In the several years I’ve known Dr. Melina Bell as a philosophy professor, I’ve become familiar with her research interests. She’s a curious, dogged scholar, with an agile mind that leads to an admirably protean body of work.  She’s also an accomplished natural bodybuilder, with success at multiple levels of competition.  In this interview we talk about her training, the intersection of bodybuilding and philosophy, and the state of the sport itself.

Brandon Patterson: Thanks for having me over. Let’s start with your place in academia.

Dr. Melina Bell:  I teach Philosophy, Women’s and Gender Studies, and am in our poverty program at Washington and Lee University. I specialize in ethics, philosophy, law, and social policy—especially policy relating to social inequalities involving race, sex, and socio-economic inequality.

BP:  How have you fared in bodybuilding?

MB: When I was at the University of Pennsylvania studying for my PhD, I entered the annual competition they have there, which is a fundraiser for the women’s track team. It’s called “Mr. and Ms. Penn.” To my amazement, I won two in a row.  Then I started coaching the Ms. Penn team and branching out into local amateur competitions, mostly with NPC or [the natural competitions promoted by] NABBA.  Some were in the Philly area, some were in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Once I branched out from Mr. and Ms. Penn I kept placing second place all the time.  There was always someone just a little bit better than me. I had my breakthrough in 2008 at the INBF Hercules in New York when I pro qualified in WNBF.  That had been my first INBF competition and I qualified for WNBF. My first professional competition was the Pro American in 2010 in Westborough, Mass., which was promoted by Nancy Andrews. She is a well-known natural bodybuilder in the WNBF. In 2012 I was in the Naturally Fit Pro International in Austin Texas.

I haven’t placed as well in the professional contests, where I think there are people who are more able to get the mass than I am. Judges say that I have to develop more mass to be competitive. I tend to get pretty lean, and usually they like my routines and they like my posing. It’s that mass I’m trying to work on, especially my legs. I just don’t seem to have the genes that make the outer sweep that’s so valued. I’ve gone from doing legs once a week to twice a week to increase that leg mass.

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Melina Bell at the INBF Hercules, 2009

 

BP:  What got you into the sport?

MB: My father is a phys-ed teacher. Because he was a physical education teacher and my family was very athletic, he tried to encourage me to be athletic. My youthful rebellion to this was to become a bookworm and just sit around and not do anything but read books.

But there’s this competition my family has annually called the Summer Games. We have all these different events that—not just with my family, but family friends and their families—compete in. I got tired of my sister, who’s seven years younger than I am, completely kicking my butt, so I decided when I bought my first house across the street from the YMCA that I was going to start being able to bench press and do pull-ups. I progressed quite bit in that year at the YMCA and started winning Summer Games competitions.

BP: Do you have a similar community at Washington and Lee?

MB: This is actually the first school I’ve been at where other female bodybuilders or at least strength athletes of some kind weren't present. At BU, Tufts, and Penn there were always women strength athletes. My first year here there was a law student who was a powerlifter, but she was a third-year student so we only had that one year.

BP: How does that work for you, being the only bodybuilder on campus?

MB: It’s hard not to have a community. It was easier when I had people in the gym who were also training, and we could sympathize with each other about the diet, share tips, encourage each other, and train with each other. I got out of touch with a lot of things that were going on in bodybuilding from being away from that community.

For example, diet is changing. I used to eliminate carbs almost completely. Then last year I was at a workshop run by Nancy Andrews, and at that nutrition clinic I attended I learned that the new approach is not to eliminate carbs. For the show in Austin, I reduced carbs but kept them equal to my protein intake. With that diet, by the last couple of weeks, I was able to cut out all of my cardio, where previously I’d been doing two sessions a day on top of my lifting to lean out. I found out that I burned calories a lot better taking in the carbs—clean carbs, like sweet potatoes and oatmeal—than cutting them all out. I had much better progress.

BP: Did you have to be more restrictive with calories?

MB: No, quite the opposite. Before, when I cut the carbs, I was down to 900 calories a day (I maintain at 1600). This time I never went below 1200. I could eat more and exercise less with the carbs. I also kept my sanity a lot better and could concentrate on things in a way I couldn’t when carb-deprived.

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BP: It’s interesting that you have this wealth of bodybuilding experience and you’ve been able to merge it with your academic career. You’ve published several articles about a philosophical take on physique competition. Why did you make bodybuilding part of your scholarly work?

