know, I take it as a signal and my mantra has become: ’Shut up Rika, it’s just the hormones, another X days and it’s over’. And it always is!
  
  
• Find workarounds! I have lists and notes everywhere during phase two. The important thing is to tidy those up during phase one otherwise it’s getting really messy.
  
  
• Don't start something new induring phase two, if you can help it. Especially not losing weight!
  
  
• Try a dairy (calcium) rich diet! The BBC series ‘The Truth about Food’ looked into a connection between Calcium and PMS, and for some of the test group it made significant changes. I am now taking Calcium+VitD supplement pills. Have a look at the video.

In the video they are frequently mentioning oily fish so ...

• Try Omega 3! During the same series the connection between Omega 3 and stress was investigated. Have a look at the video. And of course I have the pills in my cupboard, now. I never felt that layed back in my life ever before.
  

There are many more very interesting articles and videos and some of them are real eye-openers.

• Try Bodybuilding! An article in the German journal GEO (07/09) is depicting a newly discovered feedback mechanism between brain and muscles. So far it was thought that the brain gives a signal to the muscles via chemical transmitters and that then the addressed muscle moves. It now becomes apparent that on moving the muscle, certain chemicals are produced which go back to the brain and cause the initiation of all sorts of processes which influence every organ in the body. Scientists are now hoping that understanding those mechanisms will help to heal or at least stabilise conditions as severe as Alzheimer disease. This is research in very early stages, it however is established:
  
• that there is a feedback loop back from the muscles to the rest of the body which has a bigger impact than ever thought, and
• that endurance training doesn’t do it as much as resistance training

Even if one is not suffering from PMS, the changes in hormone levels are happening and do affect the body in more subtle or not so subtle ways.

Menstruation

Again it is a very individual thing. There is no point of fretting about why one girlfriend is a killjoy while the best mate’s girlfriend is as chirpy as a bird. Some women can hardly stand upright while others don’t have cramps at all and go straight into the good mood phase. And then there is the handling of those few days itself.

The props a women needs: Gym work – and basically every activity - becomes a nuisance whether one has cramps or not. It’s just awful to feel like wearing a nappy while moving about like a toddler. So press on towels are hardly an option. But not everybody is comfortable with using tampons.

I am pretty sure that especially in cultures where virginity is associated with an intact hymen, the use of a tampon is usually not an option. Although the rupture of the hymen can have many causes, and although usually the tampon should not do any harm if the size and technique is right – there nevertheless is a risk.

Women who have a bit of a lubrication problem and are on the dry side anyway will feel that tampons worsen the problem. The remedy there: Don’t remove it too early, and let it soak full. Works wonders!

And as for the guys: Accept the excuses your lady is having during those days and just be a bit patient. She might say that she can’t play tennis due to a twisted ankle and then shows up in heels for dinner. It’s not always easy to explain those things face to face, especially when the relationship is young. So we tend to make up all sorts of stuff that sounds less gooey. If you really like her and want to help, start counting weeks.

Whoops, someone is not watertight
This was such a taboo subject, even women only talk about it only to very good female friends. Only recently it is addressed more in the media, and it seems that only women who have a baby, or are really old are allowed to leak. They have a medical condition to offer (yes, age seems to be a medical condition these days), so they are excused. The rest of us will get told off by the GP for not taking care of our pelvis muscles and are basically accused of being slackers. Well and that is just not true.

I once got an instruction on testing how waterproof a person is: Drink a couple of glasses of water, wait for half and hour, stand in the bathtub with legs spread and cough as hard as you can!

Duh... I would not have stood that test in my early teens and I was very sportive back then, able to master all sorts of skipping games – not anymore.

Ladies: Don’t let anyone blame you. Sh... happens!

Guys and trainers: Be aware of the problem and help your lady/client to work around it. We cannot trampoline, we cannot skip, and lunges or rattle plate machines may pose a threat to our structural stability.

Again: The second half!

There is one thing, though: Remember that I mentioned before that I am feeling weaker during the second half? I found that not just the muscles involved in holding water, but any muscle tone is less intense during that period of time. So this problem DOES have to do with the darn hormone levels.

