Ashley Losee Chooses To Look Like This

Back at the end of January we met the very shredded Melissa Lesage, aka Miss Beast, and (among other things) her wisdom about muscle women and social media.

"If you're a girl who deadlifts and eats carbs you about to get IG stalked so hard"

We pleaded guilty and moved on.

But as Ashley Losee, formerly known as Ashley Sneathen, could confirm, if you're a girl who deadlifts and eats carbs you about to get a ton of IG abuse as well.



Why do all really buff girls look the same? Steroids. Are you a dude or do you just ingest hella testosterone? You are a dude. You look like a man. Ew! Like a girl transitioning to a guy when they take testosterone. She's gonna grow testes. OK, and where is the dick?



And that's just a tiny selection of some of the comments (spelling and grammar corrected*) that Ashley received as she prepared and competed in Figure at the NPC Illinois State Championships recently. In Figure. She was overall champ.



Now before we get on to how Ashley deals with all this IG abuse... When I look at Ashley I see a beautiful muscular woman. Granted, she's more muscular than I expect a Figure competitor, and an NPC Figure competitor at that, to look but nevertheless, not very muscular, you know, a Figure competitor. So, #1, I can't help wondering how those IG abusers of hers (haven't they got anything better to do?) react when they come across, say Isabelle Turell, Alana Shipp, Theresa Ivancik and so on. And #2, when I said she is a beautiful muscular woman, I mean really, she's absolutely gorgeous. Stunning. Those eyes! I just cannot comprehend how anyone could look at her, muscles or no, and say she looks, in any way, "like a man".



But, as we've seen, they do. And the fact that so many of them go out of their way to say so is something Ashley and, I expect, every other woman "who deadlifts and eats carbs" and has a social media presence has to deal with.

What I like about Ashley is the class with which she does it.



Shout out to all the people that find the time in their days to call ladies like me "GROSS" or "TOO MUCH", here's another pic of me being manly. The best part is, WE CHOOSE TO LOOK LIKE THIS.

Her capitals.




Shout out to everyone out there, especially the ladies that are putting in work every single day, doing THEIR thing and not giving a shit about what anyone has to say or thinks about them. It makes you just that much more of a bad ass.



Once upon a time Ashley didn't look like she does now. Do the abusers really think she looked better then? Maybe they would be a bit less abusive if they had even an inkling of the work Ashley has had to do to transform her former self into the beautiful muscular woman she is today. Somehow, I doubt it though.



You said you wanted me to look freaky... Well.

Figure!

Ashley will be at the NPC Jr. Nationals in a little over a month. Join me (and the abusers and her supporters) on her Instagram. For once, I'm not there to stalk. I'm going to correct the spelling and grammar of those who abuse her.



* for example, the original abuse read: "ru a dude or do you just injest hella testosterome". Injest?! No, actually this is VERY serious!

Rachel Reid: She Likes That Shit

A forum (the one whose first rule is...) has been running periodic "Best Selfie" polls. From a selection of 30 nominated selfies in either the Bikini/Fitness or Physique/Bodybuilding category you vote for your favourites. In the latter of those categories, Rachel Reid's selfies (above, below) get a lot of votes.



And why not? As one of the forum members there points out she is "gorgeous and huge", a combination guaranteed to get the brethren excited. And those pecs in particular get a lot of attention and praise. Chest day, she reveals, is her favorite training day of the week. And she's rightly very proud of her "lady pecs". I don't have implants, she says. Nor will I get them.



She started as a powerlifter - which is perhaps why those pecs look so damn powerful - and ended up competing only by chance. I had a good friend bet me that if he lost 30lbs in a month then I had to do a figure competition, she says. He won! After her first (natural) bodybuilding show, she says she "became hooked".



It took me a long time to build enough muscle to compete at the NPC level, says Rachel, and initially she competed in Figure, reaching national level and 9th in her class at the 2014 IFBB North Americans. But in 2015 she switched to Physique. I plan to compete in the WPD this fall, she said at the start of the year, and battle for my pro card at the NPC Nationals in Miami in November.



