Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

I am home, sick and miserable from a cold which has been keeping me away from the Gym for a couple of days. Whatever happens, tomorrow I am back squatting my guts out and pressing the hell out of me.
My last healthy day there was Saturday. As we were training hard … Renatinho, Eric, Dani and I … the old blue rack arrived. It had been away for fixing. It is a pretty good rack, one with side supports that allow us to do squat-with-pause training and many other accessory exercises.
We stopped our workout to unload the truck and bring the rack inside. Gilson asked us to choose where to put it and we chose the “little room. I call that “Gilson’s Dungeon. Like Draper’s Dungeon, it is small, tight and windowless. Like Draper’s Dungeon, we have fun, we laugh and sweat together. Friendship and solidarity are almost material, dripping from our pores with the sweat.
Friday, Gilson and I had a meeting with the attorney who is helping us with the NGO paperwork. “Paraisopolis Power (www.paraisopolispower.org ) is finally a reality.
These are the hard, wild and heroic years of constructing a dream. Painful, sometimes; crazy, most of the time; exciting, always … these are unforgettable times.
I wish I can look back a few years from now and sing “these are the years that were hard fought and won (Midnight Oil … Forgotten Years).

I have been thinking on how to answer your question regarding testosterone and mood. And you know why I had to think so much? Because I had to make a hard choice: either blabber along with technical arguments in favor of which there is almost no empirical evidence or finally reveal what I have been very careful about for quite some time, which is my own personal experience with androgens. And then I thought: WTF, I have already openly described my mental illness and suicide attempt. How much more scandalous could it be to admit to the use of steroids in a self experiment? So, here it goes.
First, the technical “intro. In the early fifties, a small set of articles appeared in the medical literature concerning the psychiatric use of AAS. It was the high moment of experimenting with hormones in mental illness: insulin was widely employed and even thyroid hormones were tried, with little success. I have compiled these articles on a post. It is unfortunately still in Portuguese, but the table containing the articles is pretty self-explanatory (http://mariliacoutinho.livejournal.com/27966.html ). Under a strictly technical observation concerning the dynamics of scientific production, this trend is somewhat suspicious. One decade of a modest production bluntly discontinued with no evidence of failure or lack of results. To those more acquainted with how research is conducted, it looks more like an “aborted agenda, for unknown reasons.
Soon after the last publication on steroid applications in psychiatry, the extremely profitable line of pharmaceutical technological innovation in psychotropic anti-depressives began: first, the MAOI (mono-amine oxidase inhibitors); then, the tricyclic compounds; then, in the eighties, the SSRIs and, finally, the “atypical drugs.
Today, there is again a modest number of publications concerning a restricted application of AAS supplementation for mood disorders in aging men and women (http://www.bodystuff.org/testoandmood.html ). There is also evidence that except for excessively large doses of AAS, where undesirable side effects are observed, these substances are shown to offer more benefits than harm concerning mood and general well being (see the article “testosterone and the brain).
All this said, let me tell you my story. As I wrote before, there is no “vacation from training for me if I want to keep my mood stable. Anything longer than three days without any workout triggers some suspicious symptoms. At a certain point (after the incidents described in the previous post), I decided I had enough basis to bet on androgen levels … and not any of the amine neurotransmitters … as the culprit or hero on my mood condition. So I decided to experiment with AAS supplementation. Based on what I suspected, I thought a mildly androgenic steroid should be my best choice. I discussed this with my physician and we decided to try mesterolone (proviron). After less than a week of use on 25mg/day, I experienced something I had never felt: the “shadow of the disorder was gone, like never before. This is a hard concept to explain to non-affected people, but it is similar to what epileptics feel: there is always a “shadow, a very subtle feeling that the origin of an earthquake is active, somewhere in your brain. Even when you feel absolutely in control and well. With proviron, this feeling was gone. For the first time in my life, I felt what probably could be called “normal.
I tried other AAS and none produced the same effect. And once, I discontinued its use for about a week: the result was a very nasty depressive state.
Mesterolone is, as I said, mildly androgenic in that dose and very little anabolic. The athletic advantage, I believe, is negligible. I have posted a few weeks ago a piece concerning anti-doping and my protest against this policy, and it largely reflects my own concerns with the health benefits AAS are delivering to people like me and so many others. I do not wish to go into this argument here, but the link is obvious.
By no means I recommend the use of AAS in mental illness (or in any condition), nor do I suggest a med-free approach to it. I am only describing my own experience and self-experimentation, for whatever it is worth. In this very well defined and limited context, the result could not possibly be more positive.