MB:  I didn’t make the connection at first.  In my third year at Penn, when I was coaching competitors, I was backstage at the competition with the contestants. This was after weeks and weeks of preparation, of encouraging women who were ready to give up because they just broke down and had a donut, or they just couldn’t take it anymore, or their friends didn’t want to be around them because they were so cranky. I was trying to encourage them through all of this: they had worked really hard and they looked great.

We were in the pump-up room when the local press came backstage. My track coach friend had arranged it and was excited for the publicity. The press asked permission to speak with the athletes, and I said “Sure, as long as the athletes want to.” This is a female journalist, and the first question she asks is, “do you realize how far back you’re setting feminism by dancing around stage in a bikini?”

It was so obnoxious.  This athlete is so excited, after all this preparation, to get out there and do her routine and have a good time, and her face just fell. I was so angry that I cut in and told the reporter, “it’s over, this interview is done, get out of this backstage area. And why don’t you go ask that to the male athletes?”

It was a complete lack of parity. She’d never say the same thing to a man. Then I started wondering if it was the same thing. Women’s bodies are generally objectified in a way that men’s are not. Men are probably becoming more objectified now, but not to the same extent. I ended taking this idea up as part of a directed study so I’d have time to do the proper research. I was surprised to find that there were a lot of female academics who are strength athletes. Leslie Heywood is an English Professor who moved from bodybuilding to powerlifting (I think because she found the powerlifting community more supportive). There’s Joanna Frueh, an artist and teacher, who wrote Monster/beauty. Susan Bordo is a professor at the University of Kentucky who’s a sociology professor who writes about bodybuilding. Elon University’s Anne Bolin is an anthropology professor who competes.

So I thought I was the only one, but it turns out I wasn’t. I even know another philosophy professor, Shay Welch at Spelman College, who’s a figure competitor.

BP: Does this double-standard show up in the bodybuilding world itself?

MB: Definitely. Bodybuilding contests used to be just men. Sometimes they’d have a bikini contest that went with the men’s bodybuilding. Then in the 1970’s this movement was really strong where women bodybuilders emerged and Ms. Olympia emerged as shown in Pumping Iron II. There was this real idea that it was going to be equal, that there were going to be these women bodybuilders who were as amazing as men and there were going to be parallel tracks.

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Melina Bell at the INBF Hercules, 2009

 

But the cultural mood swung back the other way, I think, and there was a lot of backlash to feminism, to strong women, even to women’s equality. At that point, we started to see the ranks of women bodybuilders dwindling and promoters came up with these other categories. There was the fitness category (which actually is a very athletic category done by men as well as women) which was an alternative to traditional bodybuilding. But what happened was there were a lot of women who wanted that less-developed, less massive physique, who were doing fitness. Fitness is very difficult and not everyone can do those gymnastic moves. So, they developed the figure category which was supposed to be the same physique, but you didn’t have an athletic routine attached. The fitness events usually had routines with themes and props. It was more of a performance than most bodybuilding routines.

BP: It sounds pageant-like.

MB: It was very pageant-y. Oh, and they wore high heels as well. So now it’s gone to these other categories where varying levels of muscularity are required. I don’t know how the judges understand what the criteria are because there are so many categories. I’ve heard a lot of judges complain, “well, how is the physique category supposed to be different from the fitness category?”

All of them (except bodybuilding in WNBF) require that you wear high heels.  You have to walk around in these huge high heels. It’s about makeup, it’s about facial beauty, a good hair style. The athletes have to be feminine and also meet criteria for muscle definition and size. The poses are done with open hands instead of fists, which some female bodybuilders do too. I find it awkward to flex muscles without making a fist.

It’s a very different thing from the men’s competition, and part of the problem is that the money for women’s bodybuilding, even if it’s the same amount as the men get (which it often isn’t) is divided among all these different categories. Any particular winner of a category is going to get a lot less money than the male bodybuilding winner.

BP: Have the divisions kept women’s bodybuilding more “pure?”

MB: I don’t think so. I think it has made it older. In most of my competitions, the masters and overall categories are all full of the same competitors and we’re all over thirty-five or forty now. This isn’t true in Europe or Australia, but it is true in the US that fewer and fewer young women are interested in bodybuilding as opposed to other categories.

