Having gone into a bit more detail than originally intended with last week's Summer Break @NPC USAs posts, I find myself playing catch-up. No time for very much at all, I'm afraid, so this week I'm having to go a bit PumpItUp - one picture every day.
One perfect picture.
ALINA & FRIENDS (or ALINA & "FRIENDS")
She is lesbian? asks one, perhaps slightly worried, fan.
So, let me get this straight - four women together = four lesbians?
When was this decided? How about three women? Or two?
Is the fact they are in bikinis significant?
Is it only true if one (or more) of them has muscles?
What, I wondered as I first thought about this week's selections, are my particular female muscle obsessions? You would think I'd know after roughly 30 years. Two key points were easy to identify. One, "The New", I expanded on on Tuesday, and the other will be dealt with on Saturday. Apart from that, I had a few assumptions.
Abs would surely have to be one, but then a glance at the most numerous labels over the last five years or so revealed that I'd made more posts concerning Biceps.
What goes on backstage would have to be another. As someone who's never been to a show, let alone been granted entry to a pump room (aka the holiest of holies), I guess it could be something about the attraction of the forbidden. Perhaps I'm so obsessed with backstage pics and clips because I know it's the closest I'll ever get. Perhaps it's the knowledge that nowhere on Earth is there a greater density of female muscle.
And it doesn't even have to be the big girls. I can get excited about just about any backstage clip, including Bikini. As long as there's pumping and flexing and tanning and oiling, I'm all over it. Below is a recent example of a fine bit of backstage camera work. Mostly it's the Figure pros. Diana Schnaidt is just one of many highlights.
And while we're on the subject of the Figure ladies, there's a somewhat newer obsession I appear to have developed, regarding their lack of flexing on stage and their obvious desire to flex the hell out of their muscles almost all of the rest of the time. It started a couple of years ago when Alicia Coates flexed her biceps at the Olympia...
Since then I've been monitoring the amount of gratuitous flexing ladies of the Figure division do when their not on stage at contests - in, for example, the pump room. Seems to me it's a lot. As much as possible in fact, but it doesn't end there. What about when they get interviewed after they win? Again, there's a lot. Really.
Take for example the lovely Stephanie Rowe, interviewed below by Ashley Adams for HD Physiques. Now Stephanie, as all women with muscle seem to me to do, gesticulates a lot during the interview. Inadvertent flexing you might call it, just keep your eyes on the arm closest to you. But then, as is customary at the end of these interviews, Stephanie shows us a pose (for the impatient, it's at 2.20). A Figure pose.
Can Stephanie resist giving us another kind of pose as well? Can she f**k?!
So, I obsessively wonder, does this mean that Alicia and Stephanie would like to do a bit more flexing on stage? Are all Figure ladies, or at least the ones who post themselves flexing, fully-pumped on their IG feeds day after day after day, frustrated flexers? Is the only cure a move up to Physique à laShanique Grant?
Shanique, Figure (left), and flexing
Perhaps. But for the classiest competitors, the fact that they don't get to do the double biceps or the side chest or the abs and thigh doesn't stop them sneaking a sneaky flex into their "presentations". And the best example of this I've found this year has got to be the ever-classy Cydney Gillon winning at the Miami Muscle Beach Pro. Check out the cheeky, blink-and-you-miss-it rewind-no-I-didn't-imagine-it tricep flex at 0.24.
Obsessed? Yes I am!
In an effort to bring some sort of sanity to this post, I wondered if the blog labels would reveal obsession with particular women. The top five were both predictable and surprising. Alina has more posts dedicated to her than any other woman - predictable. Lisa Cross comes a close second - also predictable, given that I'm a Brit and am ever so slightly obsessed with Lisa. Shannon in fourth and Marthe and Margie tied for 5th - also predictable. But I was genuinely surprised to find that my third most written about woman was the much-missed Slovenian she-beast Brigita Brezovac.
I don't regret a single post, I just wouldn't have counted Brigita among my top five of the past five years if you'd asked. And I guess that just goes to show how little I know! Possibly though it has something to do with the fact that the tip top number one label is "Muscle", and there can be no doubt at all that Brigita always had plenty of that.
And so, to another of my lasting obsessions. No, it's not the tongue, or the outfit - although in the case of that clip neither of those things hurt - it's the walk.
Honestly, I think if I ever saw a female bodybuilder, a real female bodybuilder, especially one who I recognised, out in public walking along the street, well, I think I would probably just keep on following her until I was either confronted, arrested, or had a door of some sort slammed in my face. I could watch clips of female bodybuilders walking all day. Every day. And I'm so enamoured by them that if a longer clip starts off with a walk before fading into something else, I'm gutted.
As George Harrison sang, something in the way she moves...
Right. Time to get this over with. I've already probably given the impression I am, if not mentally deranged, super-creepy. But if you share any of these obsessions, or indeed others - glutes, Brazilians, Brazilian glutes, Dani Reardon, female muscle hand bras, extreme vascularity, that bulge - then I'm sure we'd have something to talk about if we met at a place that has become another of my obsessions, the Girls with Muscle chat room. Look out for 6ft1swell joining the chat and say hello.
I too started with traumatic magazine-buying missions, but I don't miss those days. I have a theory that the internet 'Golden Age' really took off with the quality improvements in HD images and videos. In particular, this coincided with the rise to the top of one of the most incredible stars of the past few years: Alina Popa.