These last couple of days have been a bit chaotic and I couldn’t do what I had in mind, which is give a real answer to your question on what bodybuilding means to me. I am not exactly or directly into bodybuilding: I am a powerlifter, but I love bodybuilding and I coordinate a media project on strength sports in Brazil that includes Bb. So, the short answer could be “it means my life, and would sound somewhat euphemistic. I decided to give you the long answer, where “my life becomes quite literal.
I am looking at your pictures right now. I see this smiling, obviously happy, beautiful girl with prominent deltoids and biceps … all strength and power and femininity. I wonder if you were able to “see this girl behind the overweight, unhappy and confused young mother of some years ago. I wonder if you knew that that was just a perverse disguise made by so many little and big oppressive forces that insist to hide the real you. And it works: for a while (which can be quite a long while or last a lifetime), you actually lose yourself, since all you can see is that disguise.
The first thing I wrote about bodybuilding, I think a year ago, was playing with words: “body and “building, “self and “construction, “self and “recovering. So maybe this is the starting point. Bodybuilding or strength training are means, as powerful or more, than any meditative or religious practice, to find “the real you that has been hidden by the pains of life.
This is part 1 and I am going backwards. I am starting with my two last little deaths and recoveries … naturally, through strength and strength training.
On February 2004, I entered the Emergency Room again to get stitches for a nasty self-injury I don’t remember where. It was always ugly, sometimes life threatening and always took about 10 stitches to close. I was always very quiet and serene, even a bit apathetic. I came home to find important professional decisions to be taken. I had a dinner-meeting with a colleague and went, in spite of the pain and bulky dressing on the wound. At this time I was on Geodon (a neuroleptic drug), lamotrigine (a mood stabilizer), diazepam (a benzodiazepine anxiety inhibitor) and about three other meds. I guess it was a week later that I decided that I had had enough. I had dragged a medication-refractory bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness) plus a number of “interesting co-morbid conditions (”cool new disorders) for a decade and had been through most of the wonders Big Pharm (Big Pharmaceutical Industry) delivers into the greedy and uneducated minds of psychiatrists every year. I think I had practically everything there was to take at the time. And I felt as sick and miserable as I had ever felt. Geodon finally produced a radical change in my image, which had been deteriorating for years: a persistent twitch on my face muscles and a permanent contraction of some limb muscles.
One day, I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw the caricature of institutionalized loonies: expressionless, defeated and stiff limbed. I was dead.
But there was this ancient part of my brain that remembered the little girl of 14 that had been the national sports revelation of the year, regional, state and national champion in fencing. I remembered pushing myself through other hard times, around my doctorate, through my second and torturing marriage, by running, swimming and working out. I remembered biking with my daughter, the real Sun of my life, and feeling good. So I decided that, WTF, I was dead anyway, and maybe I should trust what I had never trusted before: my intuition. I had to recover my body.
I registered on a gym near my home and dragged myself EVERY SINGLE DAY to do something … anything. By March, I had dropped all but two of the meds. By June, I was med-free, and remain so until this day. By April, all of the involuntary twitching I was so scared of being something called “tardive dyskinesia, an irreversible collateral effect of psychotropic medication, had disappeared.
I was still very thin … weighed about 92 lbs. Today I weigh 123 lbs with about 16% BF. It was still not the “real me, but pretty closer to it than the corpse in the mirror of three months earlier.
By August or September I discovered weight training. Since I have a pretty solid biological background and became a scientific information specialist, I educated myself in the fundamentals of weight training. Bought books, discovered websites, started networking. By the end of the year, I had put on 13lb of pure muscle (still no fat, something around 10%).
Things looked wonderful and I fell on the euphoria trap: thought I had “cured all my conditions and for a while I neglected my training, while in another dysfunctional relationship (rings any bell of dependent variables?). Drug free and strong, I went into a very short period of violent mood swings. And one day, I ran to our family beach house alone and slashed my throat. For reasons I still can’t explain, since I was in a deserted dirt road, an electrician found me exactly at the moment I had done the cut, I asked for help and he drove my car to a very small hospital about 5 minutes away. I lost about 1 liter (almost 2 pints) of blood, since I had cut the jugular, but they managed to stitch me back. That was July the 4th, 2005.
I finally learned that there is no “cure for whatever I have. I just have to keep training … not a little bit: INTENSE TRAINING. I must provide enough testosterone (yes, I learned testosterone does the trick and that is why cardio sports don’t work the miracle) to keep my brain working well.
Today, when I look at myself in the mirror, I recognize the real me. All the other disguises … the real skinny white expressionless ghost, the fat depressed teenager filled with guilt, the twitching movie loonie … are gone. They were never me. I look at myself in the mirror and I wave at the 14 year old fencing champion and I thank her for giving me the blessing of body memory, the one thing that saved my life and led me back to Myself, through BODY-BUILDING or SELF-BUILDING, as you like.

