Tales of the Towel: Special K

Katrin Kirsch



Featured on FMS in 2013 for her "bullets", Katrin had fallen off the radar rather then, and hasn't returned. Still, this (for her) rather modest pic is worth looking at again if only to remind us the hand she's using to keep the towel up is entirely superfluous.

Kortney Olson



The CEO of GRRRL clothing captures herself in a rare moment of relaxation and an even rarer moment when she's not dressed in one of her own products, although she's practising what she preaches nonetheless. Not many CEOs you can say that about.

Heidi Krochter, Natalya Kuzmina

Heidi has been somewhat less talked about on the forums this year than last, though why that should be exactly is a bit of a mystery to me. This year she's not (as far as I know) competed, but she has done a terrific photoshoot with ace lensman Gene X. Hwang, and the rest of the time she's just kept on being the Heidi we adored last year. We might look at the raised eyebrow and imagine she's letting us know that she knows what we really want to see is below the bottom of the picture, but we're way off - unsurprisingly that's not what it's about at all (see the post on her IG for details).



And while we're acknowledging that appearances can be deceptive, would you have guessed (if you didn't know) from this sauna(?) shot that Natalya is not so much a Bodybuilder as a powerlifter? And of some note, too. If your goal, for example, is to deadlift, say 100kg (220lbs) at some point - a fine ambition - then consider that this beautiful young lady from Kazakhstan deadlifts 215+kg (474+lbs). For reps.

Katka Kyptova



And our last, but by no means least, Special K is, according to our (hardly exhaustive) research, the woman who takes and posts more towel-clad selfies than any other.



Forensic Katka-watchers will be able to time and date these with some precision based on hairdo, muscularity, ink coverage, and, I dare say, a multitude of other factors. The layman could care less. The layman's doing what I'm doing right after I finish compiling this post. The layman is only concerned with a happy ending, and this week's posts are going to get one - the last photo on the right, in my case. What divine definition!



If you've anything left in the tank afterwards, perhaps you'd like to check out a rar of 25 images that didn't quite make the edit this week. You would? Great! It's here. Enjoy!

Never Better: Katka Kyptova - Madrid 2011

KATKA KYPTOVA
2nd, 2011 Arnold Amateur Europe



She's only 33 now, then she'd just turned 28. Katka had been lifting for at least three years and had come a long way from the very pretty and pretty slender girl she had once been. By 2010 she had hulked her way firmly into our collective consciousness. But it was in the 2010/2011 off-season that she really blossomed, dying her blond locks black, and so becoming the uber-muscle goddess who travelled with the Czech team to Madrid and the first Arnold Classic event to be held outside the USA.



I think I'm in the best shape I've ever been, she told Ronnie.cz shortly before she got on the plane to Spain. My preparation's gone much better than ever before.



Before the contest, her blog whetted the appetite with progress pics and training clips from her preparation, I wrote of the build-up to the show back in 2011 - the very early days of this blog. I vividly remember watching her training chest, a couple of months before the show - the first time I'd seen Katka Dark. She'd been dieting for just a week, and looked so damn good I became utterly convinced that she simply couldn't lose.



For the first time on FMS, and by no means for the last (although I have got a bit better over the years I reckon), I was wrong. Not by much - Katka bested the best of Britain, Brazil and Germany; Lisa Cross, Simone Oliveira, and Nina Loebert, respectively - but somehow just lost out to Russia's Elena Shportun and her dancing abs trick.



It was one of those decisions that sets the forums ablaze with much gnashing of teeth and many many exclamation marks. I weighed in on FMS, managing to come to terms with the result, I thought, because a) I'd been reading up on Buddhism, and b) I was right-clicking like a maniac on pretty much every pic of Katka posing on that stage that I could find (and back in 2011, download speeds were not what they are now). The fact was I was too busy drooling over Katka's muscles to maintain my indignation.




Suddenly I was the teenage boy in his bedroom with his copy of Muscle & Fitness unable to take his eyes off Anja Langer and her beautiful muscular body. Katka thrilled me like the very first time. I just couldn't stop looking at her. Her pecs, her abs, her legs, her arms... a beauty and yet she was just so big and hard, her muscles were so full and defined. Tanned, thrilling. Sexy but beyond sexy. MUSCLE SEXY.



Two images in particular mesmerised me. She's on the floor, leg bicep flexed. Everywhere you look - her legendary calves, the muscle around her knee(!), the definition all over her legs and her glutes - I can barely breathe now, how bad must I have been when I first saw this image?! But she hasn't finished with me yet. My eyes move up her body to her shoulders, her arms - so powerful. I'm gasping for air.
And then, finally, you see that half smile, and those deep, intense eyes...



