Triumph in the athletic world is often an iceberg, with the peak of success visible to the public, yet the submerged mass—comprising unseen struggles and relentless effort—remains concealed. In this episode, Tina and client-guest host Kara, peel back the glossy veneer of before and after pictures and question the portrayal of women in the media, all while challenging the authenticity that diet culture claims to offer.
We share the behind-the-scenes reality of success, revealing the silent battles and the invisible toll of intense competition prep on athletes. This conversation is a stark reminder of the emotional and physical sacrifices that underpin the glossy images of perfection, and it highlights the strength of character required to navigate these demanding paths.
We unpack the fallacy of balance within the extreme realms of competitive sports and the unvarnished truth of off-season struggles, the importance of coaching, and the liberating power of body acceptance .
Don't get weird, use your head, it'll all be OK!
Looking for a coach to help you be YOUR best self? Let's get in touch!
www.centerstagethleticscoaching.com
info@centerstageathleticscoaching.com
IG: @teamcsfp
FB: https://www.facebook.com/teamcsfp
Triumph in the athletic world is often an iceberg, with the peak of success visible to the public, yet the submerged mass—comprising unseen struggles and relentless effort—remains concealed. In this episode, Tina and client-guest host Kara, peel back the glossy veneer of before and after pictures and question the portrayal of women in the media, all while challenging the authenticity that diet culture claims to offer.
We share the behind-the-scenes reality of success, revealing the silent battles and the invisible toll of intense competition prep on athletes. This conversation is a stark reminder of the emotional and physical sacrifices that underpin the glossy images of perfection, and it highlights the strength of character required to navigate these demanding paths.
We unpack the fallacy of balance within the extreme realms of competitive sports and the unvarnished truth of off-season struggles, the importance of coaching, and the liberating power of body acceptance .
Don't get weird, use your head, it'll all be OK!
Looking for a coach to help you be YOUR best self? Let's get in touch!
www.centerstagethleticscoaching.com
info@centerstageathleticscoaching.com
IG: @teamcsfp
FB: https://www.facebook.com/teamcsfp
Hello, hello, welcome, welcome. This is coaching and cocktails, the podcast. This is Tina, and today I have a new guest host and she's actually a client of mine and I'm going to let her introduce herself. But we started working together a couple of years ago. She's a pretty incredible athlete, super cool, chick, and she came up with an idea of something she wanted to talk about. She was apparently very frustrated over something she saw on the internet or social media. Actually, you're never even on social media, so I don't know where. I don't even know where this came from, but anyway. So we're going to have a conversation today, but I'm going to let Kara introduce herself first. All right, so my name is Kara Russell.
Speaker 2:I'm a bikini competitor and a triathlete, and I met Tina a couple of years ago and I'm going to talk about her. She's a triathlete and I met Tina a couple of years ago looking for a posing coach. She was just that good that that poach, that posing session, ended up turning into a full coaching relationship. So I ditched my first lackluster coach and got Tina and it's all been beautiful since then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and last year you so our first season together. You accomplished earning your master's bikini pro card with the B-Series, and now we're taking some time not only to bulk I hate that word. We're not bulking, we are growing. We're growing, we're improving and giving you so we're, we're balancing our strength training, with you now wanting to do triathlons instead of just biathlons, because why?
Speaker 1:not add more to it. I think that's really cool. But yeah, it's really cool to to see Kiara do her endurance training and be able to compete in, you know, physique competitions, because really everybody knows that you know, endurance training and bodybuilding are not the best bed fellows, because all that calorie expenditure going into cardiovascular exercise versus strength training and it's something that's hard to balance. But I think that honestly, I think you have a true genetic gift in that and I know you always. You always complain about you're the big girl, which is a good thing because you have a lot of muscle and your body can actually withstand it. So, anyway, it's been really cool to be able to have an athlete of your, I think, at the end of the year that's always come down to you sort of balancing my macros.
Speaker 2:So I'm eating correctly. Everybody told me getting into it. This was basically the dumbest thought I had had, that I couldn't be great at both of the things, so I was basically going to sacrifice both of them and I just kind of refused to accept that as an answer. So you keep feeding the muscle, I'll keep growing it, and then, yep, that's what.
Speaker 1:Yeah and yeah. And you're a great coachable. You're a true athlete in every sense of the word. That's what makes it so cool to get to work with you, because you are coachable and we worked through some Not eating disorders necessarily, but disordered eating and thought patterns around food, and I think some of that was childhood based and how you were raised and some of it was the previous competition prep and just going from sort of a bro diet to I'm sure you said you felt guilty on this last one because you never suffered and I'm not I mean, but comparably speaking, you're not suffering, would probably have been somebody else's dead on the side of road.
Speaker 2:Anybody could have done what I just did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is true, if they want to do it bad enough, so speaking of yes.
Speaker 2:What? What's your question, Henry? Do you typically do resolutions? Do you even a New Year's resolution?
Speaker 1:I don't personally do New Year's resolutions. One of my clients, slash friends. She kind of came up with this concept years ago where she just kind of like has a word, so it's not, it's just like you know where it might be growth or it might be, and I have Erin and I talked about this on the podcast the last couple of times. She kind of adopted that too and what her word of the year is. So I don't do resolutions. I'm sure I did like a million years ago, but I don't stick to them. So what's the point? I mean, whatever works for you, I personally am always just trying to be better than I was and that's just a daily thing. But I will say there's this word, a word has been coming into my head for no particular reason and I can't get it out of my head, and so this is the word I'm going with, because I think this is that's just how it comes right. It's just like that's how stuff comes to us and it's clarity. I don't.
Speaker 1:I do not yet know why. Clarity I have some ideas, but yeah, so that seems to be the word that's popping into my head this January. How about you?
