I don't think we've ever featured Brazilian thunderella Vivi Winkler before, but she's probably not unfamiliar to (a very well-informed female muscle head like) yourself.
Could you spot her in a line-up though?
Answers to the usual address. Winning entries go into a draw for the (one and only) prize - a once in a lifetime opportunity to take Vivi out dress shopping*.
On her way to compete at the NPC Nationals last year, Capucine Leconte realised she had forgotten a crucial hair accessory and turned her car around to go back home.
Having spent nearly a decade away from the stage, 2017 had been the year she had rediscovered her passion for competition. She'd qualified for the Nationals by winning her class at the New York State Grand Prix, several cuts above the competition found at such regional shows, and her appearance there jogged memories on the forums. I found her a year ago but had kind of forgotten about her since then, wrote one enthused poster. Didn't know she was going to compete. WOW! She's amazing!
An exotic beauty indeed. And ripped to shreds (as they say) - which, apparently, is never the problem in Figure that it seems to have become in Physique! (Just saying).
So anyway, back to that day of the Nationals...
Capucine arrives home to get her hair accessory. And I believe she found it, but she also found her fiance (of four years, now ex-fiance) in bed with another woman!
The shock would have floored most (the stuff about men who cheat on women who most of us would give up an organ - but not that organ - to be with is not our concern today), but Capucine, back in her car, decided to head for the show anyway.
By this time though, she was somewhat behind schedule, and arriving at the venue late she was initially told she had been disqualified. However, she was given the chance to go on when a judge (presumably an important one) noted how incredible she looked.
She did, indeed, look absolutely incredible, but there must have been so much going on in her head as strutted onto the stage. Happily, she managed to keep her composure and all the judges agreed - class winner. Capucine Leconte was now an IFBB pro.
She made her pro debut in Chicago recently (looked incredible, didn't place!), and these days there's a fella who regularly turns up in the background of some of her Instagram posts - hardly surprising she didn't stay single for very long.
She'll be at the Tampa Pro at the start of next month. I'm looking to make a strong comeback after I learned a lot from this last [Chicago] show, she says. Had a lot of great advice from others, but everyone is asking me about my abs!
Once, we fantasised about making a female muscle beach map of the world, sticking our pins in places where muscular beauties had been spotted on the sand or in the surf...
And I still think it's one of our better ideas!
Who among us hasn't headed to the beach on the first day of our holiday bursting with anticipation, utterly convinced this year will be the year when we finally lay our towel within sight of the muscle woman of our dreams, only to drag our (slightly burned) bums back to the airport two weeks' later, our fantasies still unfulfilled?
Knowing which beaches have been female muscle hotspots in the recent past would surely boost both your chances of sighting the unicorn and the local economy - female muscle lovers being well-known for their extravagant spending habits and all.
And so, my lovely readers, I appeal to you once again!
FMS is desperately seeking 1. nerd to make the map, and 2. spotters to send in reports of sightings (pictures would be appreciated but we'll take your word for it - after all, stashing a camera in your budgie smugglers is not the easiest thing in the world).
On reflection, perhaps a world map would be a monumental waste of time - entirely blank except for extreme concentrations in Florida, California, and Brazil. Perhaps we actually need to have three maps - one each for the coasts of those states?
Empty when I arrived, within an hour the beach was absolutely rammed!
Keep going, the caption reads, no matter how you feel.
There may be other women who personify the "amateur" in British female muscle quite as gloriously as Wigan's Jayne Tingle, but right now, I can't think of any who do.
She's been at it for some time - as long ago as 2007 she was the NABBA British Toned Figure champion - 13 years chipping away, as she puts it, a single mother personal trainer clearly doing it for the love. She hasn't exclusively competed at NABBA shows - she has, for example, appeared at the Arnold Amateur and Amateur Olympia, and at UKBFF British and IFBB European Championships in the past. But NABBA is the place she seems to be most at home, and the place where she gets the most love. However, she has never got as much love before as she has had from the NABBA judges this year.
She started her competitive season at the NABBA North-west, lining up in the Athletic Figure class - a bit more muscular than Toned, not as muscular as Trained.
And from there, she went on to the NABBA Britain.
Now, unlike some other federations where you get the judges telling you you were in the wrong class after you've competed, in NABBA, you are placed in one of the classes before you get on stage. And so, at the Britain this year, Jayne turned up expecting to feature in the Athletic class again, but was told she had to compete in Trained instead.
I was in absolute awe at every girl, Jayne said of the competition she suddenly found herself up against. I wondered how I could measure up to any of them.
You can probably guess what happened next...
11 years after she'd won the British Toned title, Jayne was now the British Trained champ. OMG, was her (understandable) reaction. Did I get moved from Athletic to Trained and win?! Lots of bitching, she confided. Sorry to those I've upset.
Nice of her to say that, but she probably wasn't very sorry. And anyway, in her decade and then some of competing, Jayne seems to have made a lot more friends than enemies. There were plenty of smiling faces ready to celebrate with her.
