I’m shutting down this blog now for a new one in affiliation with AST sports science. Please visit my website for updates and news about this. Soon, I will have a webshop for AST sports science supplements and as a customer you will have the chance to ask me your questions about the supplements you purchase! what a service huh?

for now visit AST sports science!

this week I am off to Sweden….. As of now I pack my belongings, clean the apartment and organize my supplements. It is a full time job.

Happy 4th of July!

“What is a great trainer like?” well, according to my personal opinion a great trainer should motivate the client, inspire the client and teach the client on how to get results without burning out.  I do my best to be a great trainer by practicing what I preach and listen to my client’s needs. Sometimes they don’t know what it takes to reach the goal of his or hers, it’s my job to outline the path to the goal and give support on the way.

“What is a great client like?” is another good question! Well, now it gets interesting… As a trainer I’ve met a lot of people with the ambition to get lean and mean and change their lifestyle for good. I know by experience that those who say “I will do anything you tell me to and so much more” don’t make it. They go hard and intense for a week or three, then, suddenly, BOOM, burnout. Too much training? Nope. Too few calories? No way. Too lofty a short term goal? Yes! A lot of clients view their training as a project. Everybody loves training when you just start out since you gain strength so fast, you see lots of improvements, you lose some weight, you feel so good! But then, to keep on, getting in better and better shape takes time, commitment, patience. Not all people have that.

You need to see past the first love for fitness and accept it for your new way of life. Eating strict and healthy is fun in the beginning, then you reach the rebelling phase when you suddenly realize “donuts seem to be gone from my life for good and I feel deprived” and get frustrated. Now, those who see through that weak moment and keep on working on your physique, understand and see the joy in repeating workout after workout, meal after meal, THAT client is a client who will succeed!

Sometimes it surprises me that I actually go to the gym almost every day, most times twice a day, do the same thing with some slight changes day in and day out. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I don’t. Fitness is a longterm relationship: good times and bad times.

Three nights in a row I’ve been sleeping well! I just wake up once at 11 pm and once at 2 am. That will do. Finally getting my sleep back, but then who doesn’t ruin it if not the mosquito! At 3 am this morning I woke up from that little bastard buzzing aroung my face. AAAAHHHHH!!! With a mere second I was 100% awake and jumped up from bed, brought the fly killer, turned on the light and then waited for it to take a seat and let me kill it. But ofcourse it was gone. Went to bed again and the same thing happened again 30 minutes later. And suddenly it was 4 am and I was ready to rise and shine. Today I wanted to walk the deep sand with my X-vest to soak in all that beautiful morning sunrise and santa monica pier. I am so lucky to live here and I just don’t want to ever ever ever leave this place. I will have to though since I’m going out of states for 18 long days. It’s not that I don’t want to meet family but THIS is my HOME and for the first time I’e found a place where I actually see myself staying forever. Since the day I left Sweden for USA not once have I regret it, missed my old home country. I was born to be here!

Question of the day or days: “How do you train your biceps?”

Answer: I don’t anymore. It’s been one year and one month since I did a dumbbell curl in my workout. So, I don’t train biceps. In my early training years I trained biceps like a sissy with tiny dumbbells because I found it boring to work biceps. So I didn’t until I competed for the first time and saw how tiny they were! Then I changed my mind and worked them to be extremely strong and did heavy dumbbell curls, hammer curls, negative reps and all the stuff with lots of weight and thus they grew. Then they got to big for my taste since big biceps make the shoulders look narrower and the female physique less athletic and slender which is the look I like. So, I quit training them altogether. Now,  have they changed size? Well, you can see in pictures they are not as thick anymore, but when I flex them they end up with the same  size.

on the way to the Krav Center

Just got back from a long day’s photo shoot. Taking professional shots takes a lot of effort and energy. It is a pain in the butt frankly. You must prep yourself. Got to get to the location. Setting lightning right. And pose pose pose…Sigh, it is exhausting. But, hey, HAVING the pictures are fun though so one gotta take em to get em… “Wow, you’re married to a pro photographer??? You must have so much fun shooting all the time!!!” Not so uncommon a comment people make. Well, first of all, you can not just go out and shoot. Those kind of shots end up looking like something crappy kids take with their first plastic “click and roll” camera from Kodak. And if you don’t take care of business and have bad lightning ANYONE will look horrible!