Many months ago, two things were happening simmultaneously here: a friend of mine was desperate for references on the “biomechanical foundations of support shirts’ influence in the Bench Press and, at the same time, Gilson and I were starting to design what would become the Parais³polis Powerlifting Program, now being legalized as a Non-Governmental Organization (www.paraisopolispower.org ). I was looking for information on equipment like crazy … at forums, at BIOMECH-L, articles at the NSCA, everywhere. Finally, I decided to contact manufacturers. I contacted Titan, with no success. They even have a forum, where I posted the question and got no reply. I got plenty of high quality feedback from folks at Fortified Iron and: Alan Thomas himself, from APT Pro WristWraps replied to me, explaining a few issues and referring me to some of his own articles. 

The fact is that Alan is not just a corporate CEO: he knows everything about the sports he supports with his equipment from experience and theory. On our correspondence, I happened to show him the social program website (at that point, still located at my own website). I was astonished when he SPONTANEOUSLY decided to support us, sending equipment to our athletes. I had sent dozens of e-mails to supplement companies asking for sponsorship and all I got were negatives. I even wrote an article about the relevance of social responsibility in sports sponsorship, which seems to be very small. Study after study demonstrated that the sponsorship business is pure marketing. 

I tried to use that in our favor, and attempted to create a “social relevance seal, just like the “sustainable development seal became important in the nineties during the environmental debate. Up to now, I have had very little positive response from companies. Alan Thomas is a great exception and this is one reason I wanted to write about him and his company here. He was not contacted for sponsorship: he took the initiative to offer it to us. Socially responsible businesses should be praised and somehow rewarded. 

However, I have a second reason to write about APTProWristWraps: even before I contacted Alan, which I actually did because of this, I used his equipment in training and competition. My friends love my APT ww because it is softer and firm at the same time, the material clearly superior to the ones they were acquainted with. And my knee wrap is just the best … hope to start with 130kg and go up to 150kg this year with it on my squat! 

It is hot as hell in S£o Paulo and it rains every single day … my picture of Hell itself. My workout buddy and I train at noon because of our work schedules and our Gym has no air conditioning. To make things worse, my normal blood pressure is 60/100, sometimes 50/90 … real low. This is definitely not my best time of the year for a meet preparation, but this is exactly what we are doing. I am on week-4 of a 8 week preparation for the first meet of the year, with low expectations.  S£o Paulo is particularly polluted these days in spite of the rain. I can’t figure why. This may be the reason why my allergic cough has improved, disappeared and then returned. I have been to the ER twice because of this cough last month. It is a pretty good and fancy hospital, they did a number of tests, took a chest X-ray and concluded it was just allergy.  I have a hard time with anti-histaminics. Promethazine knocks me out completely, even in pediatric dosage. Fexofenadine does not, but in association with pseudoephedrine, it keeps me from sleeping. At all. What really helps me sleep by controlling the coughing at a reasonable level is a Boehringer medication with Clobutinol (an anti-tussive) and Doxylamine (an anti-histaminic). Doxylamine is VERY sedating … even more than some hypnotics. I am still coughing, I see no improvement and what I DO see is that my strength has been affected. 

