Dino and Christy Resendes

Fiercely Determined

For Dino and Christy Resendes of Fairhaven, the pursuit of competitive bodybuilding isn't easy -- and that's the point

By JON COUTURE, Standard-Times staff writer

It's a rainy Saturday night in Connecticut, and inside the auditorium at East Haven High School, halogen lamps are focused center stage.

Deeply tanned and scantily clad, five women stand in the almost blinding light. Three hold runner-up trophies as the other two remain back, hands clasped, waiting to discover just what will be written on the prize they'll take home that night.

One looks down, eyes closed, hoping not to hear her number called next. The other looks straight out, almost defiant, with a smile burning nearly as bright as the lamps she's facing.

Then, the announcer speaks, ending the suspense.

"Second place ... goes to contestant number ..."

Maybe we should stop there. To truly appreciate the end of the story, we should start at the beginning.

When it comes to bodybuilding, that could be considered 1977, when the world met a brash Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger in Charles Gaines and George Butler's 'Pumping Iron.'

The images of a mid-'70s Schwarzenegger mentally bullying Lou Ferrigno into submission before the competition has even begun remain what bodybuilding is for many -- one a squatting, grunting fiend who'd skip his own father's funeral because attending would compromise his workout regimen, the other in his bedroom, supplementing his own feverish training with fistfuls of potions and pills.

There's more than that to bodybuilding, which is basically little more than "the developing of the body through exercise and diet" and "the developing of the physique for competitive exhibition." There are plenty of Arnolds still out there willing to pay any price for the title of Mr. Olympia and the cover of Flex Magazine.

Yet there are others in places like Fairhaven, where in a humble little kitchen on a Wednesday night in February, there are two pots cooking on the stovetop. One is full of green beans and chicken.

The other? Plain old macaroni and cheese.

"The kids aren't doing a contest," 32-year-old Dino Resendes says as he scoops some of the pasta out for his eight-year-old daughter, Darian. "What we do is a good example for our children, but they're not doing a contest. It's really a lifestyle. It's a choice.

"Honestly, I'd much rather eat a cheeseburger than some broccoli."

He stops to check on four-year-old Cyan, who's playing with the family's Siberian Husky puppy, while 27-year-old Christy Resendes tends to the foodstuffs and one-year-old Daegen sits quietly in a high chair. They are the normal family, sharing a slightly hectic dinner.

Yet there are signs this isn't a normal family. The basket on the table filled with dozens of packs of Extra sugar-free gum. The cabinet on the far wall filled with opaque plastic bottles labeled "casein protein," "conjugated" this and "isolate" that. Most conclusively, the fact both Christy and Dino look nothing like any parents of three you'll ever see.

"Overall, as an experience, there's nothing I can think of that would bring two people closer together," Dino says. "You're suffering together, you're celebrating victories together, you're working hard together to accomplish a goal. To me, there's nothing that can bring you closer together than something like that because you've got the highs, you've got the lows, you've got everything in between."

He should know, considering it's the common love that created this entire scene.

In the summer of 1992, a 15-year-old Christy was inspired by her mother, Jean Souza, to try competitive bodybuilding for the first time. After spending three months dieting and working in the gym, Christy entered the Whaling City Classic.

Christy won both best poser and the overall championship, but the more significant moment might have come when she was awarding a trophy to someone else. That someone else, five years her senior, had recently turned 20, moving him out of the juniors and into the novice classes of bodybuilding. Dino Resendes.

"We didn't really notice each other," Christy says. After all, 20-year-olds and 15-year-olds don't travel in the same circles, even if they share common interests.

Three years later, though, they began dating. Three years ago, they wed, all the while continuing to share their interests in the gym.

They stopped competing until last October, when Bridgewater State College professor Dr. Ellyn Robinson pushed Christy to enter the New England Natural Bodybuilding and Figure Championships in North Smithfield, R.I. An exercise science major under Robinson's tutelage at BSC, Christy had just four weeks to prepare for the show -- two months shorter than usually needed.

That didn't stop Christy from winning both the Women's Novice and Women's Open classes. A week later, she and Dino flew to New Mexico for the American National Bodybuilding Conference's (ANBC) Natural Bodybuilding championships. She won there, too, earning her professional card and leading her to decide to compete in this April's Musclemania Atlantic Natural Bodybuilding Championships. A win there would earn her a spot in November's national finals, slated to be televised on ESPN.

