Building a Body
So here we are two weeks later than the last set of photos.
What marked these two weeks in my training was that I need to eat enough protein. Some days 100 grams isn't enough and I need to eat more like 200 grams. I was feeling really wiped out and exhausted and though my life has been a bit crazy, it seemed more to do with my diet than anything else. However, what this meant was that because I am eating more I put on more bulk than I had intended. It's all about balancing my workouts, food and activity and I feel like I'm finding the right way to do this workout, stay healthy and keep up with my insanely busy life.
The thing is, that I'm not just weight lifting and getting stronger, I am actually and quite literally sculpting myself. My workouts are structured so that i build muscle in very specific ways. I am of course by default getting stronger and physically I feel awesome, but I always keep it in mind what Arnold says in the classic movie, "Pumping Iron," that bodybuilders have the same mind set as a sculptor. We look in the mirror and say hey, I need more deltoids (which I in fact, do) and we do the exercises that make that happen. A sculptor just slaps some more clay on there so really our job is more difficult.
I've also found out my weak spots throughout all of this. Some of my muscles respond super fast and I am able to increase weights quickly, other muscles, like my shoulders and my hamstrings (oh, my hammies) really hate what I'm doing to them. I've had to drop weights and focus on form and coax them along more than other parts of my body. Little bastards.
The other thing that I have to focus on more strictly is posing. Yes, posing. The competition can be made or broken by posing. Who knew.
My front pose is spot on but the rest of them, not so much. This is going to sound crazy, but it's all a lot harder than it looks. Ms. Wilkins up there looks like she's just standing there. Sure she is, but she's also flexing everything she's got not fully, but halfway. That's the relaxed pose that you do in between the "wow" poses where the judges get to see you show off your stuff. Those poses are a mixture of heels-together/flex everything/straight back/lift up ribs/stand up straight/don't look forced/don't tense/inflate your muscles and smile. Seriously not easy at all.
I certainly cut some work out for myself with this project. For someone who is a serious commitment phobe, I have definitely made a commitment to myself and perhaps that's the best place to start. Sometimes it's also good to be very basic about things. I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to make things larger than life and then it looms huge and overwhelms me. Mountains out of molehills, especially when it's some kind of goal I set for myself.
There's something incredibly simple about weightlifting. I go to the gym, I get results. Boom. That's it. Yes I've set a competition as my end goal for this, but it's more than I needed a fire under my ass to do anything about my physical being in the first place.
It's the simplicity in the action, the "I do this and something happens" that is so appealing to me about this process. It puts me in touch with my body in a similar yet different way than yoga. It is an evolutionary process of understanding my physicality in its simplest way, in limitation and form, that creates a strange (dare I say it) poetry within the action itself.
Man, I think that last statement pretty much nails this whole thing on the head. Limitation and Form. That's deep.
Now off to eat.
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