Thirty-five beautiful, muscular Physique dreams strutted their stuff in Tampa, and luckily for the armchair fan, legendary lensman (and Annie Rivieccio co-star) James Cook was there. Well over 300 images are now up on FTVideo's free site, which in my experience involves a commitment of three plus hours if you want to check them all.
I think the reason why his work has such enduring appeal is the fact that above all he is a fan. He takes the kind of pictures others don't, capturing transitions as well as poses, for example. He also tends to go in closer than your average contest photographer, allowing us to see more detail. Vascularity lost from a more distant shot, the trickles of sweat, the hard graininess of the muscle. They are images worth taking your time to appreciate, and for the last three plus hours that's exactly what I've been doing.
The result of my efforts are these 20 individual images - my pick of his bunch.
I couldn't help but be transported to the show. I recalled the "front row fantasy" of one of C. Moore's cohorts, detailed in a post last November. A new experience, I thought, for new pros like Alyssa Isley (left) - no naked, gooning female muscle lovers at NPC shows. A veteran like Angela Debatin (right), however, has seen it all before. She might even recognise one or two of her adoring jackers, remember his favourite pose, and eyeball him just as she hits it. BANG! goes her tricep - he shoots, she scores.
I wondered, not whether, but how many involuntary explosions thirty-five Physique dreams can induce in an audience of... And then realised I had no idea. How many people attend a show like Tampa? So I checked. The venue - the Tampa Marriot Waterside claims a maximum seating capacity of 2,500. Assuming they are all sold and - as legend has it - the vast majority of punters are not there to see the women, especially not the ones with proper muscles, then perhaps a conservative estimate would put the number of genuine female muscle heads at somewhere between 5 and 10% of that, or 125 to 250 chaps with the potential for involuntary explosions.
A lone wolf, I "reasoned" (while gooning away to well over 300 images, remember), would perhaps be a bit more self-conscious in the crowd, less likely to properly lose it. A couple of heads who have travelled there together, or come from different places and met up there, however, would have been talking about the moment when the Physique ladies (the FBBs were on the night after) stepped on stage for hours (possibly days) beforehand, working themselves up into a frenzy of anticipation. It wouldn't take much to push them over the edge, I reckoned, and once your female muscle lovin' "bud" has shown his appreciation, it would be harder still to hold back yourself.
And, I continued to "reason" (with at least one hand below the keyboard), with each "bud" you add to the group, the anticipation, the excitement, and therefore the chances they would really let themselves go would increase exponentially. Three heads together would be squirming in their seats. Four would be full-on writhing, and five might find themselves so caught up in the mutual moment that their explosions wouldn't be so involuntary after all. How stringent are the public decency laws in Florida? Were there, I wondered, any heads ejected from the auditorium for showing a bit too much love to the ladies and a bit too much to the rest of their row?
Who would this head travel with? Last year I had an entirely fictional experience (see "Czech Dream") with my best online female muscle lovin' friend, and he's never given me any reason to doubt he would be my first choice. We held hands as we watched, writhed, moaned and yelled out our support of the Physique ladies in that story, and (again) I saw no reason why it would have been any different in Tampa. We'd need a lot more stamina though - there were just six women in that Czechia Pro line-up, to take on thirty-five we'd have had to start training in early February... It had never occurred to me before that a female muscle head would need to do contest prep too!
Do the ladies get as excited as we do (or would, if!)? Well, actually, perhaps even more so. Swell has been taken into the confidence of a number of IFBB pros over the course of the life of this blog, and many of them have confessed to, on occasion, getting rather worked up on stage. Once the floodgates open, apparently, it can all get a bit overwhelming they say. And different women, it seems, have different "trigger" poses. Abs and thigh is probably the most "popular" (for fairly obvious reasons - think about what they are crunching down on!), but side triceps and chest, lat spread ("I just felt so BIG so WIDE!), and - as one would hope - front double biceps have all been mentioned. So you may no longer wonder, the next time you see a competitor half-stumble as they hit a lat spread, or seem to forget their routine halfway through it and just start freestylin', why this strong, graceful woman suddenly got so clumsy.
This knowledge has certainly added an extra dimension to my contest viewing, whether via pictures or video. It makes the "erotic theatre" of a female bodybuilding show even more erotic. Looking at Sammica Cash (above, right), I was at once in awe of her vascular lats (exactly the kind of detail only Cook captures), but soon my attention turned to her eyes. Was she, I wondered, just looking down to where she was going to plant her foot, or was there more? Is the abs and thigh Sammica's "trigger" pose and she's actually bracing herself for the feeling that she knows is about to spread right through her beautiful body? Show me video and I reckon I could tell...
Unfortunately, this isn't something the women discuss much - not even among themselves if what I've been told is to be believed. And I think that's a shame, because we never stop going on about the effect they have on us, it would be nice to hear a bit more about exactly why so many of them can't get enough of being on stage.
And while the credit goes to all the thirty-five women so beautifully shot by James Cook, I leave you with my two triggers during my three-hour plus trawl. The gorgeous Essence Monet, a woman I've been watching out for ever since her Arnold's appearance earlier in the year had Kai Greene screaming "WOW!" on the live feed commentary; and the equally gorgeous Nathalee Thompson, who I'd never even heard of, let alone noticed, before this show. Check out the full 300+ images on FTVideo/Gene X Magazine here. I wonder who your triggers will be, dear reader.
Enjoy!
Tomorrow - Tampa: Biggest