"Without my husband and family's support, it would have been impossible for me to have done this," Christy said in a November story in The Standard-Times. "He said I inspired him to compete again."

When Dino says he can think of nothing that could bring two people closer together, he isn't kidding.

CRAVING SUCCESS

"I have never thought of writing for honor and reputation. What I have in my heart must come out. That is the reason why I compose."

The quote is from Ludwig von Beethoven, but it's what Dino uses to describe why he and his wife put themselves through the tortures they'll undergo for the next eight weeks. It is simply who they are, and a choice they've made throughout their entire lives.

"It's the same basic value. Lots of people just don't go to the gym. They don't care about it. It's something we need to do to express ourselves," Dino says. "Whatever that expression means is subject to debate, I guess, but we express ourselves through our weightlifting and through our training and through our competing. It's part of who we are."

Which certainly isn't to say both are merely machines, the Schwarzenegger type of gym rat, content to spend all day pumping iron. Even if they could, that's not a choice they would make.

"You want to sit down and eat green beans all day. Fine. That's what you want to do," says Dino, who has a degree in finance and day-trades at home while Christy works at Titleist. "I have my wife. My kids. The finances. Business. Weightlifting. Everything in balance."

In balance, but in structure as well. While the lifting and gym routine is clearly a major part, without a strict diet as a foundation, the house falls apart. As Christy puts it, "it's like simply going out and saying you're going to run a marathon, as opposed to actually preparing for it."

"Nutrition is 60 percent of the bodybuilding lifestyle," Dino says. "You go to the gym to stimulate a reaction, but unless you fuel your body properly, you're only going to break yourself down. It, too, is really a lifestyle, and it's one of the things we do really well."

"We like to eat pizza too," Christy adds. "You can eat sweets, you can have chips, but it's sometimes. When we have our cheat meals, it's like five out of 35 meals we eat in a week. If a person only eats once or twice a day but goes out for fast food, it's a much higher percentage of what they're taking in."

Yet even those small slips go out the window at competition time. In training before a show, bodybuilders adhere to an incredibly strict regimen designed to maximize the benefits of the work they're putting in.

On the day we first visited with the family, Dino and Christy ate seven meals, though most were protein powders, vitamins or other non-food items. Baked potato. Green vegetable. Between 1 and 3 gallons of water, daily. At 4 a.m. that day, for example, an hour before Christy left the house for an hour of cardiovascular training, she'd had a breakfast of six egg whites and a cup of oatmeal.

"It leads to some interesting moments at BJ's when you're buying 15 dozen eggs and 8-12 two-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi," Dino says -- the pair list gum and diet soda as favorites in the early stages of training, because they're zero-calorie products. "People would say, 'Oh, I know someone who runs a restaurant, too!' when they'd see me buying huge bags of vegetables. I don't say anything. It's easier that way."

The man behind their printouts, those complete with pie charts of caloric breakdowns and intricate time tables, is Dave Lyford, a clinical nutritionist and fitness consultant at Bright Morning Star Center for Healing in Raynham. That and the Open Men's Bantamweight (under 150 pounds) class champion at the 2004 Musclemania Atlantic event where they'll all be competing in weeks.

In the first six to eight weeks of training, Dino and Christy visit every other week because the diet demands are less strict. As the competition closes in, however, the meetings with Lyford pick up. In one such meeting, they discuss substituting rice cakes for baked potatoes in the diet -- an idea Christy likes because "they're easier to prepare."

"I'm not concerned with, like, 15 calories until the last week," Lyford tells them. "Just make sure they're the rice cakes, not the corn cakes,"

"The eggs are just wearing me down," Dino says. When Lyford informs him the six egg whites he's been eating are 104 calories, while a scoop of whey protein is 105, another switch gets made.

"Instead of four ounces of beef, you can make it six ounces of chicken," Lyford explains. "They're different, but they're all bodybuilding foods. Sources of protein. At the same time, though, you can't make it seven ounces of chicken. It doesn't add up."

Still, the flexibility is limited. Even with a full two months before the show, any slip-up or cheat meal can do damage that can only be covered up, not truly fixed.

"If I were to eat Doritos, there are things we could do to fix it with cardio," Dino says, "but then we're getting into catabolizing, eating my own muscles."