Speaker 2:So my problem maybe people will relate to this my problem is everything for me has to happen on a Monday or the first, or like. So New Year's is great because I'm going to get real crazy with something. Man, that's the ultimate start date, and New Year's was on a Monday this year. I know I have to have Monday. If you tell me to change your diet and it's a Tuesday, I'm like, okay, on Monday I can't do it today, fair enough. So I do think that the idea of New Year's is like taking that half to start on Monday and really amping it up. So that's what. That's what I'd gotten this email and it was discussing before and after pictures, and it just sent me down this rabbit hole of being so angry at what I feel like women get fed via media, not just social media, but all media through our lives, and I really specifically think about if you remember, in the late 90s, early 2000s, man, we were eating a fedrant like it was candy, I mean diet fuel rip fuel, raise his hand.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh girl, I think I was having, like it was something crazy like 12 tablets a day, I mean that's all you were doing.
Speaker 1:I literally do not know how I survived taking that kind of speed on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:We were so jittery so I was in the military at the time and you want to talk about crazy, have your weight factor in that, if you're allowed to do your job right, like you have to be in this weight standard or we don't really want you. So we were like not eating and just throw in diet fuel and rip fuel like Ripped fuel. That's the solution. Oh, I remember rip fuel so vividly Right.
Speaker 2:So you just sit and jitter like a crazy person. And so then, if you remember just a little further into the early 2000s, there was just a lot of hardcore marketing around diet pills for women, Like it was ramping up because it was just such a big business and they would have these before and after pictures which I personally was convinced that they just took fit people and then had them, like reverse, diet out and then took the picture as the before, which is my conspiracy theory. But so I got so mad because I thought all of these women still are getting these pictures of people like our stage photos. I don't look like that the day after I'm on stage. I didn't look like that a week before I was on stage. Those pictures are for stage. But if all you get is day one of my prep months earlier and the day I'm on stage, man, isn't that an ideal? I look at my stage pictures and I'm like, oh man, I'd love to look like that.
Speaker 1:If only I could go from the left to the right without doing all the stuff in the middle, which is kind of the point of this conversation. And look and I'm equally as guilty marketing that I've posted your beginning of prep pictures and your on stage pictures. That's what everybody does, because it is good marketing, right? As a coach, it's like look what I can do. I help her go from this to this, and so, although I also like to post pictures along the way, but most people are not going, oh well, she looked like this at like 12 weeks out, and then she looked like this at like this. You know what I mean? Everybody just wants to see the pretty like. Here you were six months ago and here you were on stage.
Speaker 2:I just it kills me. There's a commercial out right now I won't I won't name the product, but it's a commercial.
Speaker 1:We're not paying for any. I'm not.
Speaker 2:I won't tell you. Won't tell you what the current product is, but there's one, and the testimonial in the commercial is the woman said I had lap band surgery that didn't work for me. Then I started taking this. Oh yeah, and and everybody's doing that now. Yes, I got to tell you, man, if surgery didn't work for you. I don't think an over the counter pill is the magical solution?
Speaker 1:Well, sure it is. If you're going to take it for the rest of your life, yeah, and prescription though, and so I know we won't talk about that Other stuff. Yeah no, I got you, but so what's bugging you about this? That people aren't seeing the work that actually goes into the before and after?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think so. Let's just say, if somebody really followed you, if they saw the pictures you posted and looked into you, there are the stories from everybody of what they did and you'll consult with them and tell them what a plan loosely looks like. If you're marketing women a thymaster or rip fuel and we are going back, Girl, I'm doing something, by the way, I really wish.
Speaker 1:I actually really wish I had kept my thymaster. Do you know? That was actually a brilliant. I mean, it's great, it was functional, right. I mean, it doesn't need to do like their inner thighs. I mean, if you don't have a machine. It really was fairly effective.
Speaker 2:It's as much as a band would be right, sure, anyway. But so my problem is, if you market that this thing, this thing, is the key to getting to the after, that's just a fib Like nobody has gone in and just eaten low carb and gotten cut. That's not how that works. You don't just lift weights and eat trash and get cut. That's not how that works. But I think people get so excited at the thought of getting to their after. They skip thinking through did this make sense? Does it make sense that I could do this for 10 minutes and you're not doing anything for 10 minutes a day and getting dramatic results?
Speaker 1:Right, and hence why you know, in any advertisement you see on TV or what have you, it's like results may vary or result are typical, right? So when you look at the fine print, right, and that's what everybody likes to skip over, right? There's all these. I know you're not on social media but I'm big on like memes and stuff. Like I love that shit all over my house.
Speaker 1:I like saying the memes and things. But there's one, actually there's two, that always, always really like resonate with me. There's one that's like you know, it shows like somebody who's successful and somebody who's just starting out just anything could be career or otherwise and it kind of shows like all this like it's like a iceberg, it's like the tip of the iceberg above the water, but nobody sees all that shit that's underneath of the water. They just see like oh you, just like you went from all the way over here to like the tip of iceberg and they'll see all the shit that happened in between and the drowning and the failures and all these things. And then there's the other one, my other favorite one, just cause I have lupus, it's like you know, nobody sees. They just see what you look like on the outside and nobody sees like what is going on, like literally the day to day struggle that people with like chronic diseases and autoimmune diseases and things like that deal with. And it's the same thing with whether you're you're trying to be a bodybuilder or a marathon or an endurance athlete like you are. It's easy to see, it's easy to think that like this picture of like perfection is where you want to be, without ever fully understanding, having not done it before, what it really takes to get there right.
Speaker 1:And no matter how much I tell clients when I have consults with them or anything like, you know the spiel. I mean you were already competing when I met you, but anybody who's like brand new that comes to me. I started off saying my job during this consult is to actually get a job during this consult, is to actually talk you out of doing this, because in fact, I talk more people out of it probably than I do into it, because only the right kind of person is going to still want to do it once I tell them everything that's actually evolved. And even then and the smartest of people that I've consulted with you know get into the throes of it and they're like like I just couldn't have imagined, right, it's, it's cause you don't know.