She did compete in the fall, but despite all the attention that she and her pecs were getting on the forums, despite feeling "gloriously veiny" on the morning of the NPC Baltimore Classic, a 6th place was not enough to get her to the Nationals.



See how Rachel always seems to say the right things? No implants, loves the veins. And she loves the right quotes as well. Example - Things I have in common with Victoria's Secret Models: 1. Being Hungry...

Well, here's the best example of all, a response to - almost unbelievably - negative comments about her magnificent physique.



And as she prepares for her 2016 season - she calls the shredding process "de-fluff" - she's saying all the right things again. And she seems to be taking continued pleasure in those upper body, pec-focused selfies. Time to get back to these abs and veins, she recently exclaimed on her Instagram next to one of those "gloriously veiny" images of her from late 2015.



She's one of the most beautiful girls in the world, according to one (highly typical) forum post. Quite possibly the most beautiful woman alive, according to another, seducing us with both her physique and her smile. Rachel clearly doesn't need to say all the right things to convince us female muscle heads of her magnificence, yet the fact that she does makes her all the more thrilling.




And nor, on the evidence so far, does she need to succeed in competition to build her (fanboy) fanbase. But we wish her well and sincerely hope that when November 2016 rolls around we'll be talking about Rachel Reid (and her pecs) at the NPC Nationals.



Follow Rachel's de-fluff for 2016 on her Instagram, and if you want to compare Rachel now with Figure Rachel, check out her 2014 IFBB North Americans package on RxMuscle and/or NPC News Online.

Enjoy!

Mo' Single Than You Think

That's just over 90kg.

And in this case, the "me" is Moe, Mmmmmonique Jones.



Now, I've always suspected that this isn't just the stuff of our female muscle fantasies, that if there's a muscular woman in the room - any room - then she gets her pick of the men (or women) (or both). She gets to feed first, as it were. And I find it rather exciting to have that acknowledged by one of the women themselves. Or better yet, not acknowledged, asserted.




Light-hearted as I'm sure this post on her Instagram was, Mmmmmonique claims to stand at a knee-weakening 6'2" in her heels (1.88m in Euros). I bet she sucks the air out of every room she walks, no, swaggers into whether she's got those heels on or not. And those women with a personal best squat of under 200lbs must surely sense that power. Maybe that's why so many women are so negative about muscular women. Maybe that's why so many more women are working on that squat PB these days!



You're about to enter a season of consecutive wins... Mmmmmonique told herself and her Instagram followers recently. Seems to me she is feeling even more assertive than normal right now. Better get yourself a girlfriend if you're in the Moe area. If you are just plain single rather than single by squat PB, the alpha goddess might not see you as a worthwhile challenge. And she'll never sling you over one mighty shoulder and your woman over the other...



Now that really is the stuff of my female muscle fantasies!

Figure BUT... Natalia's Feathers

Shanique and Nicole

You may not follow Figure, but when you say it I'll bet the next word is a big old "BUT..." And the reason for that BUT could be Maria Luisa Baeza Diaz. It could be the young phenomenons (phenomena?) Sandra Grajales Romero (who, like Maria Luisa featured in your Hot and Hard 100 for 2016) or Shanique Grant. It might be the former or current Ms Figure Olympias Nicole Wilkins or Latorya Watts, or the gorgeous (and also Hot and Hard 100 featuring) Diana Schnaidt or the gorgeous (and winning a lot in 2016) Cydney Gillon...


Latorya and Cydney

Seems like there are ever more reasons to not follow Figure BUT... And Natalia Abraham Coelho is definitely one more.



We have met Natalia on FMS before (as "Tali"), very briefly admiring her abs and learning a bit of Portuguese - eu quero adorar o seu sexy abs - in the process. But, as one forum poster has recently pointed out, yes good abs, but have you ever seen striations in a figure competitor's thighs like those before?! Simply amazing at any age, but at 19 that is astounding.