"When you're working as hard as we are, making those sacrifices in the gym, denying yourself all these foods," Lyford adds, "why would you cheat? There's a pizza place next door to here. I've been here eight years, and I've never eaten there, ever. I just don't want to eat over there."

Which isn't to say bodybuilders shut that part of their brains off.

Dino once spent six to eight weeks eating "clean," then followed through on a desire to eat three-quarters of a cheesecake. Christy spoke of the time she was competing and Dino wasn't, and her pleas to him, "don't order out ... at least not today."

Lyford even goes so far as to make trips to the supermarket across the street simply to be around food.

"The key is to find out exactly what time their bread delivery is," Lyford says, "and just walk up and down the aisles smelling it."

And yet, there's never a doubt as to whether it's all worth it.

"Doing it with a team, with so many friends ... it's just so much fun. We all want to win, but we're all there for each other too," Lyford says. "There's no sourpusses. We're all just going to have a blast."

PURSUING PERFECTION

After the nutritional discussion is done, the door to the small, blue-walled office in the back of Lyford's shop closes. With an alphabet soup of eyedropper bottles in one corner, a map of the endocrine system on the wall and the "teacher" positioned in the corner, the Resendes take turns having their posing critiqued by Lyford.

"It'll be anticlimactic if I go second, so I'll go first," Dino says with a smile, relenting to his wife.

"Your abdominals are coming in. So are your legs," Lyford assures. "Dino, you're coming in. You're leaning right out."

"I feel fat everywhere," Dino says in response.

It's a relative term, as you might suspect. Few would spend a second debating whether they'd trade physiques. Dino still shows the years of relative inactivity compared to Lyford and Christy, but has bulging shoulder and rapidly thinning abdominals. In the time he spends training for MuscleMania, he'll drop near 50 pounds.

"I feel a bit like an artist in the dark," he says. "As I get leaner, I'm seeing the flaws in my physique, the places where I need to add mass."

Posing is the core of competitive bodybuilding. Through a set series of positions chosen to show off each muscle group, judges identify which competitors best exhibit the pinnacles of bodybuilding -- symmetry, proportion, and mature, defined muscle. While there are optional poses featured in every competition, nearly all center around roughly the same group of positions.

How those positions are done and how they maximize the best features of a given contestant, often decide who wins and who loses. A superior physique will fail if the presentation, or the preparation, is poor.

"That's really what bodybuilding is. It's creating an illusion," Dino says. "Showing as much of your definition, as much of your separation of muscles as you can. For me, I've got to put myself in somebody's hands and I haven't done it in 12 years."

As Lyford offers commands to turn and pose from his chair in the corner as a judge would, Dino, stripped down to a Speedo, obliges. The comments are few, but constructive and complimentary -- "Let's crack those calves." "Stand up straight more." "That's your pose." After 10 minutes, sweat is running down Dino's face, and Lyford tells Christy it's her turn.

"I can't wait to put you through this," she says with a trademark smile, alluding to her soon-coming degree.

"You're getting close," Lyford replies.

As Christy strips down to her posing suit and a pair of short socks, it's immediately clear she is a special specimen. Never mind she's had three children -- her physique is one that made even her daughter once exclaim, "Isn't my mom ripped?!"

Dino watches Christy go through her routine.

"Christy is very gifted genetically," he says. "A lot of people have one or two body parts that really stand out. She's got several."

"You've got extra parts on those triceps!," Lyford exclaims as Christy tightens her arm to the side. "Your back is phenomenal. Somebody's been dead-lifting over the years."

"She's very impressive," Lyford says later, stealing a glance at Christy while she talks to her husband. "She's been working on this a long time. I saw pictures of her mom ... she's got incredible genetics."

The critiques continue days later in a classroom at Bridgewater State's Tinsley Center, where Christy takes part in a posing class with Robinson, her mentor. Herself a former bodybuilder, Robinson helped her student create the posing routine she used to win in Rhode Island and New Mexico.

"Amazing. Simply amazing," Robinson says as a group of students watches Christy pose alongside Brett Oteri, a fellow 27-year-old student at BSC who also teaches a self-defense class. "You'd never know you haven't trained legs for six weeks."

The critiques, however, come more frequently as the competition date nears -- Christy poses weekly with her teacher. "We're still not getting those pivots, are we?" Robinson says as her student struggles with the quarter turns needed between poses. "Shift the weight from your right heel to your left toe."

"Retract your scapula ... see how that makes her (deltoids) look?"