I remember seeing images of her 'before' things really took off. I'm thinking the short blond hair, big chunky muscles... She had 'something' but didn't especially stand out.
Then she went high definition.
Not just the images, but Alina too. There are images of Alina that are almost impossibly beautiful: the sharpness of her muscle definition; the shiny bulging peaks, abs, quads; the sharp beauty of her cheekbones...
Everything worked together and we could see her in absolute clarity.
Alina's transformation into a high definition muscle goddess was made doubly impressive as the images of her changed to high definition at the same time.
For me, Alina characterises now as being THE Golden Age for female muscle fans because all these images are readily available and can stay this sharp for ever.
No dodgy scans of creased and crumpled magazine pages!
Gentlemen, your thoughts please! Let's keep the conversation going.
The last day of Rolling Thunder, and yes, the Queen has some treats for you...
1. ALEKSANDRA RUDENKO
NEW LEGS ON THE BLOCK
Despite the name, "Sasha" is from Norway, the 2014 Norwegian Masters Physique champion, most recently in action at the Arnold Europe in Madrid, where her incredible legs weren't quite enough to get her into the top 10 in her (up to 163cm) class. Fear not, though, because she and they feature in Muscle Appeal's new preview of Beautiful Muscular Women from Europe - Sasha is on after sexy Susanna Tirpak, and, yes, there is up close quad flexing included. Short but very very sweet.
2. LAURA CAROLAN
SHOCK & AWE
In Tampa this year, and at her first pro show since 2012 (and only her second since 1995!) Canada's Laura Carolan certainly had the kind of conditioning that catches the eye. But it was her work with Awefilms after the show that is likely to live longest in the memory, and it's a screen cap from this that we present today.
It's the kind of look (and you can see a few more caps from the video here) that can make the non-female muscle headed community panic and run for cover, and can even divide female muscle lovin' opinion like an "in/out" European referendum.
I'm in. Very in. *SWOOOON*IN
The Queen approves.
3. CYNTHIA COLON
THUNDER THIGHS
She started in Figure, would you believe, but after some initial success was told she was "too big", had "too much muscle". This was back in 2009, long before the Physique division had been created, so Cynthia went straight up to Bodybuilding, first as a Middleweight and then as a Heavyweight - despite being only 5'2" (1.57m). She earned her pro card in 2011, and was next seen in the Physique division at the New York Pro in 2013, where she finished 14th and which was the last we saw of her on stage.
She doesn't seem to have any concrete plan to compete again as yet, or if she does, she isn't letting on, but that hasn't stopped her magnificent legs becoming the stuff of female muscle lovin' legend. She owns some [!} of the most gorgeous, super pumped up dancer's legs ever on an FBB, says one forum poster, clearly too overcome by Cynthia's thunder to count to two. And the rest of her is damn nice too, he adds.
Our last pair of Brazilian thighs this week turns the freakometer all the way up to 11. We've posted this picture before, and swooned all over it on too many occasions to remember. And if I'm not mistaken, I feel another one coming on right now!
5. ROBIN DEE
RIVERS OF BLOOD
Who would have thunk it? It turns out the freakometer goes up to 12.
Imagine the incomprehension on the faces of your friends as you try to explain how unbelievably erotic you find pictures like the ones of Loana and Robin above...
The Queen understands though.
6. ALINA
ALL OF THE ABOVE
Rather ironically at this stage, it occurs to me now that just about everything I've been enjoying about the other 98 thighs we've featured this week could have been summed up with just two. And both of them belong to Alina Popa. Thickness, curvaceous aesthetic sweeping lines, ripped and rippling quads. She has it all. In spades.
And with Iris having announced her retirement over, I can't help thinking that female bodybuilding needs Alina to get back to her swoonworthy best in 2016, because as much as I can admire Iris for her achievements, the last thing the sport needs is for her to monopolise the Rising Phoenix as she did the Ms Olympia. And with all due respect to the Queen of Quads, Alina is still the best chance there is to stop that happening.
Turns out it is no easy thing to choose your favourite Alina quad shots, no easy thing at all. I'm exhausted I tell you, it's been swoon after swoon after swoon. Seems I really like how Chris Zimmerman frames those prime pieces of female muscle meat.
And I even set myself the thankless task of picking a favourite Alina quad gif as well. I have to admit ths isn't the highest definition example I could find, but there's something about the way all those different peaks of quad muscle start popping (Popa-ing!) up as she jiggles her feet up and down that I find absolutely irresistible.
You are probably expecting Alina to be the "big finish", but cool your, er, thing there fella. The Queen has one last beautiful treat for your viewing pleasure, so I hope you have just a little left for our final pair of thunder thighs...
7. KASHMA
THIGH FANTASY IN MOTION
She basks in the sunshine and beckons you over. You obey, and let her direct you into exactly the position she wants you. Are they big enough for you? she asks rhetorically, stretching out one, and then the other leg. You are hypnotised by her rippling quads, in awe of the muscle. You can feel your heart pound and your cock hardening.
Don't just look at them! she snaps, the sudden firmness in her voice jolting you out of your reverie, and then, more softly, coquettishly even: Don't you want to put your lips on them? Again, the question needs no answer, and you don't answer, you just DO...
