Articles

Bikinis and biceps: the world of female bodybuilders

Female bodybuilding used to be big – like female bodybuilders themselves – but it was a craze that wasn't built to last. Now its devotees are an endangered species.

We've been speaking barely 10 minutes when Sarah Bridges shifts her enormous upper body in the doll's-house dimensions of her chair and takes in a young man, kit bag in hand, framed in the doorway of the Dartford pub she runs with her husband, Bill.

'That's my three o'clock,' she says, waving at the newcomer, who it transpires has travelled from Dover for a physical appraisal from Sarah, one of the world's most experienced female bodybuilders. Ten minutes later in the pub kitchen the 26-year-old is ordered to strip and stand posing in his pants while Sarah points out his strengths and weaknesses. At the bar a trio of locals sip Kentish ales and pass around a bag of pork scratchings as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

But Sarah's dedication to bodybuilding is out of the ordinary. Fewer and fewer women in Britain are taking part in the sport; of those who do the majority are opting to adhere to more conventionally feminine classes like 'figure' and 'body fitness', seeing the bulkier frames of women like Sarah as a throwback to the heyday of bodybuilding in the 1980s, when bigger was better and Arnie was king.

 

Exercise Is NOT the Key to Weight Loss

 

In the last 20 years, the number of overweight children and adolescents has tripled. Adults have fared just as poorly. Currently more than two thirds - almost 70% - of Americans are considered overweight or obese.

But it has very little to do with how much or the types of food we put in our mouths. That is, if you listen to the candy and snack food manufacturers, beverage companies, processed food industry and the fast food restaurants. According to these groups, the reasons why we are so fat are because we are just lazy and sedentary. We don't exercise enough.

Obesity in the USA

There appears to be no end in sight for the American cycle of eating itself to death. The economy hasn’t gotten much better, and the medical community consistently points out a lack of messaging and programming to stop the alarming increase in American obesity.

New information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that obesity is up among both sexes, among every race, and in all 50 states. Overall obesity rates were up about 4 percent in 2009 as compared to 2007 – which translates to 26.7 of the American population being obese, up from 25.6 in 2007.

 

HAPPY MEAL??

Vladimir Lenin, King Tut and the McDonald's Happy Meal: What do they all have in common? A shocking resistance to Mother Nature's cycle of decomposition and biodegradability, apparently.

That's the disturbing point brought home by the latest project of New York City-based artist and photographer Sally Davies, who bought a McDonald's Happy Meal back in April and left it out in her kitchen to see how well it would hold up over time.

The results? "The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock," Davies told the U.K. Daily Mail.

 

Turn back the clock on aging muscles

 

Regular exercise can turn back the clock for aging muscle.

It may not be the fountain of youth, but researchers at York University have discovered that regular exercise can effectively turn back the clock for aging skeletal muscle.

The study, “Molecular basis for an attenuated mitochondrial adaptive plasticity in aged skeletal muscle,” was recently published in the journal Aging. The results indicate that the elderly are able to rebuild muscle mass, and while they will not achieve the abs of a 20-year-old, they can reverse significant damage and loss of muscle function caused by inactivity and old age.

 

 

Aging muscles

Have you ever noticed that people have thinner arms and legs as they get older? As we age it becomes harder to keep our muscles healthy. They get smaller, which decreases strength and increases the likelihood of falls and fractures. New research is showing how this happens — and what to do about it.

A team of Nottingham researchers has already shown that when older people eat, they cannot make muscle as fast as the young. Now they’ve found that the suppression of muscle breakdown, which also happens during feeding, is blunted with age.

 

BY RONNY TOBER 2006

I wrote this article in 2006 for a great bodybuilding magazine. Times changed and a year after this article was posted Organon Greece produced its last vials. Does that mean they disappeared from the market? The real ones did, but the counterfeits are still readily available (see picture). I’ll post more from my old articles and will update them as soon as they change appearance.

Organon, a business unit from Akzo Nobel Holland, introduced Deca-Durabolin (nandrolone decanoate) during the early 1960’s. They made it available in strengths of 25, 50, and 100 mg/ml. The brand name Deca-Durabolin® is often abbreviated as “Deca”, an abbreviation that has become synonymous with the active agent Nandrolone Decanoate.Due to its favorable high anabolic and low androgenic qualities, Deca- Durabolin soon became the most widespread and commonly used injectable anabolic steroid in the world. In bodybuilding circles, the characteristic 2-milliliter vials with the yellow flip top became the backbone of many stacks.

 

From body image to body dysmorphia

 

The way we look to ourselves and the outside world is for an important part driven by media.

If we go back in time, we mostly call certain looks to a decade. The fifties brought the “Rock and roll” and Elvis retro-style hair. When I think “sixties” I see long hair, hippies, free love, a lot of flowers and a distinct music. Its was followed by “ Punk “. People follow a certain code in fashion, hairstyle, music etc.

As long as it comes to fashion or hairstyles, most people can adapt to these unwritten rules, mostly the younger people are very eager to be accepted, you’re “in” or “out”, in the sixties you where either “hip” or not, now the magic word is “cool”. What if this typation involves our body-image?

In the mid-sixties the most admired look changed from Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe to a British fashion model called “Twiggy”. The most wanted body type changed from a fully curved voluptuous  blond model to a boyish thin girl.

Whether you're thin, fat, small, dark, blond, redhead, you wanna be something else," said the world's first boldface supermodel. "I wanted a fairy godmother to make me look like Marilyn Monroe. I had no boobs, no hips, and I wanted it desperately."

Since then the fashion markets unnatural cq unhealthy thin models. To achieve this look , mostly very young, girls develop an unnatural  eating behaviour from diet pills to bulimia and anorexia. The first signs of body dysmorphia embodied in eating disorders.

 

Quality of Chinese Growth Hormone

 

How it started

In the nineties Jin Lei a brilliant Chinese pharmaceutical student, who graduated from Beijing University in 1985,  studied in the USA. In his free time he worked hard as a research scientist at Genentech, an American biotech company and one of the world’s leading producers of human growth hormones. His special interest where antibodies that bind to human growth hormones.

In 1994 he earned a PD in pharmaceutical chemistry from the university of California. After graduation, Mr. Jin, despite many offers for well paid jobs in the USA,  wanted to return to China to start his own biopharmaceutical company and help Chinese children by producing human growth hormone.

In 1997 Jin build a manufacturing lab, called GeneScience Pharmaceuticals Company,  in partnership with a state-owned company called “ Changchun High Tech Group “,and a year later they introduced their own patented human growth hormone, called Jintropin, named after Dr Jin. This new cheap and very effective growth hormone became very popular among anti-aging aspect, life extensionists and bodybuilders. Existing companies that made enormous amounts of money on this new and overpriced compound tried their best to discredit this much cheaper Chinese competitor.

BY RONNY TOBER

 Last summer we published an extensive article about growth hormone. On our forums there is a lot discussion on the brands, the prices, and the quality of GH, especially that of Chinese origin. Generic Supplements, a Dutch underground laboratory, had done several analyses through us to find a constant and reliable API (raw powder) manufacturer. When they asked me to try and find a laboratory that was able and willing to analyse complex peptide hormones, because they wanted to analyse a generic Chinese GH version, I was very sceptical. From the research of the previous growth hormone article I knew that GeneScience had the patent in China for the manufacture of GH by secretion technology. And this method is the only one to produce 191 amino acid GH with high purity. When they offered us a sample in January 2006, we took it, and were very curious to find out the content. We ended up being greatly surprised by the results.