Speaker 1:You just don't know what you don't know. Yet you can be like, oh yeah, I'm tough. Oh yeah, I used to be an athlete in college. Oh yeah, I know what it's like to do X, y and Z, but until you're in the middle of the, you know the suck of the of a prep, or you know race training or whatever you don't know. And then that's where you know and to me, like that really is where athletes are, are made or broken, right. It's in those moments where you're like, well, this was more than I thought it was going to be and we're either going to keep going forward or we're going to not. But nobody sees that, nobody wants to see that.
Speaker 2:Well, the second marathon I ran, I passed a woman holding a sign and the sign said if you train for this marathon and you're still married, you didn't train hard enough. And that is sort of. When I first got into multi sport cause I was so I was doing two Athalons, which is a run bike run instead of a swim bike run, which is what triathlons are I had a coach who said to me you have to make sure your marriage is in a good place, because a marriage just can't handle the amount of training required for the sport. And it was such a weird thing and I really had a whole conversation with my husband like are you on board, before I get into this, that it's going to be kind of a time suck, and you know I might complain.
Speaker 2:And it's the same thing with bodybuilding. We jokingly always say that the better I look, the worse I feel, because like the day I'm getting on stage, that's the best I'm going to look for at least a year. But you know, for a while and I just feel like garbage. And so people see that that's the picture they want, that's the thing that they're like oh my gosh. And I'm like oh, I felt so crummy, like I just wanted a donut. I did not care about any of it that day. I cared about it every single day until then. But you just come so fatigued with the process, and so people see your pictures they love stage pictures but they have no idea what that day looks like, what that prep looks like. So I say the same thing.
Speaker 1:In fact, I invite clients to bring their spouses, family members, with them to a consult, or even, you know, further down the road, or whether. Let me help explain, like, what this is all about. Like, I really encourage all of my clients to make sure they have support, because it's a very selfish sport, so having the support of your family, whoever lives in the household with you, your kids, even getting them on boards, because there's a lot of sacrifice that goes into any extreme sport, whether it's endurance, racing or bodybuilding or whatever it is that you do right, that you take to an extreme and you want to do very well at it. There is no balance. It's just not a thing. Right Like I don't.
Speaker 1:Balance would imply that I can give equal amounts of attention and energy to all the things in my life. I can balance my work, and I can balance my home, and I can balance my athletic pursuits. No, you cannot right Like something is going to give at any given time. So the key, though, is then making sure that you're not. Yes, one does have to get more attention, but you also cannot let the other things fall apart in the process, so that's really the only way to balance them. They are just not balanced, if that makes sense. So I think that that is a really key thing, and I would argue pretty strongly that the majority of my clients who have very supportive spouses, their spouses actually prefer how they look when they're not competing 100%.
Speaker 1:Every day, my husband and I competed together and Eric is like I neither of us like loved the other. I mean, the pictures are great, right, we're so sexy, like it's all very sexy and whatever, but like underneath it all, like neither one, neither of us, had a sex drive, so we fucking cared what we looked like, cause like we were touching each other, cause it was like your sex hormones go out the door, you're like welcome to competing, have fun with that. But like neither of us were like yeah, you look good now, but like I'm not interested in touching all that hard stuff, like I would just want we like each other softer.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I've always said I'd take a dad bod over a gym bod. Any day I love a good dad bod, but my husband definitely likes me heavier. He was so excited when I got on bulk.
Speaker 1:It's not a bulk. Stop saying that word.
Speaker 2:So cause he joked all through prep that he was going to start putting butter in my mouth at night because he was just like you're just getting so and he kept saying thin. And I'd say, not thin, lean. Like I'm not really getting thin, I'm getting lean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we do need to coach our family and friends to not call us skinny and to not call us thin. Well, that's what I always said it's a weakness.
Speaker 2:I said because I'm keeping all my muscle, I don't want to look thin, I want to look lean, cause I want to have muscle. And so he was just so thrilled when I started gaining weight again and of course I'm like, I mean, it feels kind of fast. And he's like, no, no, no, let it come on.
Speaker 1:And yet we beat ourselves up because we are, because, speaking of before and afters, right, we compare ourselves to our own ourselves, our afters, our after afters, right. So it's like when our after is now the before, right, so the after stage pictures, that the progress goes in the other direction.
Speaker 2:If you looked at your friends pictures, your friends said, well, this is in high school and this is after I had five kids 20 years later. You wouldn't be like. Why do they not look the same? You'd be like. Obviously they're not going to be the same, but somehow your own you're like. But that was me.
Speaker 1:Why don't I look like I did when I was 17? Right Now that I'm 50. I don't know. That doesn't make any sense, mm-mm.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:So the key point here that you want to, that what's kind of like the key thing that like is was really driving you wanting to have this conversation today.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's. You know it's great if you have some imagery that focuses you or that motivates you to get started. But I think this fixation on extrinsic motivation, the idea that how you look, should be the thing you're aiming for. If that gets you started, let it get you started. But I am never happier than when I see somebody really overweight at the gym that is just killing themselves to walk on the treadmill. Because I'm like you got in here and did this. It is so intimidating to go into a gym and to come in unfit. To me that's the greatest badge of honor. Like I want to tell everyone how proud I am when I see that happen. So for me, you know, sing the praises of the work people are doing, but how they look is just meaningless. And especially if you're seeing how they look on social media, what filter you're getting if they took 35 pictures to get one that they liked, like you, just don't know.
Speaker 1:Who are with me, took the fucking picture right.