As far as the competitions themselves, it’s still definitely expected that poses be feminine. Women do their most muscular differently than men do theirs. There are certain poses that are never asked of women that are asked of men—I’ve never seen women do a hamstring curl or a forearms pose. We definitely have to be made-up and have our hair done. I’ve even been told by a judge in a competition that things were fine with my physique, but I should get someone to help me with my hair and makeup and that I should definitely consider putting pads in my top. After that, I did have someone help me with my hair and makeup, but I did not put pads in my top. Breast implants are very common among bodybuilders.

BP: On the same theme, in reading your articles an author you cite stated that “feminist bodybuilding is about sovereignty.” Could you talk about that concept a little more?

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MB:  That’s Leslie Heywood, actually, that you’ve quoted. For some female bodybuilders, I think their focus is on attracting admiration, mainly heterosexual male admiration, and I think this why we’ve seen a trend towards participation in less-muscular categories; they don’t want a muscular physique because there are a lot of men who find that off-putting, or at least not sexually attractive.

But for many bodybuilders it’s not about that at all. It’s about having confidence and strength, and this knowledge of what your body can do and not just what it looks like. It becomes a way to transgress the norms of women’s bodies where they’re expected to be smaller, more fragile, to be sort of in the position of the subordinate where you’re more passive and you don’t make demands in terms of taking up space.

There’s a famous book by a photographer named Marianne Wex that shows people in different social settings, like a train station or a bench waiting for the bus. In the photos, the women are sitting in positions that are very restricted, with their legs crossed and their arms drawn in.  It’s almost like they’re hiding or defending themselves. If you drew a circle around them you’d find that it’s really small and you can see this idea expressed visually about how women are supposed to be restricted in space. No one thinks it’s feminine when women spread out in their chairs and spread their legs apart and fling their arms out the way men typically do in what Wex calls a “proffering posture.”

Part of the concept of sovereignty is that you’re taking up the space you’re entitled to as a human being. You’re not presenting yourself as a passive object to be subsumed within the norms of beauty by other people.  And you’re also putting yourself in a position where you don’t look so much like a good target for violence. It’s all of these things—it’s asserting the bodily sovereignty that a lot of men naturally feel that they have.

BP: You’ve also created a philosophical framework for bodybuilding that draws on the work of Immanuel Kant.

MB: In ethics, you can say there are three major theories. There’s virtue ethics, which is associated with Aristotle. There’s consequentialism—Mill’s utilitarianism is probably the most famous variety. And there’s deontological ethics, which Kant is the most famous example of. Kant believes that there are rules that are, in a sense, legislated by people to themselves just because they’re human: it’s sort of built into them because of their human rationality.

Kant’s view was theological in that God had given us this rationality, created us in his image, and therefore when we gave the law to ourselves, we would be truly autonomous, truly governing ourselves in a free way. When we do things that are morally wrong, it’s because there’s something clouding our ability to see what reason demands of us. Kant says the “categorical imperative” is the moral law that, if we recognize it, we will automatically do the right thing. It motivates all rational beings. It’s our desires that get in the way of our being able to see reason and do our moral duty.

I’m not actually an ethical Kantian in the sense that there are certain theological aspects to it I prefer to avoid. His theory of aesthetics, though, is actually what I believe to be the “right” theory of aesthetics. I had a graduate seminar in aesthetics with probably the most famous scholar of Kantian ethics, Paul Guyer, and that’s where I got interested. Kant’s aesthetics are special because for him beauty is not in the eye of the beholder the way it is for utilitarians.

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Most people might think about it this way: you might think something is beautiful, I might think something else is beautiful. There’s just no truth to the matter—we all have different tastes and preferences. Kant, though, thought that human beings who were rationally attuned in a certain way could see what really was beautiful—not that it’s objective in the sense that things are beautiful from some non-human perspective, but that human beings could all agree because we have the same reason, we all have the same structure of reasoning, the same cognitive faculties as human beings, and that there are certain things our human faculties should perceive as beautiful. There’s a right answer about these kinds of things. Kant thought that developing your aesthetic sensitivity makes it easier to develop a propensity to conform your will to morality—to the categorical imperative—which in a way is ignoring your own self-interest and your own desires.