Next stop, the Worlds, and once again she arrived thinking "athletic"...
Time for me to accept I am more muscular than I realise! she said after once again the judges had moved her up to the more muscular class. I am actually hench!
Hench enough to place 4th anyway. People said I'd be a laughing stock internationally at Trained Figure - clearly NABBA (or is it Bodybuilding generally?) is a bitchier world than I would like to imagine! - If this is a laughing stock, she continued, defiantly, I'm rolling with it! 15 stacked girls, best line-up in a good while. I am so over the moon.
And ironically, none of this might have happened this year.
I wasn't going to compete 'cause I wasn't in a good place, she told her Instagram followers recently. Some mental abuse floored me, and I lost a lot of weight. But I needed something, so from January I put food in as I was struggling to eat from stress. Then I decided to try to aim for a show just to keep myself focused...
And last weekend, she did one more - the IFBB pro qualifying event in Coventry. She only won her class, and came within a few points of actually ending the year with a pro card, but ultimately the Overall title went elsewhere. This year is definitely my year! she concludes, despite the near miss. Feels great being in a good place again.
*APOLOGIES FOR THE LACK OF A POST YESTERDAY - THIS WAS NOT ENTIRELY DUE TO THE FACT THAT FMS WAS CELEBRATING ITS 4,000,000TH PAGE VIEW (THANK YOU!) - WE HOPE THAT TODAY'S DOUBLE WILL MAKE UP FOR IT.*
The German-based NAC federation is not one that most fans know a lot about, and with the possible exception of a serial champion like Italy's Monia Gioiosa, the majority of female muscle heads would be hard-pushed to name any of its leading ladies. In that respect, it appears to have much in common with its British equivalent - NABBA. There's much to appreciate - the ladies appear drenched in oil and tanning products, they are often magnificently ripped, and they pose in thongs - but they hardly ever get the kind of attention (here and elsewhere) that IFBB/NPC competitors do.
Over the next couple of days [actually just today now thanks to yesterday's no post - ed.] we'll be spotlighting two competitors with extensive contest histories, both of whom have enjoyed recent success in one of those two less celebrated federations.
First up, it's the Romanian-born Hungary-based NAC Figure legend Judit Palecian.
Judit in her kickboxing days
Judit was a dancer in her youth, but later began a very successful kickboxing career, and she still uses the nickname "Miss Boxing" for her Facebook page. She was a World Champion in 2002 and again in 2003, after which she began to focus solely on Bodybuilding. She has won World and European titles in NAC, IBFA, IBFF, and WBPF contests over a period of many years - one article from last year claims she had held as many as 11 World and 3 European titles between 2014 and 2016 alone!
Frey also captured Judit's winning routine - thong, heels and all!
I doubt the IFBB/NPC bigwigs pay much attention to how other federations do things, but watching Judit performing her routine here (as well as previous routines, which are not difficult to find, by the way) I can't help but dare to dream that one day in the not-too-distant future we might see - for example - Cydney Gillon or Maria Luisa Baeza Diaz flexing on the Olympia stage like this Figure World Champion.
Another new alternative to the Sunday Sizzler, the Sunday Showdown will bring you two women, rightly famed for a particular muscle or body part, going head-to head.
Or, in this case, bum-to-bum.
Witness the thickness...
BAKHAR v BARBOSA
Comment box for your verdict and/or suggestions for future Showdown subjects.
Seems like not very long since our last round-up of recent YouTube clips, but we've certainly collected more than enough to fill another post, so, we thought, why not?
WHEN A WOMAN LOVES A MUSCLE WOMAN
The girl can't help it! I do especially like the way our worshipper loses the ability to finish even the most basic sentences, and, finally, the ability to articulate words.
It's sort of comforting to know that The Madness can strike the ladies just as much as it can us fellas, although I'm more than a little jealous of how much more physical access (and free physical access at that) a woman going ga-ga over a muscle woman can get!
In the normal scheme of things, MuscleSportTV is not an essential watch, but one of its shows - the imaginatively named Gregg & Joe TV - hosted by Gregg (Valentino) and Joe (Pietaro) turned out to be more interesting than most. Gregg and Joe interview "Big Daddy" Chris, a New Yorker and session regular. It's a tad cruder than I would ideally like it to be, but once I had suppressed my inner prude, I found it mighty refreshing.
The interview starts at 6.52
This may not the most respectful discussion of the topic, but I like how unapologetic Chris is, his disdain for the "schmoe" label, and his love of FBBs at their most vascular, when they look like "a GPS road map", as he puts it. The fact that Joe also confesses to being a female muscle head as well but only pleasuring himself and being (rightly) jealous of Chris' experiences is another aspect of the piece I can identify with!
From the gutter to the ballet we go (perhaps feeling we need to restore FMS' highbrow credentials at this point) [you're more deluded than I thought - ed.] with Oksana Grishina going back to her conservatory roots for a collaboration with Boris Ivanov (pianist and co-director) and Konstantin Frolov. The music is not the greatest, and there's far too much fading to Boris for my liking, but there's no denying how impressive Oksana is. The 10 or so seconds after the 1.54 mark is truly breathtaking.