Speaker 1:Like I mean, there are times that I don't, you know, I might, I don't know like, oh, I have this picture from competing, or a photo shoot that I did, you know, 10 years ago and, yeah, I'll share it, or whatever. And people are like, oh, you look so great and I'm like, that's not me. You literally just saw a picture of me yesterday, like on flex Friday or whatever. Like there, you know, that's not what I look like. This was like 15 years ago, right, but having you know, having you and I were talking before we hopped on here, some social media literacy, like you, you just have to look at everything and not just social media media, especially now with AI, because between filters were, so I don't know how to use filters, so I can promise you, everything that I post is me.
Speaker 1:I mean, unless it was a, unless it was a photo shoot that I did, the photographer did something to the picture, but I mean I don't. I don't know how to use filters, so I don't use them. Ai I have not used AI yet for to enhance a photo of me or turn me into a model or a cartoon character or any of those things. But but we have to look at everything and and be really discerning about what it is that we're looking at. It's no different than fake news, right? So we need to look at every picture on the fucking interweb as fake news until proven otherwise.
Speaker 2:Well, and it was endorsing people, because how many times do people say this is the answer there, and then you come to find out they weren't even using it. They were just paid to say something's great.
Speaker 1:Exactly Right. I mean, there is no after picture without a lot of work in the middle, regardless, right? Whether people are also have to be concerned about, like, what did they do, right? Did they do something extreme that wasn't healthy? Were they taking, you know, metformin and we go V and like whatever the fuck else everybody's taking now? Were they, you know, doing any number? Were they taking cocaine?
Speaker 1:Were they taking performance enhancing drugs? That's probably my biggest pet peeve right now. Like dramatic weight losses, I think most people can look at that and easily chalk it up to like, oh well, she probably took, you know, one of the new weight loss drugs or you know like you know, like Kelly Clarkson and Oprah Winfrey now have you know finally admitted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nobody, nobody goes from 250 pounds to 150 pounds in like eight weeks without doing something right. This is not a thing. But in the sport of bodybuilding, I think what drives me batshit crazy and has forever, is you know people who are like look at the progress I made in one year. I see this all the time. It really drives me nuts because there's so many natural athletes that went to the dark side and started taking performance enhancing drugs and you see the growth on some women I'm talking about women in particular that they make in these very short periods of time right. And then I have clients that are like well, you told me I can't grow that much in a mirror.
Speaker 1:Well, you can't, you fucking cannot, without taking drugs. It's just not a thing. But nobody puts that disclaimer on their pictures ever. Maybe if performance enhancing drugs were so great and lots of people take them right, why isn't anybody proudly stamping their photo saying this physique brought to you by? Yes, they work hard. I am not going to deny that. In fact, most people taking performance enhancing drugs. The truth is they work harder than natural athletes. Why? Because they fucking can. Because they're taking performance enhancing drugs right. You can train seven days a week and eat 50,000 calories if you're, you know if you're taking the shit. So they are actually probably working harder than we are. It's not cheating, it's none of those things, but it's. You know. If it's so great and wonderful and we're not embarrassed that we're doing them, why not slap a label on it and say this physique brought to you by a whole lot of hard work and also growth hormone and this and this, and X and Y and Z, you know be one? Well, one because it's illegal and two that's probably mostly illegal.
Speaker 1:But it drives me nuts because it that is where, especially in the body sort of bodybuilding, where everybody is getting so wrapped around the fucking axle thinking that this is true that I can go from A to Z in a year even and put on 20 pounds of muscle and natural athlete simply cannot do that. And so, but nobody, you know people look at it and they hire XYZ coach because XYZ coach, could you know meet these people? Look this way. Or you know, got them this pro card or what have you, never knowing until they're knee deep in it. Or you know, thousands of dollars into it, what it really took to get between those. There's no honesty in the sport when it comes to that.
Speaker 2:So my favorite are the number of articles online that talk about how you shouldn't gain more than 10 pounds in your off season, and that you can gain muscle but never gain more than 10 pounds. I gotta tell you the truth 10 pounds is pretty easy to come by when you're reversing.
Speaker 1:I think 10 pounds over the night. Right, I thought it to you.
Speaker 2:So you see these, these NPC girls who I mean look, look, phenomenal. I'm in no way saying they don't look incredible, but you cannot tell me that you are remaining that lean, adding any muscle, adding any muscle and gaining less than 10 pounds in an off season.
Speaker 1:naturally, Right Now, so unlikely that they're doing it naturally. So that's the first. We will call it lying. We'll call it what is it lying by omission, right? We'll just call it omitting facts, right.
Speaker 2:We'll just call it.
Speaker 1:I'm just not telling you what I'm doing, right, that's all, and you know, and that's their business. They can do that. But to the naked eye, right, the inexperienced eye, the inexperienced person, it's like oh, it just gives this false sense of what is actually possible in that period of time. And even for natural athletes, right Like that, aren't gaining any weight or aren't even actually taking bulking seasons God damn, that word Aren't taking, you know, growth seasons. I see it all the. I see pro athletes and people look up to these and again, specifically, women and men, people look up to these. Women. They're like, we'll even say natural athletes, because I see it all the time and they just compete and they compete and they compete and they take. Listen, if you competed last year, in 2023, right, or in 2024 now, if you competed at any point in 2023 and you're getting back on stage in spring of 2024, you didn't take a fucking off season. It's not a thing. You took a couple of months to put on a shit ton of weight.
Speaker 1:You sat at that shit ton of weight for like two months and now you're gonna, now you're gonna start dieting it off again, right? So if you did, if you, if you did anything in a 12 month period, you didn't give yourself time to put on muscle, and then you're, you're leading, you know, the untrained individual to think well, that's what you do, right, I just compete and compete and compete and that's it again. So go ahead and get it back to like nobody sees what's happening between the before and after and all the other afters, and then what happens when you have shut down your entire you know, you've shut down your hormones and you've shut down your gut and you've shut down any chance of living a nice, long, happy life, because this is what you decided to do, like over and over and over again throughout this sport. And nobody, nobody sees that. And I think it's irresponsible for a lot of these pro athletes, pro natural athletes I'll probably get shit for this to compete all year, every year.