The striations in question, or "feathering" as I believe it is called, were/was evident as Natalia became the youngest ever IFBB Figure pro at the 2015 NPC Nationals. 19 she was. And this year she's set out on her pro career in an equally prodigious way with similarly pronounced thigh feathering. 4th at the Miami Muscle Beach Pro at the start of April, and then an even better 2nd at the Europa in Orlando at the end of that month.


Natalia, 4th in Miami

Now results like that do not bear out the conventional wisdom of what a successful Figure pro should avoid. Namely, those thigh feathers. The reason you don't usually see a Figure girl's legs that ripped is because they get points knocked for it, one forum poster who seems to know what they're talking about informs us on a thread devoted to Natalia. So does that mean Natalia would have scored even better, perhaps even won those shows if her thighs had been smoother? Or maybe those points aren't getting knocked off any longer?


And 2nd in Orlando

Either way, the general forum consensus is that Natalia is "definitely a special one". And as seems the way with all of the Figure ladies, whenever they're not on stage, they can't wait to get flexing - if they did it on stage they would certainly lose points!



And you might want to check out Natalia (also shot at the 2015 Nationals) flexing less but also wearing less in this beach based clip. And I know you don't follow Figure, but you might want to drop by Natalia's Instagram once in a while...

Now, how do you say "I want to worship your sexy thighs" in Portuguese?

The Pursuit of Michaela Aycock

The big clue to the correct answer is in the name of the post, but if I'd asked you yesterday who Florida's youngest ever IFBB Physique pro was before today, you'd probably have reasoned that Dani Reardon is a Floridian, Dani started young - at high school - and Dani didn't hang around when it came to rising through the amateur ranks. So, your answer would probably have been Dani Reardon, no?

I know it's what I would have said.



I'd have been wrong. The correct answer, it turns out, is Michaela Aycock. Just 20 when she turned pro at the NPC USAs last year. And she is not just Florida's youngest ever, she's the youngest ever Physique pro full stop.



Now a ripe old 21, Michaela (whose middle name, apparently, is the somewhat prophetic "Destiny") recently made her pro debut at the Europa Orlando. In a field of 22 women that included women with years of professional competitive experience, former Olympians among them, Michaela finished 3rd.




The feeling when they call your number for first callout... Indescribable emotion, she wrote afterwards (I mentioned yesterday this was a week of something that was hard to define, and there you go!) And you can follow her adventures in Orlando in a short film, The Debut Pursuit, here on vimeo.



It's kind of a keyword for Michaela that, "pursuit". After the show in Orlando, "the debut is over, the pursuit continues", every day before and since the show "the pursuit continues" according to her Instagram posts. It's not, it seems to me, the pursuit of something tangible, like a pro win, an Olympia appearance or the title itself. Rather it is the thing itself, the "ultimate pursuit".



I am an "all in" type of person and I started going to the gym in 2013, she told Christian Duque last year. I really fell in love and found a passion in it and continued making goals for myself. It has just progressed from there.



I think all of us competitors are a little crazy, we love a chase and we love a challenge. Sure we all have moments, some harder than others, but I wouldn’t call any of them either "easy" or "hurdles". When you are doing something out of pure passion and pursuit [that word again] to a greater result, with your eyes fixated on whatever your goal may be, nothing can come against you and nothing can faze you.



Nothing's fazed her so far, partly, perhaps, because she's always had it all mapped out - her Road to... the Future, in two parts on her YouTube channel will tell you how.



This obsession, this fixation, this single-minded determination... Up close and personal with Michaela probably doesn't even exist unless you're one of the team involved in her "pursuit". But from afar, from here, an ocean away from Florida and Michaela, it's all incredibly attractive. The gains, the insane definition, the freakish muscular development, well it won't come as a surprise that I am swooning all over the place, and judging by the buzz around Michaela on the forums I am far from alone.



Below is the most recent pic of Michaela at the time of writing. The pursuit continues.



Watch an excellent compilation of Michaela in all her vascular freakish glory - Perfect Female Muscle - on World of Muscle Girls. And to see what a difference three years can make, you can also see what Michaela looked like in 2013, competing in Figure, not long after she had started lifting, at the NPC Kentucky in 2013 on RxMuscle.

Enjoy!