FBBUK: Georgina McConnell, Future Star

She must be the biggest (and hottest) 18-year-old FBB on this planet at the moment…

Not my words, but the words of a fan on a forum board devoted to the (now) 19-year-old female bodybuilder from Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear (which for non-UK readers, and UK readers with a tenuous grasp of geography, is in the north-east of England).



Georgina is a student of Sports Science and, in her own words has simply always wanted to do this. Her goal from the start - she began lifting at 14 - was to compete, and four years later she achieved that, finishing a precocious 2nd at the NABBA North Championships aged just 18, and as a result found a sponsor. It’s looking good, she says.


Georgina at her competitive debut, NABBA North 2012

Indeed it is. She has laid some serious foundations onto her physique with the help of her trainer Lee Casey (who is a successful UKBFF athlete himself), she already has competition experience, sponsors, and an internet fanbase that most other British amateur female bodybuilders can only dream of. Or perhaps not?

A teenage female bodybuilder can bring the worst out of the kind of fans who populate the forums, and when Georgina’s Facebook page and Bodyspace profile were ‘spotted’ in 2011, the resulting bombardment was probably something of a shock to her, judging by the fact that she felt it necessary to take down the images at first – much to the annoyance of those who claimed to have ‘discovered’ her.

However, this is not a tale of online harassment sending a talented young woman underground. Every cloud and all that, and in the last couple of years, Georgina has managed to turn the fact that she is one of the most famous young bodybuilders in the world, as far as online fans are concerned, to her advantage.



We could have another Tina Lockwood on our hands…

When fans say things like that, I think it’s fair to say that Georgina not only has incredible physical potential, but also a fair amount of earnings potential too. She has already made content for Muscle Appeal, and unsurprisingly, her clips and photos have proved extremely popular.



Indeed it is ‘looking good’ for her.


Georgina, front and back, February 2013

You can preview more of her Muscle Appeal clips on their youtube channel, and see some short but extremely impressive clips of her training on Lee Casey’s channel.

Enjoy, and remember - if you're going to contact your favourite muscle women, please do it responsibly and don't let the female muscle brethren down!

FBBUK Extra: Rosanna Comes Third!

I promised you news of Rosanna Harte's showing at the Arnold Amateur this weekend, and so here it is. The British Champ finished third in the lightweight class behind the more experienced Ana Paula Silva of Brazil, and Branka Njegovec from Croatia, who went on to claim the overall title as well.



To me, there's something very old school about Rosanna's body shape and conditioning, as though you could photoshop her into a contest pic from the late 80s and she wouldn't look out of place next to the likes of Anja Langer or Cathy Palyo. I think it's a very pleasing aesthetic, though how far it'll take Rosanna in international bodybuilding contests these days remains to be seen.



I hope she's pleased with her placing and proud of herself (nothing on her Twitter page since before she left for the USA) because she should be!



Congratulations Rosanna from FMS, and best wishes for the rest of 2013.

FBBUK: Kate Austin, Welsh Princess of Power

From South Wales, Kate Austin is a former night-club bouncer turned competitive bodybuilder and personal trainer who runs her own gym in the coastal town of Porthcawl.



I like to stand out from the crowd – I’ve never been a person who wants to blend in with everyone. I don’t care if people don’t like the way I look, I do it for myself.




And this kind of philosophy applies not just to her lifestyle, but also her bodybuilding career to date. Like many women in the UK, her first competitive experience came in a NABBA contest, and she was crowned Miss Wales in 2010. Her next move, though, was uncommon for a British female bodybuilder. Rather than going national and then international up the NABBA pyramid, she went instead to an amateur show in the US, and won the overall women’s title at the NPC Flex Lewis Classic in Tennessee in 2011.


left: NABBA Wales 2010; right: winning the Flex Lewis Classic 2011

Obviously, here is a woman who likes to do things her own way. An independent woman in more ways than one, a woman who isn’t going to let other people’s opinions affect her. Negative comments about my appearance are more to do with other people’s insecurities, she says. No matter what you look like there’s always someone who says nasty things about you.

Kate has been into muscles from a very early age, so it’s not surprising she is so at home in her own body. When I was three or four my mum taped three hours of He-Man for me to watch because I was completely obsessed by it. It was the only thing that kept me quiet! I loved (TV show) Gladiators as well. Jet was always my favourite and when I grew up that’s what I wanted to be.



Having been sporty at school, Kate began weight-training in her late teens, and, unsurprisingly given her youthful dreams, felt right at home straight away. I didn’t feel intimidated and I got used to the weights and stuff and noticed my body changing shape.



Initially, she didn’t intend to get big, but by the age of 23, being lean wasn’t enough for her and she made the decision to train for muscle gains. Now she says, I can’t imagine my life without bodybuilding. Once you get into it, it’s pretty addictive. The results speak for themselves.



People assume she won’t be very feminine because she’s into bodybuilding, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I always wear my false eyelashes and I love having my nails done and going out in my heels, she says. Considering who her childhood heroes were, it’s probably not surprising that she doesn’t see having muscles and being feminine as mutually exclusive things.