Speaker 2:Well. So we talked about this because when I came to, I'd finished up a show and we were reversing and I said to you, I really feel like I need a show on the books for this next year to stay motivated to keep going, cause I just have so much on my plate. And you said, okay, well then go the very end of the year, cause this was in June. You're like, go very end, so we at least have almost a year and a half. And you said I really wouldn't do that, but if you need that, that's at least push it all the way to the end of the year. So that's what we did. So this prep I actually got so much leaner than I got on my first prep and so much easier, but that's side note got a lot leaner. And the very tail end of prep, like the last two weeks, was the first place where I started realizing that my body was maybe over, like I'm over prep.
Speaker 1:This is it.
Speaker 2:And it clicked so hard for me that you can't do it year after year, like you can't do it 22, 23, 24, because the amount of time it takes to reverse and normalize, just normalize. You have to do that before you begin growing, and if you ain't growing, all you're doing is the exact same package year after year.
Speaker 1:You had probably a worse package.
Speaker 1:Right, because you're so depleted Because you never gave your body, your mind, your finances, your life, your family time off. Right, like it's not just about muscle growth either. Right, like it is about recovering every aspect of your body. It is mentally taxing, it is physically taxing, right, it's like we talk all the time about hormones and like it just you know every, every, every aspect of it. So, and yet you see people do it all the time. And then I have clients that are just like I, have clients leave because I'm like I just don't support doing that over and over and over again, because I can't help you be your best. If we're just running you into the ground and then we got to diet harder, we got to do more cardio, we're just going to lose more muscle. You're just going to end up looking worse.
Speaker 1:And look, I can tell you from experience because this is exactly what I did when I competed, because nobody told me not to, right. So I competed in fall of 2005, spring of 2006, fall of 2006. And then I tore my bicep and I tore my shoulder why Might you ask, over? Because I was depleted and over-changed Right, and my body was like hello, can you fuck off and just take a beat for a minute, and of course then we don't listen and we do all kinds of shit. But that it's just a recipe for what not to do.
Speaker 1:And I see it. Look, I've been in this sport for almost 20 years. I have seen athletes get on stage over and over and over again. I can tell you the athletes the top natural athletes will take two to three years off between shows, right, right. And I see more men be smart about this than women, and I think a lot of it with women is because one we start, this whole thing becomes part of our identity, that it becomes this like I don't want to be fat in my off season, so as soon as I gain the weight I'm going to diet it back off. It's just like. So it's all the things that go into this. So I do see more.
Speaker 2:I just want to note that you air quoted that because nobody else saw that happen. Air quote yeah, she didn't actually need that. Thank you for that, Air Quotes. I didn't mean that.
Speaker 1:So I always forget that. People can't seem to be going air quotes In air quotes. You got fat in your off season I see more men do this but really, really top level natural male bodybuilders take two, three years off, right, Like and it's just. I think the social media has done really great things for the sport of natural bodybuilding and I think social media has done really harmful things to the sport of natural bodybuilding specifically, not the sport, but the people right, Because I think too many people see people competing over and over again and think that's what they should be doing, or they just don't have the right guidance, right, so their coaches are encouraging them to do silly shit, or you have something to say.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what I wonder is if part of it too is that you know, what we see is that every year there's an Olympia, every year there's an Arnold Classic, like there are these enormous shows that happen annually. And I mean, I followed male bodybuilding long before I was considering competing, and so you'd see Ronnie Coleman. Every year at the Olympia, you'd see Jay Cutler every year.
Speaker 1:Have you seen Ronnie Coleman now?
Speaker 2:I oh my honey. Have you seen the documentary?
Speaker 1:The documentary is so good, it's so crushing.
Speaker 2:Have you seen it? It's heartbreaking it is heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:In fact, that's actually exactly what I think everybody listening to this podcast needs to do Go watch it. As soon as you're done listening to this, you need to go watch. I actually forget what it's called, but I think it's on Netflix. I think so too, and if you really wanna see what over-trading and over-drugging and this constant need to be competing looks like, that's what it looks like, in a male form.
Speaker 2:As an older man, I think. If I remember he was squatting 800 pounds. If I remember correctly, Like bending the bar 800 pounds, pure insanity. If anybody is not familiar for any reason with Ronnie Coleman, he was a superhero in real life. I mean well over six feet tall, like 300, I think 325 pounds when he compete. Just this mass. And they were putting on now heavy drug use but they were putting on 20 pounds of muscle a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they could compete every year at the Olympia and they could compete, they competed all year long.
Speaker 2:But see, I think that's why people think it's an annual thing, because these guys were doing big shows that were heavily covered year after year Monica Brandt, Kelly Ryan, those girls were doing Olympia and I mean the Arnold every year. So I think people really thought, just like the 12 week prep is a steroid cycle really. I mean, the reason people think you can prep in 12 weeks is because of testosterone use. I think that's the same reason people think they can do an annual show is because we saw these pro athletes for so long.
Speaker 1:Well, we see it now.
Speaker 1:We see it in natural bodybuilding If you watch the Jorton Cup every year, the OCD Jorton Cup, which, like or WNBF worlds or any of the really big shows, every pro is gunning for that show every year. I'm already seeing people who competed in last years end of season kind of pro circuit starting to get ready for this year. Which means, like we just said, there was no off season taken. There was no recovery happening. You do not recover in a month or two months or three months or four months. I mean three to six months. The studies are out there and there's not a lot done on women, unfortunately. But you can look at studies on men and see how long it takes for their hormonal profiles to recover, right. It's not even just a matter of like, oh well, I gained my 20 pounds back and right. It doesn't even work that way.