Clobutinol has been shown to be an ion channel blocker in a K+ pump heart system. I found nothing concerning skeletal muscle effects. Doxylamine may cause muscle injury in high doses, has smooth muscle relaxant activity, which makes me think it is not so innocuous for ANY muscle in ANY dose.  I am not very enthusiastic about all this:  

I am struggling with my Ileopsoas again and trying to avoid both injury and having everyone scolding me for being so irresponsible. The Ileopsoas complex is a dangerous site of injury for many athletes. There are not too many good references on this, none epidemiological, but Gray’s piece is quite instructive (http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/tc/tc1009/back.htm ). The ileopsoas is not visible and acts “inside the hip joint (see pictures on the links bellow), which is a first obstacle to monitor it’s condition by the athlete him(her)self. The second problem is that when it starts hurting, depending on how it has been injured or affected, it may take the form of an acute back pain, an acute abdominal pain, both or none … just something pulling inside or near the joint. 

You can read about it at the article above or you can believe me: I had all of them. Once my father took me to the Emergency room believing I was having a severe appendicitis crisis. Another time I ended up there again because friends thought it was kidney stones. Both times, it was just a nasty case of Ileopsoas pulled muscle pain. And caused by what? Can you guess? 

Because stupid me decided to run one day after having either squatted or deadlifted … heavy. On those days (long, long ago, about six months away from now:), when I knew nothing about powerlifting, this could be an excusable mistake. Not anymore: I should know better now. I have been extensively lectured on the psoas threat by Gilson (my coach) to understand the dangers of not warming up or stretching it properly, and, obviously, of further straining it through running after a heavy squat/deadlift workout. My doctor, however, has been very strict on my about cardio. She demands I do it properly at least 4 days a week. She checks me every two months or even more to see if my HDL/LDL ratio is on the range she likes it to be (plus 50 other tests:) and if it is not, then I get lectured on the dangers of heart damage on strength sports. Believe me: when I spent three months doing very little or no cardio, she really disliked the rate (although the whole cholesterol was very low and all … no deal with her). 

Walking is extremely boring, stationary bike so much more that it makes me feel like a hamster, swimming is unavailable at the moment and, to make things really worse, I LOVE running (I used to be on the high performance group on street races in S£o Paulo a year and a half ago). I try to avoid this subject with my powerlifting friends because they have scolded me more than once. They claim I am backpaddling, sabotaging my progress and, moreover, exposing myself to unnecessary injury risk. In a sense they are right: there is enough evidence to support the claim that intense strength and endurance training are not compatible and that the strength gains are cut back by such combinations. So I try to act on the “intense part of the statement, by doing it “light. At least I think it is and it feels light to me. 

Yesterday I thought it would be ok to run, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t done any “heavy squatting or deadlifting. However, I had done several accessory exercises, such as squatting with rubber bands and frontal squatting. Many reps, many sets. I was feeling just a little bit sore and: oh: sure: I should have “listened to my body. Not a running day, definitely. No, I am not from my last visit to the Emergency Room, but I am holding an ice pack on my back and I am being very careful: 

Gray’s Anatomy 

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/gray/subjects/subject?id=127 

Nice picture: http://www.fitstep.com/Advanced/Anatomy/Hip_flexors.htm 

Six months ago I entered the gym where I train today for the first time. My motivation was having read a few articles here, at bb.com , about Westside Barbell approaches to training. The reason I looked closer at the WB article was that a good friend of mine told me he was going to take part in a Deadlift contest. I thought the workout design was unusual and I learned that it came from something called “powerlifting. Up to this point I was reasonably familiar with weight training in general concerning its physiological and biomechanical basis. Had the “basic library at home, consisting of Zatsiorsky, Fleck, Bompa, etc. For the first time I picked up Fleck and looked up the last chapter, with the “sports. Ahh: interesting: So: “powerlifting is not so much about power, but about strength, and weight lifting not so much about strength, but power (which I don’t quite agree)? Worth keeping an eye at. I started to apply a modified version of a workout plan to myself and really enjoyed the “lifts, or my own crooked version of them. However, I didn’t have enough grip to do the deadlift. I already mentioned my ancient hand injury that made me look at grip training techniques and discussing that with a friend of mine, whose nick in forums is “Grip master. So Vitz, this friend, taught me many helpful exercises and I was thrilled to observe that my grip was really improving. 

