Tube Watch

FMS picks a few of our favourite new clips from YouTube from around the Christmas period for your viewing pleasure as a new, irregularly regular post makes its debut.

Welcome to Tube Watch.

CORINNE'S GOLD

Finally put up on December 28th, FMS Woman of the Year, Corinne Ingman, poses her way to victory at the WFF International World Championships. Corinne reckoned she "could have been a bit sharper" on the day, we say just look at those LEGS!!!



See also: the comparisons and the awards from Corinne's class.

For Your Consideration

FMS has bigged up the genius compilations of Valya Arn before. Pleasingly, the channel's output has become ever more frequent since. Of the several edits posted in the last month or so, FMS particularly recommends this offering from December 28th for many reasons, one of which would be that it has got Nicky Foord in it.

ULTIMATE MUSCLE - 1989

Another channel that puts together outstanding compilations, Ultimate Muscle, posted a number of clips mid-December from the 1989 NPC USAs under the tag "Ultimate Muscle Classics". FMS recommends checking out a young(er) Michelle Ivers, beautiful Julia Kover, Drorit Kernes, Donna Barentine and many more.

All the ladies are impressive one way or another, but no one - no one - has ever posed quite like Yolanda Hughes. She finished 5th in the Heavyweight class that year.

Imagine that!



I think it's a bit sad the last 20 seconds or so of the clips are given over to self-promotion for the channel. If a clip is advertised as 2.08 long, but actually finishes after 1.48, I have a tendency to feel a bit cheated. I think these clips, and Ultimate Muscle's edits in general, are far too good to need any of that sort of thing.

Just saying.

For Your Consideration

If you like to imagine that you could do what those female muscle photographers do, check out J.M. Manion working harder than any man has ever worked as he shoots Bikini Queen Yarishna Nicole Ayala in Puerto Rico earlier this year. The clip, posted on Christmas Eve, is "Part 2". The first installment was posted way back in August.

STILL THE HOTTEST HARD WOMAN IN THE WORLD?

Cris Goy Arellano was your, the FMS readers, choice last year. After a comparatively quiet 2016, will she hold on to her crown in 2017? This preview clip from Double Biceps, posted on 21st December won't, I imagine, hurt her cause any.



Tube Watch will return.

Far From Routine: Ellogon's Treasures Part 1

Since 2009, YouTuber "Ellogon" has been building probably the most amazing female muscle contest collection that (as far as I know) exists. Unsurprisingly, many of your suggestions for this week's posts led me to clips uploaded to their channel, and on top of that, I found that many of my own favourite routines (or at least the very best versions of them that are available) were right there on that same channel too.

In fact, so numerous were the nominations from Ellogon's channel that I thought it best (especially after yesterday's, er, let's say "festival of excitement") to split our collective tribute to their work into two parts. Today, two reader requests, and a couple of Swell picks from three famous names from the good old "Golden Age".
That two of them are both requests and favourites of mine just goes to show that it's true what they say that great female muscle lovin' minds really do think alike!


Reader Request/Swell Pick

NATALIA MURNIKOVIENE
1994 IFBB Worlds

The best leg definition in the show, says the Eurosport commentator, an accolade that Natalia could claim in most of the shows she competed in during her career. Her performance here has just about everything that you could possibly want from a routine. Dance moves, flexibility and gymnastics, hard flexing through gritted teeth, oh so expressive, crawling across the stage like a silky, powerful pantheress on heat...




Swell Pick

YOLANDA HUGHES
1997 Ms International

Dubbed "The Queen of Mobile Muscle", Yolanda performs her way to the first of her two Ms International triumphs. If Natalia's routine has everything you could want, Yolanda's has that and a whole bunch of other stuff you never dreamed possible.



For my money, every routine Yolanda ever performed is worth a watch, a second watch, and a third, fourth and fifth as well. If you fancy a bit more of her WOW factor, you might like to check her out at the 1991 NPC USAs, a Ms Olympia I'm not sure of the date of, and the 1993 Ms Olympia (no sound, but my personal favourite posing suit).