Speaker 1:There's this really, really great study that a group of natural bodybuilders did. I think it was Andrew Pardue who did it, I think, but he did his own prep and he did blood work before and he did blood work after and then like. So the goal was to kind of see well, are your hormones recovered when you get to a certain body fat percentage, or rather where they were at that body fat percentage before you started cutting, right, so, and the results were no right. So if you were 20% body fat before you started cutting and your hormones were like, oh, it's great, your hormone profile is perfect, you're a 22 year old male and this is fantastic. And then afterwards back up to 20% body fat or whatever it was, oh no, the hormones were still tanked, and this was like three and six months afterwards, right, or you know they're starting to recover, but you know more or less not where they should be, so it really doesn't have to.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people think that, right, and you know, there's just so much more that goes into it. And a lot of people don't get blood work done, and you know, so there's, you know, really understanding what's going on with them, and a lot of people won't know until the damage is already done. Right, so until I mean, I suffer from it now, right, like, do I have regrets? Do I wish I had gone back and done things differently? Yes and no. I mean it wasn't going to be a thing. So there's no reason to feel regretful over any decisions I made about how I competed back in the day, cause you know when you know better, you do better. We didn't know. I'm not gonna blame myself for doing something I didn't. You know, I smoked when I was 13 to 32 because cigarettes were not bad for you Right, and seat belts were unnecessary.
Speaker 2:It's just government conspiracy, right I?
Speaker 1:mean who needs seat belts Right. Well so, and cigarettes are fine.
Speaker 2:I watched a Bikini show, so I think the one I say was before my very first show. I had watched this show that was being broadcast and they had a pro competitor that was helping with commentary and she said I love a 20 week prep because I can really just take out candy the first week. And she was saying these crazy things. This girl like looked phenomenal. I was like 20 weeks, geez, oh Pete, cause I did a 16 week prep and I was like this is forever. And now I can honestly say I'd rather do 20 or 24 weeks and just slow roll it because she was dead. Right, yeah, just take away candy.
Speaker 1:The first, the best prep I ever did was by from the start of my cutting to my first show. I think was about 20. I think it's 20, maybe 23, 24 weeks and then I did two more shows that season, like a week or two after. I think the whole prep was close to 30 weeks and it was the best I ever looked. It was the best I ever felt. I never felt deprived. I didn't have a single binge episode because there wasn't a single prep. I ever did that. I didn't. I had binge eating disorder.
Speaker 1:So there, you know, it was something that happened because I was so fucking deprived, because I was doing 12 week preps and I posted a sample. I found my 2010 diet. You had to get on social media so you can see the thing that I posted and it was terrifying and people were posted like I would have died on it. It was like literally every third day I would get like a bowl of rice and like some oatmeal and a banana. I only got carbs every three days, right, and it was so it was insane, but I could eat something like 40 almonds. You better believe I ate the biggest fucking. You know some almonds are like these little cause you were even weighing them then you were just counting them.
Speaker 2:Oh no, oh no, it was like 40 fucking almonds, I'm gonna eat the whole fucking almond tray.
Speaker 1:It's like the biggest almonds, right, I could get, but anyway, I don't even know where I was going. Oh, I used to do, we did the 12 week preps and I know for a fact you can see my pictures I was always lean, I always did well, but was I really well conditioned? No, not, until I did a 20 plus week prep, and it depends on the person. I have a client right now. She's got over 30 pounds to lose. Guess what we're doing? A minimum of a 35 week prep. Right, I didn't tell you to gain 30 pounds, right? That's just. That's just what we have to do. And if we're lucky, we lose a pound a week.
Speaker 1:I have to give it at least a prep, especially for a new athlete. Now for sure, I will caveat that and say I have athletes I have worked with athletes who I can do a 12 week prep with because I know their body. We actually know they do better with a hard and fast than a slow burn. And so, again, everybody is different, which is why we cannot say everybody can do it in 12. Any more than we can say everybody can do it in 20. Right, it really is very, very, very dependent. So again, it's just one more thing that nobody sees between the before and the after picture, but so that's also on the timeline though.
Speaker 2:So we have to reverse diet and normalize, then we have to do growth, then you have to leave all that period of time to cut. So if you're talking six months of cutting, that's half a year. Which means if it took you half a year just to get to where you're building and half a year of cutting, that's a full year. So just to try to gain three pounds of muscle can take an entire year of a perfect training and diet.
Speaker 1:But that's the key, right. Yeah, an entire year, we're talking, I would say 12 months of being in a calorie excess, or the average female, not the genetically gifted or the ectomer if that's a harder time putting on muscle, right. Three to five pounds of muscle If you're lucky. 12 months in a calorie excess, not 12 months between shows, right. When I see people say I don't know off season and it's like three months, I was like what the fuck are you talking about that? Is not an off season.
Speaker 2:That's not even reverse.
Speaker 1:I mean no.
Speaker 1:I mean technically, you should be fully reversed in like six weeks, but then it's just building up to maintenance and growth. But I just, I don't know, it makes me crazy. And then people either listen to me or they don't, and I do my best, at least with my clients and my athletes, to say, ok, well, you know, I didn't sugar coat it. I'm like, well, yeah, but we are losing out on being able to grow, we're losing out on being able to do any number of things. So if that's really what you want to do, we'll give it a shot.
Speaker 2:But I make the promises right.
Speaker 2:But so this big timeline so that's the other thing is when you get somebody that says in six weeks I went from 200 pounds to 110. They're just standing there with their, you know, standing in a single leg of a pair of pants. If you do things like that really quickly, if you do things like that to me on your own is hazardous Because, like in medicine, we don't treat family members because you just can't make clear decisions when emotions evolve. Man, get a coach. You know I have an endurance coach, I have you for strength and nutrition. I'm a big believer that an outside observer can give you objective data to utilize and function better than you're ever going to figure out on your own.
Speaker 1:I never competed without a coach. I've always had a coach.
