Muscle is Movement - Movement is Life
With the events of the Olympia week-end just gone (congratulations to Shaun Roden), It got me thinking about my first love. The reason I first picked up a dumbbell. Competitive Bodybuilding!
I competed in the mid 80s at the tender age of 19 and I will admit I loved every minute of it. Although I only entered 3 competitions I remained a bodybuilder for a further two decades.
The picture above was taken a good 15 years after my competitive days were over. It was a photo shoot for a project that was to depict the golden age of bodybuilding - The 1940’s and 50s
I always looked forward to the Mr Olympia and back then it was Lee Haney who dominated and collected no less than eight consecutive Sandow trophies. A bodybuilding competition comprises of 4 rounds all of which involve the art of physique display or in layman’s terms - posing!
To display one’s physique by playing up strengths whilst hiding weaknesses is a heck of a skill. There are seven judges looking at you and scrutinizing every inch of your physique, trying to pick out the slightest flaw!
Round 3 is the free posing round and the top guys who come to mind are Lee Labrada, Bob Paris, Chris Dickerson, Roy Callendar, Mohamed Makkawy, Phil Hill and today’s hero Kai Green! I mean these men were incredible artists of the stage and would give me goose bumps every time I watched them perform. One of my most memorable moments was watching Bob Paris pose to Tracy Chapman’s “Baby can I hold you?”
Apart from the creativity and skill required, there is a large factor of mobility and alignment necessary to move gracefully and effortlessly from a 3 quarter back double biceps, to an lunging archer without firstly falling on your ass, to controlling your mid section so that your gut doesn’t hang out all over the stage!
I tried to recapture my bodybuilding days briefly in the gym today and found it hard work getting into a simple lunging front lat spread! It then occurred to me that incorporating a few compulsory poses may help to alleviate my shoulder and hip impingement. I shall be making more of a habit of this in the future. After all, as humans, we were designed to move, and if you ever wanted an example of how beautifully the human body can be displayed, take a look at some of the names I have mentioned above. Pure poetry in motion!