Then we also have the convenience factor. It is extremely convenient for a photographer to have a ready fitness model at home to shoot any day, but do you think that occurs more than not so often? Nope. Because it’s WORK! Who works in the free time? Not me!

For me, I am the difficult model who has no patience, a bad temper and always gets cramps,  walks around with a compulsive “I’m constipated” for no reason and never thinks she looks as good as she wants. I suck at being energetic, up spirit and “ready to shoot, yay!!!”. Actually I don’t fancy photo shoots. They take so much time. And I get tired. Especially in my muscles from lifting big weights of 5 lbs…Oh, they just tend to come off so heavy at shoots…

What I DO like is TV! If you don’t make a line flow, well, you just cut and redo. Delete the bad, repeat the good phrases.  It is so much more ACTION! In the future I want this:

My own TV show

So, now you know.

good night!

That must be the most annoying question ever. And it hits me too often… I just cannot stand that one. See, how do I explain in one or two sentences TOP that I do not need a show to train at a certain intensity/dedication. I work out and diet 24/7 all year long. It is a L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E. I am not training FOR something, it is JUST WHAT I DO. I am not lean because I’m doing a photo shoot or competing. I just want to look this way. It is like religion. I’m not crazy because I almost never touch bad food or have too many calories, I’m disciplined since I cannot stand feeling fat! And fat I feel when I am more than 2 lbs off from contest shape. That’s just the way I am.

Tonight I had a wonderful back workout. I just couldn’t stop. You know those days when you feel stronger and stronger, you just want to keep going and need to force yourself to quit because it is not the best thing to do to keep on going… I did pullups, negative rear pullups, parallell bb rows, v-pulldown with rope, hang leg raises legs to the ceiling, some seated pulldown-rope crunches and some stuff for the rear delts like retroflexions with dumbbells. It’s funny because I was so tired all day and did not want to go to the gym, but since I’m shooting on sunday I cannot squeeze in another rest day before sunday. Now I’m happy I did go after all! It’s almost always like that!

This morning I had a cardio workout directly imported from HELL. My heart rate monitor pretended to be gone fishing. Dead. GGGRRR, I just HATE that! I want to see my average heart rate and every minute it doesn’t show it I lose the stats! So I cannot get it on paper what I do! I tried 5 different machines in 30 minutes, jumping around like a rabbit and got all red-headed due to the frustration. One machine’s handles gave up after two minutes, almost strained my shoulder due to that little accident. Another machine allowed me to increase levels but not decrease it, so me pushing the button too hard in my anger I got too much resistance and wanted to lower it but then: NO said the machine. AAAAHHH I was screeeaaaaming inside!!!! I pushed hard and hard and hard and built up loads of lactic acid that I flushed away when running to a new machine, so it actually turned out into a pretty good workout after all. A little anger goes a long way.

Speaking of anger… oooh, you wouldn’t want to be around me yesterday. I was a stinging be at war. Some days I just cannot control myself.  It usually starts with me waking up feeling a bit puffy which pisses me off since I’m so good all the time diet and training and rest wise. (ok, the last one was wishful thinking, but I’m working on it:-). Then I get major crises like “out of wheat bran”. “Too lazy to drive to the store”. Had too much fiber so my stomach hurts”. “ran out of chewing gum”. “Got a stupid email”. “cannot work out exactly when I want to” etc etc. I just see irritation in a lot of things on those days. I walk around like a bomb waiting to explode. And I did finally. At Golds. I was waiting outside the restroom when suddenly a male trainer opened the door and exited. With a mere glimpse I saw the unflushed toilet and jumped to conclusions: “HEEEY, would you mind flush the toilet???” I asked him and grabbed his right arm firmly. I got fire in my eyes. I was a bulldog. of course the guy got pissed at me since I accused him for being disgusting, but you see I just HATE the male gender’s bad samples who like to have people see what they lay in the toilet. It’s disgusting and since I’ve never caught a man in action doing just that I just took the opportunity to yell at the man for being a pig.

As I was waiting for my car outside the male trainer came up to me and said I was rude. I apologized and we were all good again. I actually always liked him but never talked to him, but now we got all introduced so something good came out of the whole thing.