Speaker 2:I think I could put it all together honestly, Like I have the knowledge for it. I could.
Speaker 1:I don't want to.
Speaker 2:I don't have the emotional bandwidth to control myself. I need somebody else to help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. Well, I think we've got our point across. We've been talking for about 45 minutes or so now, so what's the main point you want to get across to people? If people take nothing away from this conversation, it was the main thing you want everybody to leave here and really think about, or know.
Speaker 2:I would say if you're going to use any of the stuff that's being thrown at you for the new year as we're all getting motivated and into this next year, use that stuff as a jumping off point to be motivated to start. Do not compare yourself against anybody else's progress, against your own old pictures or hopeful pictures. Use all of that stuff just as a motivator to get into the gym. But then start goal setting based on measurable things and not weight goals, speed goals, power goals, things that are real accomplishments that don't involve the scale or the size pants you're wearing, but health-related.
Speaker 1:If you focus on that, everything else does come. If you focus on eating for your health or eating for performance and training for your health and training for performance whether it's strength performance or endurance performance or whatever your performance goal is the other stuff will come and the physical appearance will come from that.
Speaker 2:The great irony is I always thought the one hole in my life was I didn't look how I wanted to look. I mean, from age eight I thought, man, if I would just be thinner, my whole life would come together and I really believed everything in my life would fall into place. And then what I found was the more I looked exactly how I wanted to look, the more it sort of bothered me that people cared about how I looked.
Speaker 2:Like when people would say, especially if a man says you're hot and I'm like, this is literally the dumbest thing you could say to me. You didn't say I was funny or interesting or you look strong, yeah, I mean, it's just You're fast. So all of these things I thought were going to be the thing I really wanted. As I actually approached reaching that goal, I realized none of that mattered at all, and all of this time it was just that it was an unobtainable goal, and so I could perpetually put the fault on that. As long as I couldn't be that, I could say that was why I wasn't happy, that was why I wasn't successful, that was why whatever, you weren't good enough at X Right, and then you reach it and you're like, oh, it never even mattered.
Speaker 2:But you won't know that until you get there, but it really doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:No, it's what the scale says. I mean, it's a very useful tool for weight loss, it's a useful tool for measuring different types of things, but not nothing, nothing else Significant outside of bodybuilding and you need to lose some body fat or your obese and you need to reduce some body fat. But really we should be looking at health markers and strength and things like that. That's why I encourage so many of my athletes I mean, I'm glad you already have other sports, but I have a lot that get into powerlifting in their growth seasons. It gives them a reason to eat and just focus on strength, which also has an added benefit of gaining more muscle. So why not? We have a client that did do a marathon in between shows. It gave her something else to focus on. Like you can balance all of these things. But we have to get away from everything being so obsessive about aesthetics, even though this particular sport is about aesthetics. It's only about aesthetics on that one day, one day or however many shows you're doing that many stages. That's the only time it matters and it has nothing to do with who you are as a person or how great you are.
Speaker 1:I have a client who she sent me a check-in once and she's getting more and more comfortable again. Like you know, she's like this is the best I've ever felt and I never thought it'd feel this good and await this heavy Right. Because we associate how we feel with what the scale says, like I'm somehow going to feel different when it says this versus this, these false goals that we set. And she's like well, I want to do a mini cut and you know, we've been in her growth season for a while and I mean she eats a ton of food, so I was like we could do a little mini cut and suck our whole thing. And then she got down to like she sits around like 133, 134, and she got down to like 128. And she's like I don't think I need to do this again. She said, you know, she said I achieved that goal, right. She said, and it was amazing, I walked into work and nobody celebrated me for it. Nope, she said there was no fanfare, nobody treated me different, my life didn't change because I was 128 versus 133 or 135. She's like so it was this huge, like epiphany for her that she realized. She was like I'm really kind of like being at like 133, 135. Better, get to eat more. I feel stronger, I'm sleeping better, like you know, whatever the case may be. Plus, nobody gives a fuck if I'm 122 pounds. Nobody celebrated me for it, right, because nobody fucking cares, right? It just isn't, and it just it's these false like ideals that we put on ourselves, because this is just how we were born and bred, right, like it's just.
Speaker 1:There is a. There is a bazillion dollar industry out there that does not want here. If you hear nothing else I say on this podcast, I've said it a million times there is a bazillion dollar industry out there that goes broke the minute. Women feel like they're enough, wherever they are. Yep, that is some powerful shit. If you feel good about who you are, what you're doing, what you, what you look like, whatever the case may be, the system is not set up for that, because there's a whole, there's some real rich fucking people going to get real fucking poor if women suddenly believe they're enough.
Speaker 1:Do you have. Wouldn't you say the same?
Speaker 2:Yeah I say I don't think you need to love where you are necessarily. You just need to be okay with the thought that you're moving yourself towards where you want to be.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, you don't have to. I do not love how I look all the time, right I mean. But I'm okay with where I am Right.
Speaker 2:Well, so I just think that this idea of when we talk about people being okay is not to say you have to love everything as it is. Nope, you have to accept where it is. So my husband got me watching Star Trek, which was never, ever, ever the kind of show I thought I would watch. So this is new Star Trek, and so this whole Vulcan thought of using logic versus emotion it just started to really sink in with me in this way where I began looking at things like let's remove all of the emotion about this decision, or how I feel about it, and how would I look at it if it was somebody else telling me and there's something about removing this level of emotion where you can just go yeah, I mean, that's what I told you, right, it is scale weight is a data point, so we're just going to look at it as a data point and I'm refusing to let it determine my daily worth because it doesn't matter, because, because it doesn't, Right, right.
Speaker 1:And the fact of the matter is it doesn't and take I love that you said that, because it's you know, I tell clients this all the time is like taking the emotion out of food. Right, food doesn't have morals. Your body doesn't have morals. It's not good when it's this way and bad when it this way. You're not a bad person because you're this way and are a good person because you're whatever right Like we. I love that. I think that is brilliant. So if we all have to start adopting the Vulcan way of thinking, man, you should go watch the show.
