7:4:09

Hey Everyone,

I hope you all had a great 4th of July weekend. Ours was fantastic. Isabel and I were in a wedding for 2 of our best friends Bill & Sara and had a great time & are extremely happy for them. Congrats guys! Now, I know I have been out of touch with my BioBlog and I apologize for that. Between Isabel's contest prep, putting out two peer review papers, running my business, and designing my final experiment for my thesis, things have been pretty crazy.

Isabel did really well at her shows. All the shows were very competitive, in fact one show had 12 people in Isabel's class. Even though it was her first 3 shows, she only did the open classes and managed to place top 5 in every single show and also won her class at the NGA Heart of America Natural Classic! She did not win the overall but there will be plenty of time for that. Overall she had a great time and wants to compete again in the future. If you want to check out her journey in more detail she is now a part of the video series on bodybuilding.com: http://videos.bodybuilding.com/watch/9141/isabel-norton-lago-the-latin-assassin-1-contest-prep

As for me. I've just been trying to focus on my thesis and my business, both of which are going extremely well. I have been blessed to be able to work with so many really great clients this year and so far they have done an awsome job. I want to shout out to all of them for doing such a fantastic job and normally I don't single people out but I want to say great job to Tiffany Benson, Francisco Montealegre, Ava Cowan, and Amy Sedlatschek. Tiffany has fought through injuries, personal setbacks, and too many obstacles to name to finally come away with a pro card; great job girl. Francisco has been with me for a year and has never waivered from his singular purpose to win a natural pro card. Great job buddy, now he will be competing in his first pro show ever and I'm sure "Senior Symmetry" will do fantastic. What can I say about Ava Cowan except the girl kicks ass. She won the ridiculously huge Figure Universe (18 girls in her class alone) show unanimously on the judges score cards. She has done a fantastic job and I truly believe she is one of the best figure competitors in the world. Amy is another person who overcame tremendous obstacles to come out on top. She showed up in phenominal condition at all her shows and even won the overall at a big NPC show with 12 girls in her class!

Now that I'm done gushing over how proud I am of them, I'll talk a bit about me. I am in the midst of prepping for another powerlifting show on July 25th in Terre Haute, IN. It is an IPA push/pull meet but I will just be doing the deadlift only portion. At my first meet I hit 645 and I hit 660 recently in training pretty easily, so I'm hoping to do even better at the meet. I also realized that right now I am less than a year away from starting to prep for my comeback shows! HELL YES! I am so excited I can hardly wait. I've been away from the game way too long. It's time to find out if I can hang with the pros.

I also want to thank everyone who has checked out my DVD. It has sold so well that we are almost sold out. I just opened the last box so we have less than 100 copies left. So if you wanted to check it out, you might want to do so. You can get it by emailing me directly if you'd like a signed copy or you can buy it off scivation's store, bodybuilding.com, abcbodybuilding.com, or home-gym.com.

I promise to do a better job keeping everyone updated. Thanks again for visiting my site, I truly appreciate it.

-Layne