At this point I was reading much more about powerlifting, discovered Metal Militia and other cool sites, but had no idea if this “thing was practiced in Brazil. I asked Vitz … he should know. Vitz introduced me to my coach, Gilson, whose team is the largest and most awarded in the country. He was very polite and invited me for a visit. It was like entering a new planet. It took some time for me to concentrate on the conversation: I was stunned with the Olympic bar fixed with what looked like car wheels hanging on a rack … came back later a took a picture of it. Then there was this beautiful set of disks, all with different bright colors … yellow, blue, red and green. And in the corner, an arrangement of smaller bars … all kinds. A sort of metal Ikebana. The racks and supports themselves were so creative, what with the funny (ornamental, for sure) rubber bands at the sides and the little red wheel with a screw. I walked about as if in Hirshhorn Museum … a big post-modern art exposition! 

Cool, man! I like it here … I thought to myself. Well, I never left the place. That same week I learned the lifts and discovered that I could hold a properly knurled bar. THAT was a bar … not the stuff I’d been training with. 

I love that place like home and its people like family. But sometimes I miss the sense of awe and wonder that Day One produced in me, and the uncontrollable excitement of being sure I had discovered something truly marvelous and irresistible. 

I promised Richard I’d make him laugh and I feel guilty because I can’t today. Today I need to bleed a little bit of the information overdose of the last two days. I’ve been assigned an article by a very nice cultural magazine in Brazil. They want me to write about the life of the slum-resident female powerlifters. I want to write an interesting piece … not another Ph.D. thesis (boooooooooring) or a “call-to-action”. A good story … something ordinary educated middle-class people (that’s their readership) will feel attracted to go through until the last period.

So I chose to make it more personal by concentrating on the lives of three women (all national and international champions): one is 14 (pre-junior), the other 21 (junior) and the third is 53 (master 2). They are all first generation Northeast immigrants to S£o Paulo, all residents at Paradise City for almost all their lives and the three of them are very close to me.

I am no na¯ve outsider … I have been a social rights activist for as long as I can remember. I am a Ph.D. in sociology. I: well, I’ve said enough: what I mean is that I shouldn’t be shocked by anything. I must say, though, that one thing is to get acquainted with violence, misery or whatever destructive human forces as a professional researcher. Another completely different is to hear that from the mouth of your sisters. Yes, that is what they are to me: my sisters. Or even my daughter (the little one, who’s not little at all, she’s almost 6ft tall and weighs 75kg, the most beautiful thing in the world).

The little girl watched drug dealers kill two of her friends; the middle girl lost 90% of her eyesight because her alcoholic and drug dealing father beat her too hard before spending 10 years in jail. All of her female childhood friends got pregnant before 18; all of her male childhood friends were killed. Her only friends are us … the powerlifting family.

Our older sister has 9 kids. Managed to prevent them from getting involved in the organized crime through a power greater than I dreamed she could have. Supplements? Rice, beans and a little meat … that is what she eats and ate all her life. She was vice-world champion in 2005, I think. Why only in 2005? Because it was the only year Gilson arranged to have her transported to the meet … no money: The source of her strength, it seems, is the same as the source of her power.

The editor gave me another week to balance the manuscript. I need time to achieve that … let my own reactions cool down a little bit.

It is still pretty weird: I travel, sleep, eat, laugh and cry with these girls. Everyday, every meet: I’m not a bad writer, but I am human, and I need some time to digest all this.

All I can say now is that powerlifting, for that community, is far, far, far greater than a sport; greater even than a family; it is the only path out of living hell.

In Hogwarts, no professor lasted long enough teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts. It is pretty tough, we must admit. Unfortunately, having attended traditional muggle K-12 in my own country and in the United States have prevented me from having any instruction at all in this amazing and extraordinary field.

I reckon I must have needed its techniques a number of times during my professional life. Who hasn’t? Who hasn’t interacted with mediocre and envious people and felt that funny feeling on back of your neck? Everybody who is not a professional vampire, right? With time, you get used to it. If you are incompetent against them like me, you learn to try and keep away, or else just let them suck the least possible amount of blood, but you know some of it they’ll drink. They are good … you are a sucker.