On the other hand it IS true that training the pelvis muscles can help to a degree. So knowing your cycle opens opportunities to find a remedy. All those core muscle exercises on a swiss balll are well and nice, but the idea I am following up on at the moment is a bit more drastic.

The theory is that the exercise that is likely to cause leakage is likely to be able to train exactly those muscles as apparently it is putting a lot of strain on it. So I am doing the exercise during the first half testing it to the very limits, hoping that after a while the muscles will be so trained enough to be able to do it in the second half as well – at least with less weight – and that should then be good enough for daily life situations.

My target exercise is deadlifts I found out, that I can do them in the first half of the cycle – given that I pay the bathroom a visit before – and now I am hoping that using that slot for rigorous training will strengthen the whole area, resolving the problem. Will keep you posted on that one!

All the above are the things I know about from my own experience, I however am sure that there are many more issues. If you would like me to address those I am very happy to do so. Just write me and email to rika @ incredible-ladies . com
I will keep your details completely confidential and will only write about the problem itself.

Have a great week!
Always yours,
Rika

The Tasks And The Plan

The Tasks are clear:

• Lose fat,
• gain muscle,
• learn how to pose.

The plan for losing fat
Doing an indoor rowing marathon this year in end June or October – need to explore those options – and using this for a lot of cardio/endurance work to lose the fat. This is in planning for a while already and I think it will nicely accommodate my needs for the championship.

For starters I would like to lose something like a stone (a good 6 kg) of fat. That should give me at least a rough idea what sort of muscles I actually have around my legs. Well, and the upper should look rather neat by then. I may risk losing a bit of muscle mass as well due to the forced endurance effort, but I have enough time to build up afterwards. For now it is important to actually be able to see the muscles, so that I then can make a plan on where to focus the weight work on.

Timing:
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday morning rowing, and Sunday power walking
I still have to figure out the details of the rowing training. But those are the only days which make sense. Power walking is something I do with a friend who has rather short legs and basically is her training in which I join in. It is a light session which gives a bit of kick to the calves and is relaxed movement of the muscles in fresh air.


The plan for gaining/keeping muscle – before marathon
Doing BB as I did before. I am training on a 2-split, meaning each muscle is trained once per week. I usually start with a 5 minute indoor rower warm up, and need one and a half hours to get through a program.

Timing:
Tuesdays - Split 1
Chest/back/arms (bench, incline bench, pull over, cable fly, row, pull down neck, triceps cable, biceps machine)
Friday - Split 2
Leg/ABS/Shoulder (leg press, extension, curl, calves seated, ABS cable, leg raises, hyperextensions, dumbbell press, barbell neck press, cable lateral lift, reverse cable fly).

The plan for gaining muscle – after marathon
Cutting down on massive endurance work and cranking up the training intensity/frequency. I may skip rowing training entirely for a while, adding posing training. At a later stage the rowing may come back to help burn excess fat. I am plannig to go three times a week for weights instead of two, changing either the split (more likely) or the frequency.

In changing the split I may do:

• legs/and arms in one session,
• ABS and Shoulders in another, and
• chest/back in a third,

adding more exercises to each muscle group.

In changing the frequency I will train 3 times a week with one week legs twice and chest once, and the other week the chest twice and legs once.

I used to train four times a week and I hit the overtraining barrier rather quickly. So I need to avoid that. I will pick up a lot of information as I go along, though. Hence I will just see how it goes and adapt accordingly.


The plan for learning how to pose

• Taking up ballet classes again (once a week) for flexibility, balance and posture
• Adding a proper stretching session
• Checking out a gym in town where at least one of the trainers is competing and hence might be able to help with posing and other questions,

I have a half hour stretching routine which I want to integrate straight away. If I were only to do weights I actually wouldn’t need the stretching so much, as usually every exercise that flexes has a counter exercise that stretches. But with all the endurance work that contradicts the weight exercises I need to take care of flexibility. I hope it will pay off in the end when the posing training will start in ernest.

Timing:
Ballet on Monday, Stretch on Thursday

Well, and in this blog I will write it all down... the changes, the measurments, the assessments, the hiccups...

A First Assessment

Bloody Hell...

Bloody Hell, it seemed such a good idea yesterday. Today is the day after, every muscle is aching and I have another one and a half years of days like this ahead of me.

