#33 - How To Select Your Category
Hey, hey ladies. Welcome to episode number 33. Today, we're going to talk about how to select your category when you're competing. And before we get into today's episode, I just want to send a shout out to all the women who are listening to this podcast who don't want to compete or who maybe, you know, competition isn't on the goal plan for you right now. I want you to know that I appreciate you kind of staying with us and know that at the end of this 10 block series on competition prep. I'm going to come back to you. We're going to get back into the mindset. We're going to get back into nutrition. We're going to get back into the fundamentals of sculpted lifestyle. I just really wanted to put some basic information out into the world for athlete's looking to compete in their first show. I wanted to give them. That might be you. Um, just a place to start a landing platform somewhere they could go to get honest, real experience, views on how to go about doing all the things that need to happen to compete in your first show. All right.
So today we're going to talk about choosing your category. So this is something that most women who compete have a pretty good idea of what category they want to compete in before they even get started. There's a category that usually calls us one that we aspire to be part of and I want to talk a little bit about all of the categories that are available to us as women. And I also want to open your eyes up to what your body might be best suited for even if you aspire to be part of a different category.
So let's start with, Bikini is one of the youngest categories in the bodybuilding community. It didn't even become a thing until 2010, which is crazy just over a decade ago. And, um, has grown substantially since then. I feel like every single federation has embraced Bikini. What Bikini as a category really looks for is a very soft muscle tone for the most part and a little bit more of a natural looking feminine physique. So in WNBF, in our Bikini athletes, we want to see girls that look like they go to the gym. We don't want you to, just to like, get skinny. I got on stage, you should have spent time prepping for your show, you should have developed shoulders and quadriceps glutes. We should be able to see the back definition. Your abs should be visible. Maybe not fully. Like six packed, but they should be visible. It should look like you put in some hard ass work. Right. Bikini as a presented category is a little bit more loose, a little bit more flirtatious and fun. There's a lot more freedom with their poses. There's still four mandatory poses. Your front side, back side. Right. And then you go into your t-walks, your I-walks, etc, where you have a little bit more freedom with it, but even in the front poses and the side poses and the back poses. You have a little bit more flexibility, you can maneuver your hips. You can play with your footing. You can play with your arms a little bit more. There's a little bit more freedom there for you to express your personality and who you are as an athlete. This is why most people are drawn to Bikini. There's that freedom there. I recently hosted a pose in a clinic and one of the athletes there had this beautiful muscle structure. She had a lot of muscle and it was gorgeous. And she was posing with the Bikini pros. And I asked her, I was like, why aren't you considering figures? You have this beautiful shit, beautiful, beautiful back and beautiful legs, beautiful glutes. And she said, I really like the freedom that Bikini athletes have. I like that they're posing in their femininity. A bit more Figure is really rigid and structured. And I said to her, I said, Figure is going to be what you make it. So I am a Figure athlete. I'm a Figure pro and Figure in the next category we're going to talk about here.
So Figure is a muscle level up from Bikini. So some of my Bikini girls are striving to become Figure athletes. Some athletes go right into Figure. They skip over Bikini altogether and go right into figure. Now, Figure is a little bit more rigid. It's a little bit more structured. The form mandatory poses are set. You don't have a lot of room to play with in WWF, I love that Figure side poses. You can bend your back knee, which I love that look, but what I want to say to my more muscled women out there is if you love the attitude and the personality and the stage presence that Bikini athletes get, but you have the body of a Figure athlete. Bring all of that bring that personality and that showmanship and that fluidity and flexibility of Bikini into your figure performance. And you will, wow the judges. So Figure yes, as a category, it is a little bit more structured, especially with your mandatories, but you still have the opportunity to T walk and showcase your personality, play with your poses. Your Figure T walk does not have to be solely mandatory poses. They can be played up as mandatory poses. I've put a few Bikini X-poses into my Figure T-walk routine, and I've even pulled some puzzles out of fit body and physique. So. know that there's a little bit of freedom there. What you want to do is showcase your body to the best of its ability. So in my T-walk, I really want to make sure that the best angles and the best parts of my body are showcased in the best poses for the judges. Now, I've played with my body when I competed in WBFF. I did a category called fitness model, as well as Figure. I knew that I was probably more set for Figure, but I also did fitness modeling because I wanted to give myself the opportunity to try it. So in that show, I ended up winning my pro card and Figure. And I ended up placing 11th, I believe out of like 20 fitness model girls. And the judges afterwards said to me, they're like, it's obvious where you belong. Yeah. I was like, yes. Thank you. And this is something that I tell my athletes too, if they really don't know where they belong, you can always do both and let the judges let you know. Most coaches will tell you. I have athletes right now who compete in Bikini and parts of their body could compete in Figure. Maybe they have a beautiful lot spread that would be competitive on a Figure stage, but maybe their legs don't have enough muscle on them, or maybe they have beautiful legs that could compete on a Figure stage, but