Crunch Time for Bodybuilder Mom

For Penny Seabolt, as with many busy moms, the weight of the world can become a bit too much. The 38-year-old Lutherville resident juggles a husband, twin fourth-graders, an aging mother who lives with her family and a career as a freelance court stenographer.

But when life gets heavy, no one is better suited to press back then Seabolt, a mom with six-pack abs, ripped biceps and carved quads.

That’s because Seabolt is a competitive “figure builder.”

Figure building is like bodybuilding but allows for a (slightly) higher percentage of body fat. She is a personal trainer at Bare Hills Fitness Club, but her main client is herself.

“You try your best,” said Seabolt, a 38-year-old Lutherville mother of twins. “Do your best, that’s all you can ask for. And you have to be happy. You have to love yourself for that. I always tell my kids, love yourself, love yourself, love yourself.”

It’s a positive philosophy that’s paid off. Her first competition was less than a year ago, in April, at the eastern regional competition of the Organization of Competitive Bodybuilders, and Seabolt won first place in three categories, and second place in a fourth. She took a break over the summer.

“I got really fat over the summer, and I enjoyed every minute of it,” she said, laughing.

But now it’s crunch time again—literally. Seabolt is training for three more competitions that will be held at the end of this summer, and her goal is to go pro.

To become an industry pro, Seabolt has to win at a pro-qualifying figure building show. Then she has to compete again, and win again.

“Then doors open,” she said. “You get magazines, sponsors, you never know. You never know who’s going to be at these shows.”

It’s a big commitment. To become a pro, Seabolt won’t be able to take a summer off again. She has mixed feelings about training full-time.

“You have to really judge how you want to live your life,” Seabolt said. “I had taken a lot from my family in the months that I trained last year and I wanted to devote my time to my family again. I wanted to sit down with them at dinner, and to be able to go to my kids’ school functions, and to be a mom. You have to balance it out.”

Seabolt is the mother of twins Madison and Thomas. The two are in fourth grade at .

“I was trying to teach them through this if you set a goal, see it through,” she said. “I don’t care what it is in life. If you say you’re going to do something, you do it. And you see it through until the end.”

Seabolt also cares for her mother, who lives with her family. Seabolt credits her husband with being a supportive influence, but she still feels the pull–and not in her hamstrings–when she’s in training mode.

“My schedule’s different from theirs and I’m training constantly. It’s all you think about,” Seabolt said. 

Sean Rehak, director of fitness at Bare Hills, considers Seabolt to be a unique client, and he’s excited about Seabolt’s contributions to the gym.

“This isn’t a place where actual competitors typically come. Now that Penny has joined us, Penny is more of the competitive trainer type,” Rehak said. “She’ll probably bring more of the competitive fitness in.”

Bare Hills is a unique gym, specializing in sports performance training. The fitness center also offers the new Soul Body Barre class. It combines a ballet-type Pilates with resistance training and isometric stretching, another in-house specialty. 

One unique piece of equipment that Bare Hills has is the ElliptiGO, a bicycle-like elliptical machine that you ride standing up and outside.

“It a great cross-trainer,” said Nancy Dwyer, the owner of Bare Hills. “If you’re a runner, and if you like the elliptical, you can be outside. It’s better exercise than biking because you’re not sitting. You’re standing. You’re getting your abs.”

Dwyer said Bare Hills is the only gym on the east coast that has the ElliptiGO.

Seabolt enjoys the ElliptiGO because she is a cross-trainer herself.

“I like to cross-train,” she said. “I’m big into splitting it up. Your body gets used to a lot of stuff.  So I’ll do stair stepper, I’ll do elliptical, I’ll do the bike, I’ll take a spinning class—alternate all the time.”

Believe it or not, it’s not cross training–or training at all–that Seabolt said is the secret to her physique. Seabolt swears that everybody is built more or less like she is. It just might be hidden under a bit more body fat.

“It’s diet,” she said. “I can’t stress that enough. You don’t really have to work out all that hard. You already have it. It’s there. You just have to bring it out a little bit.”

Seabolt added: “Think about if you just scan the perimeter of the grocery store, and just bought all greens, and yellows, and oranges, and nuts, and meats and milk. If you just ate that, if you consumed that in a day, do you know how much weight you would lose? It’s fascinating to see your body change. I think that’s why I love it so much.”

She listed some more staples of her diet: “Egg whites, oatmeal, chicken, vegetables, turkey, and good lean meats, fish, and broccoli. When I start incorporating all that stuff into my diet again, I melt the fat off.”

By day, Seabolt works as a freelance court stenographer, though she takes time off to focus on her strict eating and training regiment. She eats six meals a day, roughly one meal every two hours. 

Seabolt conceded that she does, in fact, exercise.

“You do have to work hard though,” she said. “You have to do cardio, you have to lift weights.”

She said she trains for an hour to an hour and a half a day.  

“I split it up. I usually have a leg day, where I do all legs. I go to shoulders, I do shoulder day. I do a back and triceps day, I do a chest and biceps day. And then another day I do abs and any lagging body part. So I break everything down all week.”

Seabolt stressed that she is nothing special, despite the fact that she can bench 185 pounds, and is targeting a higher figure this summer. 

“You can do anything you set your mind to,” she said. “I am a really true believer in anything, not just competing, not fitness, anything in life. You can do it, you just have to set your mind to it.”