The error in the title (for the benefit of our non-English-speaking readers: men is plural, One Man's Dream would be correct) may, for all I know, be entirely deliberate. Perhaps the filmmakers are commenting on the fact that what we think are our individual muscle woman fantasies are actually shared collective fantasies.
Or something.
GLAMMED AND TANNED
Best Muscle Video continues to delight with its edits of individual women, both amateur and professional, at recent shows. Our pick of the recent amateur bunch are the very watchable Gisselle Cole (Figure) and Chrissy Cuellar (Physique).
Meanwhile, they have started (I hope there will be more) to put up footage from the St. Louis Pro this year, with veteran FBB turned Physique Master Candice Carr and the gorgeous Katie Lee already ready to view. Our pick of the pros from that show and from the channel recently though is Krista Dunn. Make it past the abs and thigh at 2.40 and you will have lasted longer than me [that's "highbrow"?! - ed.]
For more Euro-centric delights, Lara Tasharofi, the Austrian winner of this year's NABBA Slovakia, gives quite the glute-show, but Body-Xtreme's coverage of the Physique class at the recent German Championships is truly essential viewing. Despite their jobs depending on it, the Research Department haven't yet been able to identify the last of the posers (or indeed any of them) but whoever she is, she is very special.
She juxtaposes the seemingly incompatible: she has the shape of a seriously built amazon and the face of the prettiest, most innocent girl. Long shiny dark hair, big eyes with curly lashes and a charming smile somehow go along with the widest shoulders. (Vasilina Pazdnikova, "Vladislava Galagan, the Female Bodybuilder")
Not me gushing, but a female admirer, a would-be journalist and student at the Anglo-American University in Prague, where "Slava" (as she is more commonly known) was enrolled for a while. But it could have been written (though perhaps not so well) by pretty much any of the many female muscle heads who have fallen under her spell.
Young(er) Slava, already "selecting outfits that make sure her achievements don’t go unnoticed"
A teenage athlete, she had first found beauty in female muscle at local meets. There were girls in good shape with beautiful leg muscles, she says. If I saw them now I wouldn't be so impressed, but at that time, at 16, they amazed me. Weight training not only improved her as an athlete, it gradually became her obsession in life.
Slava is, like her Prague-based trainer Olha Zhelamska, originally from Russia. Specifically, she hails from what she calls "a tiny town in the God-forsaken Taman Peninsula" (which, if your Russian geography isn't all that it should be, is about as close as you can get to eastern Crimea without actually being in it), and it was there she first began to dream of becoming a pro FBB. I was on the phone with my ex-boyfriend while scrolling through Bodyfitness models on the Internet, she explains. Suddenly, as though something or someone inside me had put the words there, I thought: 'I know what I want to do with my life'. Item #1 on the agenda was escape from Taman...
Relocating to Prague gave her freedom from a family who failed to understand (and support) her. She became financially independent as well, but the demands of being a student and being a bodybuilder proved incompatible. Happily, she ditched the former. Bodybuilding requires a lot of investment, she says. I had to work and train. Studying was just too much. I loved it, but it stood in the way of my dream.
And one part of that dream was realised last week when she stood on stage for the first time at the IFBB Diamond Cup in Malta. Not as one of those Bodyfitness models she had been scrolling through when she had that epiphany, but in the Physique division. She was the Physique division actually, all of it. Perhaps not quite as she had dreamt it then, but still... Best experience ever! she told her Instagram followers. Even though I was the only one, I still stepped on the stage. It’s always so hard the first time.
Yep, she's already planning to do it again. And that is very good news for the female muscle lovin' community because, although a very select few have had her on their radar since late 2016, it has only been during the prep for her contest debut that Slava has really made a name for herself. And she's really made a name for herself.
On top of all that single-minded dedication (which is always a winner), she's an "Amazonian" 5'9", has the looks of "a buffer Aspen Rae", and has made the kind of progress every head with a 22-year-old skinny but athletic girlfriend dreams of on a nightly basis. To say Slava has slayed us all is (not easy but) no understatement.
We don't seem to be able to decide whether "to look into her eyes or at her pecs" for one thing. She is "huge, but still cute as a button", "growing like a weed", and "her sex appeal is off the charts". It's been said she is "the future of bodybuilding", and "the future sexiest woman on Earth". The reply to which was, predictably: "She already is."
It is, apparently, almost impossible not to get a bit carried away (as you gaze into those big brown eyes or at those beautiful beefy arms). Her student interviewer felt it, FMS is very much feeling it, and her fans, including her 20,000+ Instagram followers (Angelica Enberg and Yeon Woo Jhi among them) are no doubt feeling it too.
I build this dream, she says. I never had a doubt. Good, but by no means 100% perfect English. And that is both something of a relief and perfectly excusable considering just about everything else about Slava Galaganis, apparently, absolutely perfect.