And the second? Even better!



There were rumours even then that she had decided to quit Bodybuilding (more gnashing of teeth from the brethren), but in fact she returned to Madrid the following year and competed in Bodybuilding again. She finished runner-up again, this time to Jacqueline Fuchs, and then she became the Physique competitor she is today.


Katka at the 2016 Tampa Pro

In her dark-haired phase it's hardly surprising some of the racier female muscle paysites had come calling, and - as FMS noted in 2011 - Katka went through a phase of feeling less than shy about exposing that muscle sexy chest of hers in all its pectacular glory, leaving my Katka Dark folder (yes, I have a special folder for that dark-haired period) busting at the seams, and all of us with many many unforgettable images.



The fact that she's no longer one of the big big girls (and has a fair bit of ink) has led to many a female muscle head crossing her off their love list, but I have to admit I'm still a big big fan, and I don't ever think I'll lose my soft hard spot for Mladá Boleslav's finest.



Follow Katka on Instagram.

Sweat. Sweet! (The Search for Sweat)

Finally! I thought to myself, something new on the blog, something we've never done before. Sweat. Sweet sweet sweat. Pouring off beautiful muscular bodies. Great patches of it drenching her top. Beads of sweat dripping down her pec line, her abs...

There must be thousands of images of muscle beauties with a good sweat on, right?



Well, I'm still not sure whether the answer to that question is "No" or whether I've been looking in all the wrong places, but having spent more hours than is healthy in a female muscle image viewing vortex and turning up very few proper sweaty images, FMS turned to a friend of the blog for assistance. I stopped after the first 8,000 pictures, he told us, admitting that even among the 30 or so he had found, it was hard to tell how many were "enhanced" - the "sweat" just sprayed on water mixed with a bit of oil.



Images I remembered from way back, "classic" sweat from The Magazine Years, proved, on closer inspection, to be quite obviously of the "enhanced" variety.

And even more worrying, when I was sure I knew where to find sweaty selfies of a more recent vintage, I found my mind had been playing tricks on me too. For example, Marthe Sundby. I thought I'd find sweat bucket selfies in the Marthe folder by the shed load. It's bloody dripping off her in almost every one she takes, right?

WRONG!



At best, there's a sheen. Marthe certainly looks like she has been sweating (or is about to get busy sweating a whole lot more), but her sweat-drenched vest, the great rivers of sweat flowing over her blood-filled muscles turned out to be all in my mind.

And Marthe's wasn't the only folder I entered confidently but left disappointed.




Sweat, I can only conclude, is a lot easier to imagine than to actually find, or at least that seems to be the case for me. I realise I'm projecting sweat onto images old and new, and I don't need a doctor to tell me that must mean I really really dig a strong sexy woman with a good sweat on. And if you feel the same way you are really really going to dig this week's posts, because thankfully, though it might have proved difficult to find exactly the kind of images I dreamed of, it has not proved impossible.



Please email in your favourite sweaty pics to 6ft1swell@gmail.com and I promise to post the lot of them. Sweet Sweat, by the way, is an actual product. Check it out!

100 Biceps: Day 4

Today's post is what they call "NSFW" by the time you reach the end, although to be honest I suppose how "safe for work" anything is depends very much on what exactly "work" is. What's "safe" for an Antarctic post master is, I imagine, very different from what's "safe" for an inner-city primary school teacher.

Anyway, time for some biceps in motion with a selection of my 10 favourite biceptual gifs from the utter genius that is ShirtRippers2.0 on Tumblr. Enjoy!

MARJA LEHTONEN

We gave Marja's bad boys a whole post of their own on Sunday, but included
her again because, well, more Marja is never a bad thing, is it?

TINA CHANDLER: 033, 034

"Which one do you prefer?" says Tina. "The left or the right?"
Well, I really couldn't say. Show me them again...

ELENA OANA HREAPCA: 035, 036

For my money, the most beautiful woman in the world. Is it just my imagination
or does she sniff it pre-flex? Bet it smells as good as it looks!

KASHMA MAHARAJ I: 037, 038

If you could guarantee a barely-covered Kashma would be on the dance floor tonight
I might be persuaded that my clubbing days were not over after all.

SIMONE OLIVEIRA: 039

Fully pumped. Not just her arm, either.
And not just the bits you can see I'll bet. 

VIRGINIA SANCHEZ: 040

What would you like to do to Virginia's massive peak?
(Or perhaps "on" Virginia's massive peak?!)

KASHMA MAHARAJ II

More Kashma. About to rip it all off and reveal her
rock hard body in all its glory. Or something.

KATKA KYPTOVA I: 041

Gosh! Three Katka's!!! And all of them arrogant as f**k!!!