Speaker 1:I don't know, it's not my kind of show at all.
Speaker 1:No, it's not my name, but the thought process is yeah, right, like, stop taking the take the emotion out of it. It just is what it is, right and and it's just like, do I have a little more belly fat than I used to? Yup, and that's it, right, right, and there's no other, there's no other thing that has to go with that, right, I, I, so it's. You know, it's like radical acceptance, right? So we use the term radical acceptance or just acceptance in general. It really does. When it's kind of like taking all the exacerbated emotions out of everything, again, you really have to get on social media.
Speaker 1:This was very poignant, because I posted it just yesterday I just yesterday I'll send it to you because you'll like it and it was like here's, this is what acceptance looks like. And on the left hand side it was like it's right as like a little cloud and it was raining, and under the cloud is raining. I hate the rain. I really wish it wasn't raining. When it's raining, I feel this and I, and raining makes me sad, and rain it's just like all these like about the rain. And on the right hand side it says it's raining. It just said yup, right. So again it. You know that it's just a. This is about rain. It wasn't about our bodies, but it's the same thing, right? I don't let sitting in traffic bother me anymore. I used to. I used to lose my shit Right.
Speaker 1:So I believe that the fact that I'm just like a much more mindful person and I'm just so focused on again, just like this Cause, you can't control it, I can't do anything about the fact that somebody just had a wreck up here in front of me and there days a whole lot shittier than mine, and here I am sitting in traffic and I'm going to be late. Oh well, right, I'm sitting in traffic. Yup, right, I'm going to get there. Yup, it's the same thing I've been trying to adopt.
Speaker 1:Everybody lasted me, because everybody who's followed me for years knows I hate the fucking cold, right. So? But the more you focus emotion on something like that, the more I say I hate the cold, the more I am miserable about the cold. The more that I think about how miserable I am about the cold, the colder I am and the more miserable I am. If I'm just like it's cold out, yup, you know what I mean. Like it's cold, I stand outside for hours, three, four hours at a time, in the cold, in the rain, with these horses Right, it's something I love to do. It's sometimes physically miserable, absolutely. But if all I do is think about how physically miserable I am, I'm missing out on a whole lot of other shit that's going on in this environment and I'm just miserable. So, yeah, I'm cold, we just okay, I just accept that, I embrace it. Right, like we kind of embrace some of these things Just like okay.
Speaker 1:This is just where we are.
Speaker 2:So I feel like there's some rooting in gratitude for physicality as well. There have been so many times I've been running and I will, in my brain, thank my legs for being able to run, because I think of how many people would kill just to be able to walk. And here I am, using my legs to run and I am so thankful to my body that it lets me work. People who've ever been injured can really appreciate that you didn't recognize how good things were until you broke something Absolutely. Or you get the flu and you're laid up and you're like gosh, I didn't realize how healthy I was until I got really sick, yep. So I do think there's gratitude even in the things that are the suck.
Speaker 1:I mean, I even the things we don't love, right, like the same thing with, like a competition prep. Yeah, you can be miserable on the diet the whole time, right, or?
Speaker 2:you can choose to.
Speaker 1:Just you know you chose to do it right. You don't have to it. Just it just is right, like we don't have to focus on how much it sucks all the time, because we focus how much it sucks all the time and how hungry you are, guess what it's going to suck and you're going to be hungry right, oh, you get so much hungrier. Right and just be grateful that you can right. Yeah, have gratitude that you have the ability to make a choice to starve yourself.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I get to the truth. It's the most expensive version of dieting.
Speaker 1:you could do it is Right, but I mean, think about it. You think about it in those terms that you, we're blessed enough to sit here and talk about purposely reducing our calories, to look a certain way, right, where in? Yes, there are starving people all over the world, right, who would really love to just have enough food to eat, let alone be able to choose, right, and I am now going to purposely make myself hungry, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, doesn't it? And so when we, when we adopt the gratitude and we adopt this sort of radical acceptance of things and we also look at everything we're on social media and media and otherwise, you know, as fake news until proven otherwise, right, really like having some literacy about the whole thing. Yeah, it just changes your perception on, I mean, really you can use this in any way, in any, any part of your life, not just bodybuilding or endurance, sports or, you know, scenic traffic or being in the cold. Some people would kill to be in the cold right now because they're in the desert, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Somebody out there loves the cold, all right. Well, this was a really fun conversation. Do you want to join me for another podcast sometime? This was fun Anytime, I think, because, since you know, brandi is so busy with her kids and stuff right now, like we just haven't had time for her and I to sit down and do podcasting. So I'm just going to keep inviting. So I'll put it out there, like if I have other clients or people I don't know and you want to introduce me and you have a topic you want to talk about Stranger.
Speaker 1:Yeah, stranger danger? There's no stranger than me. So if anybody wants to, is there something like a burning topic they want to talk about? I think it would be really cool to you know, have some different co-hosts on. So if you have another topic you want to talk about, let me know and hopefully we'll get some feedback on this and I think people will like it. I think people will. I think it'll resonate with a lot of people. So do you know our sign off?
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm trying to think which of the lines that start use your head is first. Nope, don't get weird, don't get weirds first.
Speaker 1:Okay, then use your head, use your head, it'll all be okay, right, and think like a Vulcan, yeah, logic over emotion, because that's really what our close off is Don't get weird Right, get it all emotional, use your head, think logically and it'll all be okay. We are Vulcans, yeah, we are. Oh, they can't see me doing that. I don't know how to do it. Oh, I can't. I have a sit.
Speaker 2:Nobody can see us doing gazzar hand gestures. Okay.
Speaker 1:And just like that we'll go bye, Bye.