“what kind of food do you like?” is a common question I receive. To be honest/boring I love the simple stuff I eat day in and day out and I seldom crave anything in particular except for those weird sudden ones when I out of the blue dream about nuts or granola. Every day I have the same stuff: Vanilla flavored VP2 protein from AST, wheat bran, angel hair cabbage, pink salmon, eggwhites, pistachios, cocoa powder, eye of round, iceberg lettuce, garlic sea salt, carrots. On some days I have oats too. That is how plain I am and in all sincerity, when I eat every meal I look all happy. I am happy with my diet.

But then you have another side of Pauline. The Pauline who knows absolutely everything about what delicious flavors go with this and that, I love making apple pie, cookies, lasagna, pizza, you name it. I also know all flavors available in the icecream, cookie and granola bar departments. Heck, I could be the guide to every aisle at your local Ralph’s! I know exactly what the ten different grocery stores carry in my area and what they always miss out on. I have a designated tour every week when I go from store to store to pick up almost expired eggs, salad mixes and tilapia filets marked down 50% in price. let’s say I am a savvy consumer. I real pain in the butt for the stores. I can almost see in the staff’s eyes “oh no, here comes the bodybuilder chick again, taking all our stuff, I know she calculates and waits around for the things to get a price reduction”.

I am also a gourmet who seldom get some goodies. I prefer offering the things I would like to try to my test group: meaning my husband. I bring him pistachio ice cream, the latest cookies, candies and pizzas. I always want him to get that sugar high occasionally! But now to the boring fact: he doesn’t care about variety! He always goes for the same boring stuff on his cheat days: vanilla sandwhich icecream. come on how boring is that on a scale from 1 to 10??? And he chooses FATFREE! That is a real sin, lol! That is not even ice cream, it is just a fake product! He loves chips. He chooses plain ones. No extra seasoning. No dipping sauce. And when it comes to his papa johns pizza, every time the same order: a medium hawaii with extra pepperoni. Sigh… Never something new or exciting… So how come I don’t get how he can enjoy the same things over and over? How come it annoys me? I am exactly the same way!

Yesterday I was happy, my ten days of bloat was gone and my body was back to normal! That gave me lots of energy! I hate the feeling of walking around jiggling. I know, I am exaggerating 1000%, but it is all about how you feel, not what you actually look like. That must be the same reason why you see extremely fat people that wear clothing size small even though there are five belly tiers having out. They must not feel it and not see it either. Good for them! Not for their health though!

Yesterday I did a very unusual thing. I forgot my postworkout shake! AAAHH, I forgot to tuck it in my bag! How could I? I was so concerned I found myself a bit unfocused during the workout. I did all I was set up to do and then ran home. Just to find myself keyless. Yup. So, I called my husband to let me in, but he scans all numbers and mine does not appear on the screen so that was a bummer. And even if he did see it he would not have been able to receive the call since our building has no connection with the outside world… I am glad internet works though.

I cannot stop thinking about global warming and the effects I and everyone else has on the planet. All these cars. And I am in one of them. One person per car. And I drive a SUV. Such a waste. I wanted a veggie fuel car but hey, I cannot afford to switch or to get a hybrid at the time being. I feel ashamed that I am part of the damage being done. I do what I can in some ways like recycling plastic, paper etc and wash my dishes with an organic liquid and clean with vinegar, but then on the other hand I buy stuff in plastic containers and drive to Golds which is one block away… It is hard to be good.

Soon I will launch a new project I am working on… It is very exciting! Cannot say more yet though!

training is going well. Especially cardio. Today Golds was shut down. No power! I have never seen golds that way before! it took some energy to regroup and go home to prep for cardio outdoors instead, but nothing I could not do ofcourse.

I think I have some kind of bug or something. I feel funny. Not hungry. That is very strange to be Pauline Nordin. I also thought a lot about nuts yesterday. How much I loved pistachios and how it would be to eat a whole jar of some almond butter…hm, well, well, I wonder why THAT was something that got me ticking! The human mind…

My neck…still not good. I am massaging and pressing it everyday. I was going for a massage today but Tom was not there and then I did not want to anymore.

Here is a pic from yesterday. Photo shoot and here I am waiting for the model to show up.