Micellar Mike’s BodyBlog

After a year and a half of searching schools, researching team needs and program history, shooting hundreds of emails and phone calls, and months of intense training my search for a place to continue playing baseball is finally over! On August 22nd I will be leaving Boise for Phoenix to play ball for Grand Canyon University! Since I finished my degree in 3 years I will also be enrolling in graduate school so I can be eligible to play. Phoenix looks to be a great fit academically, athletically, and I love the area! There is not better place in the country to be for baseball with as many teams and scouts that are in the Phoenix area.

I will be leaving customer service here at BB.com August 1st to finish up my summer season and make sure everything is set up for my move. I wanted to send out a big thank you to everyone who has been supportive and encouraged me to keep working hard. You all helped give me the extra boost to keep me on track and reminded me to be patient so this situation could finally come around!

I narrowed a list down to 10 schools and have contacted all of them about playing ball for them this fall and next spring. The list is:

• Northwest Nazarene (Nampa, ID)
• St. Martin’s (Lacey, WA)
• Colorado Christian (Denver, CO)
• Regis University (Denver, CO)
• Grand Canyon (Phoenix, AZ)
• Cal State Chico
• Cal State Dominguez Hills
• Cal State LA
• Cal State San Bernardino
• University of California San Diego

So far I have heard back from NNU, Colorado Christian, St. Martin’s and Cal State San Bernardino. CSUSB is the best fit for me academically and seems to be as far as baseball goes as well, but I will stay in touch with each team and see if there is any more information or any other teams that maybe find me over the summer. Just an update for everyone! I appreciate all the support and I will keep everyone posted!

I lifted for the first time in a while last night and luckily haven’t lost anything at all. During season I usually do 1-3 full body workouts a week on off days and make sure I get a ton of sleep and glutamine to be good to go the next day. I hit an workout late last night and did well considering it was the first time in over a week I had lifted. With 5-6 games a week those off days are sometimes needed for rest instead of maintenance, but I finally managed to get some work in last night. So far I have heard back from 2 schools, one in Denver and one in Oklahoma about playing ball next year. Hopefully I can find a few other offers that are a little closer or fit my academic needs more, but I am sitting better than last year at this time when I couldn’t get a release from my old school in Hawaii. I will keep the updates coming and throw a workout tracker up as well!

Summer ball started a couple weeks ago and we have been doing well. As some of you saw by my goals I went to a Padres tryout in Portland and did well, but at open tryouts they really just look for pitchers unless you are blazing fast, have a cannon and hit well. Unfortunately I only fit in the last 2 and not quick enough to turn heads at those kind of events. I’m not slow, but they expect Superman to tryout unless you are a pitcher. Even though I did well at the last 2 pro tryouts I went to I had struggled a little bit in summer ball. After hitting low-mid 90s those 78-86mph pitchers seem like the ball takes FOREVER to get to the plate and I have been so far out in front of everything it is insane! As with everything I do I need to just be a little patient and wait for the ball a split second and things will start to happen! I’m doing another school search also starting on the west coast with 5 California teams, 2 Colorado teams, and 1 team in both Arizona, Idaho and Washington. With my school and NCAA rules situation I am limited as to where I can play and need to find a place that needs an outfielder. I’ll be working my way further east as the season goes on but I need to put up some good numbers to get a decent look by schools. Another game tonight and hoping that things will start to finally turn and I will wait that extra split second.

 As far as supplements go Aplodan and Leukic are still helping a ton and I added Bodyquick before games to help me with focus and concentration. That stuff is money! I have never had better focus and vision in my life!

On May 20th I added 3 Muscletech products to my already loaded stack to give them a test and see if they actually did what their crazy ads say they do. Having a degree in Advertising myself it is funny to see the way they market their products and the choice words they throw in to make the average person think they are buying some sort of steroid that slipped past everyone. To people with any sort of knowledge we just kinda laugh and go right for the ingredients label to see what they are really all about.

The 3 products I have been using are Aplodan, Leukic and Anator P70. Leukic made sense to me because it is basically fancy Leucine and that is an obvious choice to help make progress. Aplodan was also one that interested me but more because they made huge claims about the strength and that was something I really wanted to test and see if it worked. Anator P70 was my least favorite of the 3 going into it because of the monohydrate and most post-workout drinks don’t hold a candle to Torrent.