"Flare your lats."

"Paw that hamstring back."

"Drive that knee up. Your stomach? Like a vacuum."

Christy is dripping with sweat after a 15-minute posedown.

"I'll do my routine, but I'll be too exhausted to eat lunch. My legs hurt so much," Christy says. "She's tough on me. It's tough love. I'm drained."

Drained, but still smiling.

"It looks like they're just standing there, but to hold those isometric (muscle) contractions is unbelievable," Robinson says, admiring her. "She has so much talent."

"You look awesome. Both of you," she adds as her students come within earshot. "There's not much to coach or correct now. You guys are fine-tuned machines."

"Christy's got a great rapport with all her professors. They can feel her passion," Dino says later.

It's a passion that goes well beyond her own training. Along with her schoolwork and rigorous schedule, Christy has helped several friends with their workout routines and competitive posing. One, Sandy Dias of Dartmouth, will be competing as a novice at the Musclemania show, while Kristy Dlugosinski helps watch the couple's three kids in exchange for assistance at the gym.

"She works with my husband and got him into it," Dlugosinski says. "I wanted to get in shape, so she started helping me during her spring break. So when she's in school all day and posing, (Dino)'s watching two of the kids and hasn't been able to go to the gym. So he can go to the gym, I'll watch the kids. I'm helping her, she's helping me."

"I like seeing people change," Christy said.

SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

Dino had joined Christy, Oteri and Robinson days earlier in the BSC Human Performance Lab for a hydrostatic weighing to calculate their body fat. It's not a necessary step, but often a helpful one to let bodybuilders know where they stand in preparing for a competition.

"It's a tool to motivate, to know what gains you're making and where the losses are," Dino says. "Ultimately, the mirror test is all that matters. The judges aren't coming up to you with [fat] calipers."

The test is an elaborate one. First, a person is weighed while dry -- Dino was 182¾, Christy 150 -- and then their residual volume is determined. By expelling all air in the lungs through a spirometer, which is basically a tube connected to a recording cylinder, the amount of air inside a person can be accurately calculated.

"Blow! Blow! Blow! Extra air equals extra fat!," Robinson says with a smile. "That always works for ladies."

Finally, the subjects are lowered into a tank of water, then weighed once they've expelled all the air from their lungs. While the exact formula is complex, those three figures plus the density of the water yields the most accurate method of calculating body fat.

Christy's passion is further visible in the way she pores over the results and charts as both Oteri and her husband are calculated. She assists the other two in positioning themselves on what is essentially a large produce scale submerged in a tank, helping read the scale and record the results.

Of course, much of her glee might come from feeling like she'll beat her husband and have a lower body fat. After all, she is coming off a competition the previous fall, while Dino has been off for 13 years.

"He better not beat me!," Christy playfully shouts.

"I haven't seen your residual volume and I don't know your weight, but you're leaner than your wife," Robinson assures Dino.

The spreadsheet calculates the numbers. Some seven weeks before the show, Dino is at 8.2 percent body fat, already well below the 15 percent to 18 percent sported by the average adult male.

But unfortunately, not below his wife's 8.1 percent.

"It's a conspiracy," he says with a smile.

Neither are nowhere near where they'll be by show time, with Dino still 15 pounds from his competing weight and his wife above the 138 she'll finish at. As the weeks go by, the training stiffens, the diet tightens and the workload becomes tougher to bear. In one week during the final month, she'll drop 11 pounds in a single week. How?

By a homestretch that truly proves the mettle of those who choose to compete.

BRINGING IT HOME

"I just couldn't do it," says Robinson, who had been a serious bodybuilder 15 years ago. "The last month of the diet, I just couldn't do it. I'd stand in front of my class and just be dead. I don't miss that at all. When you want to listen to someone, but you just can't."

"Bodybuilding diets are fine up until you get to 20 weeks," Lyford says. "That last month, though ... I'll tell you right now. It's not healthy."

The physical transformation competitive bodybuilders make in the time leading up to a show is awe-inspiring.

However, the final week before a show is something different altogether. It's when well-muscled people go from simply having beautiful bodies to becoming genuine competitive bodybuilders, the kind who stand tanned and ripped in the spotlight before hundreds of spectators and eagle-eyed judges.

Dino and Christy Resendes are about to make that transformation.

This story appeared on Page E1 of The Standard-Times on May 1, 2005.