ALEESHA YOUNG: 042

Yes, Aleesha, yes I would like to...

KATKA KYPTOVA II: 043

The NSFW bit. Obviously. Mainly because of where it is compelling
your favoured hand to go. Well, am I wrong?

See you tomorrow!

Valentina vs. Katka

It's almost like one of those 'What if...?' games you might play in idle moments, pairing your favourite muscle babes past and present on stage in a kind of fantasy posedown.

Valentina Chepiga vs. Katka Kyptova anyone? Well, as it happens...



...Valentina AND Katka did indeed grace the same stage at the Emerald Cup in Washington state at the end of April. In the 'What if...? game, of course, they both would have been at their peak, but unfortunately this was not Valentina in her Ms Olympia winning pomp against Katka in her dark and sultry bodybuilder phase that so excited FMS back in 2011. However, compete against each other they did.



I should at this point confess that I was, until about ten minutes ago, under the impression that the Emerald Cup was Valentina's big comeback, but as I began to source pictures of her from the contest I saw that she had, in fact, already competed as a physique pro once, last year at the Titans Grand Prix in California - incidentally in the same line-up as Mindi O'Brien. I can only beg your forgiveness for not being sufficiently on the ball to have noticed that Valentina, one of only four Europeans to have won the Ms Olympia crown, had returned to competition then.




Now it's easy for us female bodybuilding fans to feel disappointed when our favourite competitors 'downsize' to physique, but in this case, surely, we can have nothing but admiration for Valentina. Whether it was by accident or design, she took to the stage (again) in 2014 on the weekend of her birthday. Her fifty-second birthday!



All my mates who are approaching the big five-o (and as I enter my 40s there's more and more of them) are boring the tits off me by repeating (in a kind of 'if I keep saying it, it'll be true' way) that 50 is the new 40. Well, I don't know about you, but if 50 looks like Valentina does at that age, it might as well be the new 30, or even the new 20! Just think of some 50-year-old women you know, then have another good gander at Valentina's 52-year-old bod. Incredible, n'est-ce pas? Try again. Picture a few 40-year-old women you know. Do any of them even come close to Valentina? What about the 30-year-olds in your life? Maybe there's one or two who could hold a candle to her, but not for much longer I'd bet. I'm struggling to think of any women in their 20s that I personally know who look half as good as Valentina does at 52!



Granted, those are some genes Valentina has - genes she has always had - but to be the age she is and still have the sensational body she does (without, to my untrained eye at least, resorting to any kind of surgery for help) can only serve to inspire women of all ages to adopt bodybuilding as the tool in the fight against the ageing process.


Katka: bodybuilder, 2011 vs. physique competitor, 2014

And then there's Katka. Poor Katka. Once upon a time, well, actually about three years ago, she was probably the most lusted after young female bodybuilder in the world - the Shannon Courtney of the day. She had everything - the body, the face, the attitude... But she kept getting beaten. You may remember that she was a controversial runner-up to Elena Shportun at the Arnold Europe in 2011. She returned the following year and came tantalisingly close again, losing out to Jay Fuchs on that occasion. I said around the time she announced her move into the physique division that while I was somewhat disappointed, you had to sympathise. She had tried for so long to get her pro card as a bodybuilder and come so very close on a number of occasions. Perhaps she felt she had a better chance as a physique competitor.




So, she switched. Then she got her pro card anyway, one of those that are awarded on merit rather than on results. Her dream had come true at last. Except she now finds herself in the most competitive pro division right now (and if you don't agree it's the most competitive, check out some of the other ladies who were on stage with Katka and Valentina at the Emerald Cup while you remember that this was a relatively minor show in the pro physique calendar). So Katka still isn't winning. Poor Katka.



Opinion among us female muscle heads is divided over whether she was better as a bodybuilder or as the physique competitor she is now. She needs to go back to bodybuilding, her body type and muscularity suits it, says one fairly typical forum post. But in another fan's opinion, Her body doesn't put on mass as easily as some of the shorter, more compact women. I think she's better suited for the less demanding physique category. And there's no shortage of those who would agree with that either. Personally, I think that Katka is one of those women who would have flourished as a lightweight or middleweight bodybuilder but unfortunately for her she came to bodybuilding only after the golden era of weight classes (days when Valentina had been crowned Ms Olympia - in her weight class!) had long since passed.



Poor Katka finished 6th at the Emerald Cup (and 4th in a field of just five a week later at the new Mozolani Pro contest in Slovakia). It is, indeed, a very competitive division these days. And Valentina? Well, at 52, Valentina Chepiga came 11th.

You can judge for yourself who would have been the happier...



Enjoy!