Reader Request/Swell Pick

MELISSA COATES
1997 Ms International

And from the same show, the best advertisement for not getting cosmetic surgery back when she was the best advertisement for female bodybuilding. In those days Melissa could have come on with a paintbrush, painted a bit of the stage and watched it dry and it would have been sexy, so this performance must have threatened the trouser fabric of many an audience member. My personal highlight comes just before the 1.00 mark - the little "hula hoop" move followed by an abs and thigh pose. Major swoonage.




Enjoy!

Treasures from the Archive: Ms Olympia Memories: Part I The Magazine Years

Can't say I remember too clearly what it was like having to follow the Ms Olympia a month (or two) after it had actually happened through the pages of Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Ironman and so on, but whenever I come across an image of Cory Everson with a big medal around her neck, flanked by one or both of the Weiders and/or one or both of the women who made up the top three that year, her arms held aloft, it invariably seems familiar, and takes me back to those early magazine years.



Then, as far as my teenage female muscle obsessive self was concerned anyway, the result was a given. The Ms Olympia was not so much a contest as the annual coronation of the most physically perfect woman in the world. And clearly that was Cory.



In those days you were never exactly starved of images of her to drool over (especially in Weider publications), but for me it was the pics of Cory on stage that were always the most drool-worthy, so the Olympia editions were prized possessions. The tan, the oil, the striations, the muscles, and, I particularly remember, the bikini bottoms so tight that I was forced to spend hours, possibly days, of my life just looking (slightly puzzled at that tender age) at whatever was making that shape between her legs!



But, of course, there were other women, and in those very early days Anja Langer was, I reckoned, probably the second most physically perfect woman in the world... The judges didn't see it my way (not for the last time) in 1987 (left, below) when she finished 4th, but in 1988 (right) Anja was runner-up to (of course!) Cory Everson.



These days, I'm convinced that the reason I've found myself reacting so positively to the Physique division (much more positively than I'd expected to when it was first announced) is largely because the aesthetic is so reminiscent of Anja's and the other female bodybuilders' at the time I first discovered my love of female muscle. Over 25 years later, it seems I'm still programmed to respond to this "classical" aesthetic.

And staying in those early years (but not in the sense that it was an image I saw in a magazine), a screencap of Gladys Portugues during her routine at the 1986 Ms Olympia. It was intended for posting earlier in the year when FMS explored The Agony & the Ecstasy experienced by female bodybuilders when prepping and competing.



Now I've seen women (and men) looking this deliriously happy before, but they tended to be in sweaty clubs set up in old railway arches in the late 1990s and all of them had ingested a substance whose effects gave it its name. I doubt Gladys had had any of that, nor that she looked so ecstatic because Jean-Claude had promised to buy her a dog. This is what pure, unadulterated, Olympian female muscle ecstasy looks like!



We return to my formative female muscle lovin' years with three of the most "exotic" (to a teenage boy in a London suburb anyway!) and, therefore, most exciting women I had the pleasure of seeing inside the covers of the magazines containing Olympia reports. Future Ms Olympia Juliette Bergmann (above left) seemed, I recall, almost impossibly beautiful, and was probably responsible for my eagerness to visit Holland - much more so than the more conventional attractions for a young man. Marie-Laure Mahabir (above right) seemed to be from a different planet altogether.



The months when pictures from the Olympia appeared in the magazines tended to be the only ones featuring European-based FBBs like Marie-Laure, and I guess because I had seen so few images of them it made them all the more exciting - they were more memorable because they were so rare. Their placing at the show was utterly irrelevant to me, though perhaps it did cross my mind how such a magnificently sensual creature like Claudia Profanter could possibly finish 14th (as she did in '91).



But while it may have been an advantage to be European to get Swell's attention (or maybe that should be to bring Swell to attention), it was by no means necessary. As my teenage years drew to a close, Denise Rutkowski's feline power and unforgettable gold bikini proved an irresistible combination. And, for the first time in my life, I was, actually, trying to resist the lure of female muscle in order to appear all normal and stuff as I left school and moved away to university.

[Incidentally, if you are the sort who likes to know how the FBBs of your youth are looking now I am honour-bound to warn you that YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT DENISE RUTKOWSKI LOOKS LIKE NOW. I had the misfortune to see, and it is haunting me. Really. Trust me. DON'T.]