A quick recap on who I am - the more elaborate story you can read on my personal blog:

• Me, Rika, born in June 1961 and thus age 48,
• started training with weights when I met hubby to be in 1882,
• had a phase some time around ’86 when things went bumpy at university and I thought that I should become a real bodybuilder/trainer instead of a computer scientist,
• although at the moment I am neither, I dug my way through university, trained on and off, and settled into a comfortable life after the exam,
• moved from Germany to England, got house, cats and garden, and became fat while training was more often ‘off’ than ‘on’,
• got severe back pain and migraines and all of a sudden the comfortable life was a bad life,
• went back to the gym regularly from early 2005, age 43, and
• started the Incredible Ladies website as a record of this experience in June 2007 at age 46.

Apparently I am feeling too well now, because yesterday I decided to start a journey paved with pain and sweat: I am going to compete in a Bodybuilding contest in 2011.

Why now?

Well, do the math: firstly I am going to be 50 in 2011, and secondly this idea is bugging me since 35 years and if I don’t do it now, that might well mean ‘never’. I came across this competition for the first time shortly after having started training regularly again, and I have to admit: Even I thought that those competitions have a bit of a dodgy, door bouncer atmosphere about them. Bodybuilding is not a really mainstream sport, is it? And what we see on the telly, on how professional female bodybuilders have to make a living because there is almost no sponsorship in this sport, is not helping either. So hubby and I went to see the show armed with prejudice and mixed feelings: Does one really want to belong to this sort of scene?

But see, one should not judge without having seen it: when we got there we were amazed how professional and fantastically skilled these people were. Nothing dodgy, no door bouncer atmosphere whatsoever, and they put on a great show, it was entertaining and inspiring... and I felt that I could have competed with the lady who came least – well, there were only four ladies anyway. Isn’t it sad that a sport that has so many benefits, especially for women, is not kicking in? It did for the guys. These days almost every guy tries to put on a bit of muscle in the gym, or at least is flirting with the idea.

C’mon guys – don’t lie to mummy! While you are sweating on the treadmill you must be thinking of the one or the other muscle when a well trained guy is passing you by.

For women however, it is out of the question. Oh yes, I see them with 1 kg dumbbells doing a bit of triceps on a stabilizing ball – that is NOT bodybuilding. That is rubbish. Well it is a start... but I so rarely see it taken to the next level. These ladies just vanish from the gym because they never experience the full power this training could give them. Oh I have written piles of pamphlets about why muscles are a good thing. But honestly: Nobody wants to read or hear it!

OK, I am ranting again: So back to my plan. Back then in 2005 the competition bug bit me the second time in my life, but just briefly: I wasn’t confident enough and scared of thousands of things, mainly embarrassment.

And then only two weeks ago the bug bit me again – all good things come in three, apparently – at the whiteboard of my gym there was an advert for a bodybuilding championship - hanging there very innocently. Whoof... this time it hit right into the stomach: I want to do this!

While the stomach was recovering, my brain tried to understand: “No you don’t! You might want to visit it again, but you DO NOT WANT TO COMPETE! You are scared of competitions”.

‘No I’m not! Not anymore, and if I do it next year then I can do it for my 50th and hence I can’t actually lose. It will be fun, and I always wanted to be on a stage and bodybuilding is the only thing I am good at, and hence I am going to do it!’

I checked with the trainers if they would know somebody in the region who could teach me how to pose. I know how to train, but I don’t have a clue how to put on a show. When I got the address of a gym where the head trainer is competing I had to come out of the closet: I just had to tell hubby. And you know what: He loves this idea!

And then we made a deal. This will not be like any other of my projects during which I work, and do, and document, and then see how it goes, and THEN might decide whether or not I will take on the challenge.

This time I will not play it safe. It will be a commitment from the beginning. I herewith declare: If this show is on in 2011, and if I will be fit enough to crawl onto that stage, then I will compete. No matter how I look. I may not be able to get rid of lose skin, I may... oh don’t get me started:

I will look my best, promised!

And with this blog I am inviting you to join me in this journey. Ideas and comments welcome: I will need any help I can get! Oh well, and maybe I see you in mid 2011 in Great Yarmouth!