Recently I’ve learned that also in small, amateur, extremely deprived, hard to practice, dungeon-like gym sports such as ours (in my case, powerlifting, a typical working class sport in Brazil), we also have little vampires!

And I’ve only been around for six months … six short little months from day one, when I first said “hi to an Olympic bar and found it really artistic that all the disks had different colors (not kidding).

Really, I don’t even have motor units sufficiently stimulated to exert maximum effort … just starting to learn. And there comes this lady, who, for some reason that escapes my na¯ve mind, and decides I am spoiling her (totally self-attributed) status as the great powerlifting star in the country. She is probably the only lifter in the country with enough personal financial resources to attend international meets, she is a master athlete and: well, she has climbed her way to a very doubtful “top in this sport we are struggling to establish in the country.

We clashed a number of times: whenever I am trying to persuade corporate representatives to support our social program at Paraisopolis (www.paraisopolispower.org ), she interferes and tries to divert his attention to her own “needs (needs???) for sponsorship. Yes: we are definitely at different trenches of the same (political and social) war.

Funny thing is: whenever she is present, something weird happens to me: She trains at a fancy gym at a high income neighborhood, but yesterday she was there, parasitizing us at Parais³polis. Well: I had just done some warm-up movements with 60kg, laid on the bench for a first very light lift of 65kg, hadn’t even TOUCHED the bar and felt a funny painful cramp on the deltoid. Thought to myself: “must be innocent, I’ll press anyway. It was very, very light, just a load test with 65kg. I don’t know what happened, but I got injured.

At the South American Champs I was prepared to press 82kg. Had trained for that. Was prepared for that. Missed the 67,5kg! And then the 75kg!

I don’t believe in anything supernatural … not up to now. But this creature does twist things the wrong way when she is around. Worst of all is that everyone told me she has an “issue with me.

What I really need now is not good training … this, I have. I need a good WITCH HUNTER! hahahaha

Yesterday we had a load test at the gym. Everyone was called and we arranged the test according to the new IPF rules … precisely as an official competition. There were about 30 people. Gilson, our coach and my friend, was supposed to be referee and organizer … just that. He is injured, I am acting like a bitch to make sure he DOES NOT wrap knees or passes bars. His injury affects mainly the rhomboid and it’s a pretty old and nasty fibrosed thing. He needs to keep away from certain movements and do his physiotherapy. Most of us don’t know how to wrap ourselves … me included. I am somewhat ashamed to admit this, but not so much, considering that the first time I ever TOUCHED an Olympic bar was late July last year; that I became acquainted with powerlifting (through training forums) was just a few months earlier; and that my first championship was in August. It’s been six months since I even know this sport, let alone details, preparation and rules.

When I saw Gilson wrapping me, however, I was pissed off. With him, first, and then with myself. Before that, my workout buddy and good friend Renatinho was doing the job, but Renatinho had to prepare himself as well. I looked around and I saw Vanderlan. Vanderlan is a very good referee, an exceptional coach aid, knows all about powerlifting but: he is INJURED and cannot compete! He is the best knee wrapper I know. He was wrapping everyone … men and women alike. He was soaked in sweat and at a certain point he asked me if I had some kind of pain spray. I felt horrible. Vandinho was killing himself, spoiling weeks of physiotherapy because we were not realizing that the real need for our folks and the sport here is the SUPPORT TEAM. Much more than referees.

I revised the former translated copy of the IPF rules and updated the text, besides correcting translation mistakes. Supposedly, I know the rules quite well. The important ones, at least. It is hard for me to force myself to memorize things I believe are useless for a referee and should be technically checked by other staff, but it would be ok.

I thought and I thought: I thought about Vandinho wrapping knees all alone and how I should be there doing the job with him: I thought about selfish personal disputes that would be inevitably at play once I became a referee: I thought about my own doubts and criticisms towards the IPF: And I decided to leave it alone. At least for a while.

Later, when I feel I have fulfilled other much more pressing demands, when our powerlifting social program (www.paraisopolispower.org ) is well and strong, when there are enough hands to wrap knees, to fit support shirts and suits, to tighten belts and prepare athletes: then I may think of taking this test and becoming a referee.