Aesthetic objects command your will in the same way to pronounce them beautiful. It’s just that people have a much easier time perceiving things through their own interest. So perceiving things as beautiful can be a way to train yourself to look past your self-interest, to use your cognitive capacities to recognize if a certain thing is beautiful or not. For Kant, anything that hurts the human being is going to undermine his or her rationality. If you think about it, when you’re sick and you’re miserable, the last thing you feel like doing is the right thing. It’s harder to control your will when you’re vulnerable. Anything that hurts your well-being is going to compromise your ability to follow moral law. If we learn to appreciate aesthetically things that damage human well-being, then what we’re doing is deforming our will, inclining it towards things that hurt people.

Instead, we should incline our will towards things that are good, that promote well-being, that promote morality. That means having an aesthetic appreciation for beautiful things that are recognized according to human cognitive abilities. Not things that have a false beauty.

BP: How does this aesthetic sense fit into the world of bodybuilding?

MB: One of things I was trying to think of was, “what is beauty in the human form?” Because this is what bodybuilding ostensibly says it’s doing: looking at the human form and trying to figure out what the ‘ideal’ is. Some people say it’s an androcentric ideal to the extent that muscle is associated with masculinity, and therefore it masculinizes the sense of beauty. That doesn’t seem right to me because we all have muscles, and if muscles are beautiful why shouldn’t they be beautiful in both men and women?

It seems natural bodybuilders are much more beautiful to a wider variety of people than those who use PEDs and end up really, really big. Maybe what’s going is that at some level we recognize this enhanced body inclines humans to appreciate and emulate a damaging norm. Illegal performance enhancing drugs can be very detrimental to the human body and undermine health. The Kantian makes sense in this particular instance because what many people are finding as too much development (in both men and women) is starting to impede health and giving a false appearance of health.

I’m not saying that these people are doing something morally wrong or trying to criticize people who are using PEDs—I think that’s their choice, and it’s not meant to be a critique of them. I’m critiquing the standards that force them into making these choices because that’s what you have to do if you want to win a no-test, pro bodybuilding competition. You have to enhance. You can’t win if you don’t enhance.

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If we just had natural bodybuilding like WNBF does—a lie-detector test as well as a urine test to absolutely make sure people aren’t using—we’d have a standard that picks out beautiful people (in a Kantian manner) while not doing anything to undermine their health. So in that sense it’s very Kantian both morally and aesthetically.

BP:  Would it be a fair to say a Muscle Beach physique from say the 50’s would be morally acceptable, then?

MB: I don’t mean to put a moral judgment on physiques or athletes. I would say it’d be a more beautiful body than some.

BP:  Would any other behaviors associated with bodybuilding contribute to a negative aesthetic? Where would breast implants, for example, fall?

MB: I’d say it’s a personal choice because I understand someone saying, “look, I have no breasts after I’ve dieted.” I can completely understand that. But male bodybuilders aren’t allowed to have implants: you can’t get biceps implants or calf implants. Also, breast size shouldn’t really have an influence on judging standards—you certainly don’t ask men to enhance their “package.” In fact, when women compete in bodybuilding, breasts aren’t proportionately enlarged by training (unlike the underlying pectorals, which do grow) because they’re mostly fat.  The idea that enhancing them improves your judging scores is a double standard, as is the idea that femininity is as important as musculature.

BP: Do common legal practices in natural bodybuilding, such as drying out, pre-contest cutting, or even the damage incurred in strength training, run afoul of Kantian aesthetics?

MB: I don’t think strength training is necessarily unhealthy—of course there are ways to do it unhealthily—but you can be a very successful natural bodybuilder and not do training that’s unhealthy. The diet is probably not great for you to do all the time, but for twelve or fourteen weeks a cutting plan doesn’t seem to have any serious negative effects, particularly negative long-term effects. In fact, calorie restriction may have positive benefits beyond lost fat mass and effects on blood profiles, as some longevity studies hint at. The dehydration part is very short-term, 24 to 48 hours, so there’s no real effect there. People also aren’t dehydrating like they used to. That’s another thing that seems to be going away. Restoring normal water balance seems like a better way to demonstrate vascularity.

BP: If it was proven that a PED was perfectly safe or even enhanced health, could a bodybuilder who used it be considered beautiful? Hormone Replacement Therapy might be a real-world example. To push the question, if there were a magic pill that could bestow you with competition-level mass and leanness without side effects, would its users meet the Kantian ideal? Would the legality of such a hypothetical pill impact your decision?