 After 3 weeks of using these products as directed and training extremely hard I honestly like them. Aplodan is a little tough to tell if it works since it is more of a throughout the day product, but I have noticed strength increasing a lot. Leukic did everything I expected it to and gave me a little boost throughout workout I didn’t have before. I wasn’t too happy about the 6 decent sized pills, but after a few days I got used to them and it was no biggie. Anator P70 was my biggest shock of all 3! Althought the Fruit Punch flavor tastes a little like cough syrup, it has been working great and fueling me after my workouts. If they could just throw some waxy maize, whey isolate instead of concentrate and any other type of creatine in the world aside from monohydrate I would be all about this product! Even without the top of the line ingredients it has still been working awesome.
If you check out my charts my bodyfat has gone down a top, strength has gone up even though I am doing more sport-specific workouts and I am in probably the best shape I’ve even been in aside from the running/endurance part of things. I have endurance to work out and train, but running no thanks! I honestly don’t need a whole lot of cardio endurance with baseball anyway so it’s all good!

So I hit up a late workout last night at about 11:30pm. I was being lazy and finally decided to just suck it up and hit the gym for a little bit. I was a little tired but NO Shotgun fixed that problem right away! When I got there I noticed there were a ton of cars there for being that late, probably about 20 or so. I would have guessed maybe 2 or 3. I was curious to see what type of people would actually be there at that time. Younger people hitting the gym instead of going out? Older people for some odd reason? An in between croud getting off of work at the late shift? Who was going to be at the gym at this time? I was shocked because normally there is a mix of everyone and people from all different lifestyles. I noticed that half the cars were of people playing late night basketball… good stuff for people who like/are decent at basketball, but not my style. There were actually a couple of older couples working out together which is always cool to see, but a lot later than I would have guessed. The rest were all people around my age just hitting the weights and getting some work in. The thing that surprised me the most is that aside from 2 older ladies with their husbands doing circuit training everyone in the whole place was male! Was this just a fluke and weird night or do the ladies in Boise not work out that late? I know that there were probably more out at bars and drinking than there should have been, but not ONE younger female at the gym? Just kind of a random experience but made me wonder for a little bit. It is crazy how few females 18-25 take care of themselves the way males of the same age do. It might just be the group of people I am around, but even before a night of going out all the guys I know seem to make time to hit the gym first. It is the same way the next day. Even after a long night and not feeling great the next day we all manage to make time and at least do some cardio or something… what is the deal with the trend here? For all the ladies in this age group that might read this and don’t fit the mold… GREAT JOB! You are select group of people who actually care about your health at that age! This is just sharing my observations and something to think about. I found it kind of interesting and sad myself but something to ponder!

Those of you who know me, have talked to me, or maybe even visited my page know that I am searching for somewhere to play baseball next fall. It would be nice to do a MLB or minor league tryout and not have to worry about going back to school, but just in case I made a list of 27 schools to contact and see what I could get done. I sorted this schools by all of the Divison I teams in the country and who needs experienced outfielders next year. I actually made a resume and listed my past, current happenings and my goals for the future. I threw in a picture from my last baseball season and emailed 18 of the schools. The other 9 schools either had website issues or I couldn’t find contact emails for them. I will be mailing this out to all 27 schools this week and beginning to weed out the schools until I find the right fit! Times are getting crazy but after my hard work and staying focused I am excited to see where I might end up!

I used to work out the entire time with headphones on listening to my 200+ song playlist of workout music of a variety of styles to get me pumped and focused. I did this 5-6 days a week for about a year and a half and it really helped. When I didn’t use them I felt super mellow and wasn’t ready to go at all. The past few months I have been going hard with Jamming Jack and we didn’t use headphone at all. I was getting crazy increases in strength and size (check out my charts) and didn’t have a lack of focus at all. Last week  Jack had some things to take care of and I decided to down some SuperPump 250 and get nasty on some legs by myself! I did a little bit more weight that I had done the week before, but nothing too crazy. My last 2 sets I had to snatch the headphone out of my ears because I felt out of breathe. The music seriously made me so pumped that I felt like my heart was going to explode! It was pretty awesome but freaked me out at the same time. It’s just nuts to think about the effect that a song can have mentally. The music got me in a whole different frame of mind.

So I threw some new "progress" pictures up last night and I got to thinking. Did I really make progress? I can see and feel that I did, but since I didn’t put any pictures up from 3 weeks ago, it is hard to tell. I look about the same as I did in my other pictures but smaller and a little more cut, but nothing huge. I have to say that 10lbs gone didn’t show up on a camera like I would have liked! I want to throw some body fat readings up, because I’m sure that went down at least a little bit, but Gold’s Gym is being a pain and making it pretty impossible to get that done! Hopefully I can throw those up there in the next few days so the change can actually be seen. Until then, I can’t wait for the bulk next Monday!!!

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