As far as I know, Kate never made it onto Gladiators, but now, having just turned 30, she has indeed grown up into a real-life She-ra, a dark-eyed Welsh She-ra with long, black hair who wields a barbell (one-handed!) rather than a sword.



I leave you today with Kate’s winning routine from the 2011 Flex Lewis Classic



Check out a very cool (but short) preview of her workout from fitvids.co.uk here and footage from her Miss Wales 2010 victory here.

You might also like to check out Kate’s website, www.kateaustinbodybuilder.co.uk at some stage, but at the time of writing, it was, unfortunately, down.

More FBBUK tomorrow!

FBBUK: Rosanna Harte and Regional Love

This weekend, the 2012 British champion, Rosanna Harte, takes to the stage at the Arnold, representing her and my country at what may be the world's premier amateur female bodybuilding event.

Was I alerted to this fact by a report of the Sports Minister breaking off from his busy schedule to visit her in her gym and wish her well? Was Rosanna's preparation featured in any sports bulletins on the BBC, the reporter somewhat comically attempting to lift the same weights as her? Was there an article on her in the national press, detailing her career to date? Well,... no. None of these things happened. In fact none of these things ever happen to female bodybuilders. Not in this country, and probably not in yours.




But I did find out that Rosanna would be competing, and it was before the competitor lists became available. And it was from a national media source. Even if it was only as a small online 'calendar' piece on itv online, not an actual article, I was pleasantly surprised to find Rosanna there, not only because any coverage of UK female bodybuilders in the national press is good coverage, but also because the only story here is the fact that she has qualified and will compete. There's no 'celebrity-turned-bodybuilder' angle à la Jodie Marsh, nor any of the nonsense it takes for Rene Campbell to get into the national media (I'm a Bigorexic/Female Bodybuilding Champion Can't Find Love etc etc). So well done itv!



I do, however, suspect that the story was originally picked up by the local media, and consequently made it onto the national platform. I'm not saying that's the only way it could have happened, but I do think it's a likely scenario given the amount of female muscle I have discovered in regional media around the UK. And this local coverage tends, like the piece on Rosanna, to focus solely on the woman, her background and her achievements. There's no angle necessary.

In the national media 'She's a World Champion' is simply not enough, so they need to have 'She's a World Champion Who Can't Find a Man' (yeah, right) or something like that to spice it up a bit. The regional media, in contrast, have pages to fill and not nearly as much happening around them, so the fact that a local lady has made good, even in a sport as widely-derided as female bodybuilding is, in itself, automatically newsworthy.

In the last year, FMS has come across countless articles in the regional media celebrating local muscle heroines. Examples include an April 2012 article about Jen Ford winning Miss Toned Figure at NABBA Scotland in the West Lothian Courier. In September, the Hucknall Dispatch reported that local lass Caroline 'Cee' Oliver would had qualified for the IFBB World Championships. Also in September, the Yorkshire Post interviewed Batley girl Joanne Dudley and Anna Middleton from Bingley, both competitors in Natural Physique Association contests. Rachael Hayes' victory at the Drug Free Athletes Coalition World Championships was celebrated by the (Sheffield) Postcode Gazette in November.


Joanne Dudley

I could go on. Indeed I could also go back, back to 2010, when I first started investigating female muscle in local media, back to a report in This Is Kent about Broadstairs' Vicky Bradley winning the Figure class at the London qualifier for the British National Bodybuilding Federation's National Championships.

The point is, if you care to look closely at your local media, you might find a lot more female muscle than you will if you only pay attention to national press. And any female muscle fans with ambitions to write about the women in the sport could do worse than seek out local muscle women for interviews. There is, after all, quite a good chance that local media outlets would be up for actually publishing your work online or even in print. It's up to all of us to spread the regional love. Has think global, act local ever worked for minority movements before?!

Meanwhile, the best of British to Rosanna in her quest for professional status.




We'll be keeping an eye on events in Columbus, stay tuned for news of Rosanna there.

In the meantime, enjoy Rosanna's guest posing routine at the UKBFF Leeds last year


And, in tribute to Rosanna and all the other British female bodybuilders who represent us, this week on Female Muscle Slave, it's FBBUK. And however pant-wettingly exciting the thought that British female muscle icons Lisa Cross and Rene Campbell will both be competing in 2013 in world-class competitions, FBBUK Week will be waving the flag for some of the less well-known muscle women from these shores.

And we're sure Lisa and Rene, great Britons that they are, would approve.

Unbuttoned/Unzipped of the Day

FMS was delighted to have been invited onto the set of Dena Westerfield's forthcoming vampire movie, and would like to express our gratitude to her for a wonderful day, and for this exclusive preview still. Entitled She Eats by Night, Dena's character traps her male victims simply by exposing just enough of her incredible body to whet their appetite and lure them back to her lair. In this shot, Dena checks herself out in the mirror before she goes out to find some fresh meat.



Could you resist her charms?