MB: If a PED were perfectly safe or health-enhancing, I believe a bodybuilder who used it could be considered beautiful under a Kantian aesthetic standard. Those who appreciated the bodybuilder’s physique would not be inclining their will to appreciate what is harmful to humans.  You might think, "but wouldn’t the person’s appearance actually be the same as it is now?" I am inclined to think not. There are certain noticeable physical aspects of PED use, such as an enlarged abdomen [with androgens.]  I am not sure exactly in what ways a healthy PED-enhanced body would look different from the sort of enhancement we see now, but that is one thing that occurs to me. If Kant’s theory is right, though, we would expect that either healthy enhanced bodies would look different from the enhancement accompanied by health risks, or alternatively we would expect the general public to begin to find these healthy larger physiques more appealing despite a small or barely detectible difference.

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As for the legality, it is not clear why a PED would be made illegal if it did not harm health. But assuming it were illegal, there may be good moral reasons not to use it, if there is a moral duty to obey a reasonably just law. If it were really expensive, such that it would make the playing field too uneven for athletes, that could be a reason for an organization to ban use of the PED. This seems unlikely to happen, though, given that even natural bodybuilding currently is very expensive to participate in, when one considers the cost of professional training and diet advice, travel costs, tanning and suits, entry fees, photographs, drug testing, and so forth.

In any event, the legality or fairness of this hypothetical healthy PED is a different issue from its aesthetics. I would say even if it were wrong to use the PED for some reason, that would be a separate moral question that does not bear directly on the question of aesthetics and whether such an enhanced physique would be considered beautiful, from a Kantian point of view. This is because what would make the hypothetical PED wrong to use would be contingent circumstances, such as the cost or legality, which could be changed by social choices and conventions.  The hypothetical PED would not be intrinsically harmful to human health, only harmful under a certain set of contingent circumstances.

As for the comparison to HRT, though, it seems that the safety of HRT itself is now being questioned. Its use has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and blood clots, as well as having some less-serious side effects.

BP: How are you training these days? You mentioned working on your quad sweep earlier.

MB: This past year I’ve been doing leg workouts with my quads on Monday, and then I do a hamstrings/posterior chain workout on Thursday. Tuesday back, Wednesday chest, and Friday shoulders. I try to get biceps in on back day, triceps on chest day, and other things on the second leg day or the shoulder day. Calves I do with legs, and ab work three times a week when I can get it in.

Generally for a body part I’ll do four different exercises for four sets, with anywhere from six to twelve reps per set. I’ll move from heavier lifts to lighter ones, and from barbells to dumbbells, something with cables, with different grips and stances all throughout. I usually rotate exercises every three weeks.

BP: Why do you train on five consecutive days? Do you have to be more cautious with balancing work and recovery?

MB: I train on five consecutive days mostly because it suits the rest of my schedule and the schedule of my training partners (two chemistry professors). My gym is at the university, so it is convenient to train on work days before work. I would have to make a special trip to campus for workouts on weekends, and also would have to work out later (due to the different gym hours on weekends). Instead, I prefer to hike with my spouse on weekends. Most importantly, though, my training partners train on weekdays, and I prefer not to train alone. Back, chest and shoulders I only train once a week, legs I split until quads and hamstrings/glutes, each of which is done only once a week. Arms, abs and calves recover quickly and many people train them more than once a week. I feel that I get enough recovery time before training any given body part again. A muscle group usually does not feel sore by the time I train it again.

I also arrange my workouts so that the muscle groups I want to focus on building most are trained at the beginning of the week. Although it is not ideal to train five days in a row, I haven’t seen much of a difference in my results from when I used to train three days on, one day off.  The tradeoff is between having a spotter and being able to lift more weight, or taking more rest in between workouts but having to train 20-40% of the time alone. And doing cardio in the mountains on weekends, or doing it in the gym or in town.

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BP: Do you periodize your training?

MB: I’ll do more of a powerlifting-style routine in the winter where I pyramid up to a one-rep max for my squat, bench press, and deadlift, for about six weeks. My first lift will be the powerlift, starting off with 50-60% of my one-rep max for fifteen reps, then 70% for eight, then about 80% for four, 90% for two, then single reps going for a max.

BP: Do you feel like the powerlifitng gains directly correlate to more muscle gain, or is there another reason for switching styles?

MB: The big part of it was that I was competing in powerlifting. We used to have a competition [at my current school], but no longer do because it was too labor intensive for the number of participants we had. So that winter cycle was mostly to keep me in shape for powerlifting.  But powerlifting strength gains do translate into more muscle just because you can add more weight to your mass-building work. So I’ve found I can actually increase my gains by cycling through powerlifting and mass-building. Some people do a high-rep cycle before a contest, but I’ll never do that again because I just lose muscle.

