Theresa Ivancik: Worth Celebrating

It's pretty hard to believe, looking at her now, but once upon a time Theresa Ivancik competed in figure. In 2010, I decided to make a switch to bodybuilding, she says. The figure girls now have the look of being too thin. I love the muscle look! If I'm going to lift, I'm going to lift! I loved hitting the weights and I loved the feeling of lifting heavy, the crazy pumps and harder intense training. A couple of years down the road, and female muscle heads all over the world had their eyes popping out of their sockets at the results of Theresa's intense hard training, not least when they first saw what, I believe, has become one of the more well-known 'before and after' images.



Maybe it's the fact that she's holding those dumbbells in the 'before', maybe it's the fact that it's not strictly speaking a 'before' at all - she's already got plenty of muscle tone on that slender frame - but even the biggest fan of the biggest girls would surely have to admit that Theresa had something going on even then. But that doesn't make the 'after' any less arresting. My she'd grown! She'd been beautiful 'before', but now that beauty was bathed in the kind of big, sexy, curvy muscle that you would have to be dead below the waist (probably for a good many years) not to be aroused by.




With her drop-dead looks, her penchant for low-cut dresses (no doubt she wanted to emphasise her pec line), [give me a break! - ed.] and those sumptuous and (seemingly) perma-tanned muscles, Theresa quickly became a favourite to many, and Swell and the rest of the FMS family were no exceptions. The images selected today are personal favourites, but really, from the gym to the glamour, whatever she was wearing, it's actually proved impossible for me to find a bad picture of Theresa.



I love the modeling side of bodybuilding, she told the peerless Promoting Real Women in February 2010. It's a wonderful feeling to see the final product! Good to know it's been as good for Theresa as it has for me! In modeling, she adds, I always make sure not to let the photographer photoshop my pictures for I want it to be the real me people see. As a result, it doesn't seem to matter whether the image is the lit-to-bits work of a top photographer, or a simple holiday candid taken by her significant other, she's always the real her, always nothing less than glorious to look at.



Back in April, FMS alerted readers to the fact that the very gorgeous Theresa Ivancik's return to competition was imminent (see Tube of the Week, April 9th). Well, Theresa, looking, as one reader predicted at the time of that post, insanely hot, wore her posing suit again at the beginning of May at the NPC Pittsburgh Championships.



She placed 2nd. A cause for celebration? Well, yes and no.



First the bad news. If you're looking for evidence of the sorry state of female bodybuilding proper in the USA, and amateur female bodybuilding in particular, you could find it at this show. There were only three competitors in the female bodybuilding division - compared to 18 in three different physique classes, and over 50, spread over a number of different classes, in both the figure and bikini divisions.

For the previous two years, though, there had been no female bodybuilding division at all at the championships. To find any female bodybuilders at all at the NPC Pittsburgh, you have to go back to 2011, three years ago, when Theresa had finished 2nd in her class - one of four heavyweights in an overall field of just eight women.

I'm not saying that you should start popping the champagne because three female bodybuilders are better than none (though they are, infinitely, especially when one of them is Theresa Ivancik!). What I am saying is that the fact that there are women out there who continue to want to be competitive bodybuilders at all in such a climate is something we, the female muscle lovin' brethren, ought to celebrate.



I've no doubt Theresa would have loved to have won in Pittsburgh, but for her this year is all about getting her pro card, and that was never going to have happened here. This year, for her, is all about the Nationals. And if Theresa wants to get pro status, I, for one, sincerely hope that pro status is what she gets. In the meantime, she'll probably be getting back to her hard, intense training at the gym she co-owns with her trainer and long-term partner, Jeffrey Harlan. She'll be helping her clients through some of that hard, intense training, and she'll be marketing the line of protein she and her partner (hate him yet?) have developed. And I don't doubt she'll continue to smoulder away in those low-cut dresses for our viewing pleasure.



And as if that isn't enough to get you in the mood for a celebration, we have a whole new round of contest countdown pictures of Theresa and her ever-growing, crazy pumped muscles to look forward to as the Nationals approach.




Follow and/or contact Theresa via her website or Facebook page. She regularly updates her new You Tube channel with training clips like the one FMS brought you in April, and you might want to review her old channel while you're at it.

Read the whole interview quoted in today's post on Promoting Real Women.

Enjoy! And celebrate!