And though I regularly fell off the wagon, discovering the likes of Denise, Yolanda Hughes and Natalia Murnikoviene (above, left and right respectively) when I did, I think of that first effort at repressing my desire to view images of female bodybuilders as the end of "The Magazine Years". By the time I re-embraced my sthenolagnia in the late '90s, I didn't need to rely on the mainstream muscle magazines for my fix - there was Women's Physique World and, a bit later, Muscle Elegance. It's rather ironic (and quite fitting) then that I couldn't actually find a magazine scan of Yolanda at the Olympia from a muscle magazine, and instead had to use a WPW pic.

Oh, look! It's Cory winning again...



And I leave you for today with Denise Rutkowski as I would like to remember her, performing her (I think it's fair to say) LEGENDARY routine from 1993. She finished second, and by all accounts that I know of, should have won.

On this evidence, it's easy to see why people would have thought so.

(If you've already got the box of tissues in in preparation for the excitement of this Friday's 2014 meat-fest, now might be a good time to crack them open...)



Enjoy!

More Ms O memories coming soon...

Ms International: 1997-1998 Yolanda Hughes

Back in 1984, two-time Ms International winner Yolanda Hughes was practising gymnastics in a gym in Kentucky when a pro wrestler called Hillbilly Jim (no, really) asked her if she would be interested in competing in bodybuilding. I trained for four weeks and I placed second. I thought that was good for not knowing what I was doing. The contest was the 1984 NPC Iron Maiden.



A successful amateur career followed, though by her own admission, I just kind of fooled around with it until I started winning the national championships and then I took it serious. Then, after winning the IFBB World Championships in 1992, Yolanda turned pro.



Her Ms International titles came in 1997 and 1998. I was living abroad at the time, but I can remember the shows being reported in WPW and other muscle magazines, and marvelling at Yolanda – beautiful, tall, athletic – and particularly her legs, not so much the size of them, but those thighs that seemed to go on forever.



However, it wasn’t until the internet came around, and clips of female bodybuilding shows past started to appear on youtube, that I really appreciated why Yolanda had been dubbed ‘The Queen of Mobile Muscle’. To really see Yolanda at her best, you have to watch her move.

And thankfully, Yolanda was competing at a time when women were given enough time for their routines. A time when gymnastics, dance and posing all combined to make a unique style of performance. And, I think you’ll agree, there were few better than Yolanda at using that time. Watch and wonder, but also listen to the crowd’s reaction as you enjoy her routine at the 1997 Ms I.



She retired shortly after her Ms I wins, and appeared, very briefly, in the 2001 re-make of ‘Rollerball’ as 'Red Team #28', blink and you will miss her). That was a great experience. Had a blast! Thought that I wanted to pursue that career. But the Hollywood life wasn’t for her. I went out to L.A. and changed my mind. It was just being that I was so different. Being muscular, a woman of color. They were saying 'you're way too big.' Just dealing with the superficialness, I decided I didn't want to do that.



However, while in Los Angeles, she had taken a pole dancing class. So what did Yolanda do next? Well, she settled in Washington state with her husband, and she opened a studio called Fitness Exotica, offering classes such as Cardio Striptease, Booty Camp, Sexy Flexy, and, of course, Pole Dancing 101.



There is nothing like seeing women who come in who are inhibited, seeing them blossoming. Seeing the confidence they gain. That's rewarding for me, she says. The girls learn how to do tricks on the poles, which is lifting your own body weight, which is a great way to get fit, because it is dead weight. It is like doing pull-ups. You learn how to dance. You put the combination of dancing and the pole together. Five minutes of dancing and doing pole tricks is a real cardio workout. It takes a lot of core strength and upper back and arms. It's really a good workout. It's fun, a sense of freedom. Liberating! For women to really just own their own power.



With the benefit of hindsight, it’s not hard to see why Hillbilly Jim believed that Yolanda had potential in the female muscle game. Here’s to Mr Jim, for without his intervention, the glory of Yolanda may have never been realised. And here’s to Yolanda, and all the other female bodybuilders, past present and future, who truly own their own power.




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Information on Yolanda and her fitness studio here and here