BP: Do you have primary exercises you build your programming around?

MB: Squat/bench press/deadlift is the core for me that I built everything around.

BP: The classic approach.

MB: In a lot of ways, I do have a classic approach. I’ve just found it works for me. I’ve tried a lot of different things and that just seems like what gets the best results for me.

BP: And how are the quads coming along?

MB: I don’t see anything yet, but it’s really hard to tell until I’ve dieted down.

BP: What’s your off-season diet structured like?

MB: Off-season I eat mostly clean, but I’ll have some treats every now and then. I’ll go out to eat and not worry too much about what I’m eating. I’m not ordering the most fattening thing on the menu or anything deep-fried, but that’s more because I don’t like it. I’ve really started to develop a taste for things that are maybe a little more healthier or cleaner, like a salad with grilled chicken. Fried foods have never really been a temptation, but ice cream may be my downfall. Especially if it has peanut butter in it. I’ll have ice cream now and then, or a beer or a glass of wine. It’s not significantly different [from my in-season diet.]  I’ll eat salads with chicken, Greek yogurt, oatmeal, fried eggs (I love fried eggs.) For dinner, I like lean turkey chili, stir-fries with tempeh, Indian dishes like vindaloo chicken. Actually, my dinners are usually different kinds of chicken with vegetables or oatmeal or a sweet potato. I’m not a huge rice fan. I will have Ezekiel bread with peanut butter, but just a little bit. I have to buy natural peanut butter in small amounts because otherwise I’ll eat the whole jar.

BP: Do you track your macros and calories?

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MB: I do. My spouse is a software engineer so he wrote me a program to do it, which he’s hoping to sell as an app. He wrote it on Palm Pre, so it has to be ported to Android or Apple. He hasn’t figured out how to do that yet. But basically it calculates all of my calories, my protein and other macros, and gives me my totals for the day and my targets. I do count my macros in the off-season (maybe not when I go on vacation) because it helps me feel safe.

BP: What are your targets?

MB: 1600 calories is my daily off-season target, and I’ll look for 130 grams of protein, about 160 grams of carbs, and the rest fats. It usually turns out to be 35% protein, 40% carbs, and then around 25% fat.

BP: You’re pretty strict with that throughout?

MB: For the most part. As long as I’m not eating out.

BP: What’s it like being a bodybuilder and a professor at an institute of higher education?

MB: I don’t think anyone looks at it any differently than they would someone who’s a marathon runner or a cyclist. They know I’m committed to bodybuilding, but it isn’t that unusual; there are several people here who are heavily involved in sports. It’s a way to balance the body and the mind.

BP: To wrap things up, do you have any tips for our readers?

MB: For me the most important thing is changing up my routine. You just can’t keep doing the same exercises over and over. Be willing to try things that are outside what you usually do, like Olympic lifts. My training partners and I will sometimes just do a workout where we hit the heavy bag. It’s important to have a rest day, even active rest like walking, so your body recovers a bit, especially when you get older.

You should also have, if not a training partner, than at least someone to watch you lift every now and then to make sure your form is good and you’re symmetrical. It’s so hard to judge yourself—you’ll miss asymmetries and bad form because it feels like you’re doing something that you’re actually not doing.

As far as diet, the only way I get by (and a lot of bodybuilders do this) is to make all my meals on weekends. You put your Tupperware in the freezer and take food with you. There’s always food with you. Some people like cheat days, but I’ve never been able to handle them—it just completely ruins me. It makes me want to eat more after. If you have a problem with that, I suggest trying ten days where you go without a cheat and see if you still want to cheat.

You should journal everything you eat. Sometimes having to write down everything will make you want to not eat that piece of chocolate cake because you’re like, “Aw, man, I have to write that down.” Or if you’re counting calories, “Man, that’s 700 calories, do I really want to eat that?” I would not carb deplete or bother with dehydration—I like Dr. Joe Klemczewski’s work on this. He’s a WNBF athlete who’s written a lot about that.

For contest prep, get some posing coaching from somebody. Start posing and have your routine together well before the show—before you’re cut and you can really see anything.

BP: Melina, thanks so much for talking with us. Best of luck with your future competitions.

MB: Thank you.

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