they don't have the upper body muscle yet. So as a coach, I'm going to play to their strengths and I will probably keep them in a Bikini until their whole body is ready to up-level to that more competitive platform of muscle in a Figure competition. However, when I say more competitive, I use that term loosely because Bikini is a far more competitive category than most Figure categories. Usually the more muscle you have, the less competitive the category gets. So Bikini because it requires the least amount of muscle you end up getting way more athletes competing in that category. And then Figure being next. Next biggest category and the next comes fit body. And fit body is a category that I believe is uniquely WNBF. So what a fit body is, is it's kind of halfway between Figure and bodybuilding. You get to play with these bodybuilding poses that are done in a more feminine style. And you're in heels and a Figure suit, but you need to get on stage and kind of pose down a little bit, which is super fun for those of us women who like to show off our muscles. Right. When I competed in Figure with WNBF, I played with the idea of having a fit body, but because I was coming out of retirement and I hadn't competed in a number of years, I decided to keep it simple. And for my first time athletes, I usually suggest keeping it simple for your first show, pick one category, stick with it. But if you're coming back for a second show or a third show, and you're not quite sure where you fit in, or if you are a Figure athlete, I highly recommend that you embrace fit body as well, because it's a fun freaking category. You have to get up there and show them what you got. The mandatories for fit body. There's five different poses that you go through, that are again very unique to WNBF. You can look them up on the WNBFcanada.com website. But the muscle structure that we're looking for is that leaner, slightly harder, more straightened, kind of almost moving towards bodybuilding.
And then of course you have female bodybuilding too, which is a category that I don't consider myself a coach for. I don't work with bodybuilders. I've never put my body to that point. So I, you know, leave that category to the people who are pros at it. So bodybuilding is going to be the hardest leanest, most muscular category that a female could compete in. Usually it's done without shoes, so bare feet. It's usually in a two piece suit. And again, it's all about the physique. So those are the four main categories for women in WNBF. So if you're just getting started, if this is your first competition, there's a pretty good chance, bikini is going to be your starting point. However, if you've been working out for 10 plus years, or if you've been an athlete for a long time, or if you're somebody who puts on muscle really quickly. There is a possibility that you may want to consider the Figure. Now, Bikini and Figure suits are different. This is something to take into consideration when you're choosing your category and thinking about your long game, are you going into Bikini just for this first year and is that necessary or could you go right into Figure, if Figure is where you want to be another option is we're going to get into shoes and suits and hair and makeup and all that jazz in our next episode. But another option would be to pay me or borrow a Bikini suit, or rent a Bikini suit. If your strategic plan is to move into Figure the following year, just so you're not making that huge investment in a suit for just one year, that also goes for my Figure athletes who maybe want to try out Bikini just to see. If you are a retired Figure athlete or someone who's competed in Figure for years and are now thinking of dialing it back, this is really common because Bikini wasn't available to those women who were competing 20 years ago. So now what I'm seeing is athletes coming out of the woodwork after having kids and spending focused time on their families who are wanting to compete again and now have this option to compete in a Bikini, whereas before they didn't. I mean, if you were competing in Figure 20 years ago, you probably needed a new suit anyway. Suits have changed a lot since then. Even when I started you guys in 2007. When I did my first Figure competition. We had two or three different suits. There was a two piece black suit, a two-piece colored suit and a one piece suit. That was like straight out of the eighties. Worse, I still have my original one. I can't get rid of it. It's just too funny. Oh, Where for one day, just for fun. All right, you can Google those if you really want to see them. I'm sure I have a picture of me and mine somewhere. I'll have to post that up.
Any who, let's talk about some of the categories that are available to women in other federations outside WNBF, because maybe you are just designed for something that's a little bit different. So a couple of other female categories that might interest you, NPC offers three other categories. Asides from Bikini, Figure and bodybuilding. Those include wellness. What wellness is, it's a brand new category. It was only introduced. I want to say like three or four years ago since I've left, the NPC was introduced. And my understanding of it is, is it a very similar category to Bikini , it's Bikini suits, it's Bikini posing, it's a Bikini body, but with a more developed, more muscular, lower body, so more developed quads, hamstrings, glutes, etc. So they created this category for women who naturally develop bigger lower bodies. And I love that they have created this category because it is so common to see athletes coming out of other sports and from different countries who do have more developed lower bodies. Uh, we also have physique, woman's physique, which is similar to fit body and the WNBF would be physique and NPC. So that's again, not in between Figure and bodybuilding, where you get a little bit more feminine posing, a little bit more opportunity to show off what you've worked so hard for, and flex your muscles a little bit. There's also an NPC. One of my favorite categories. You guys. and a category that's really dear to my heart. This is the fitness category. So I competed as a fitness athlete from 2008 to 2009. Right through till when I was 32. I don't know what year that was. So most of my competition career was done in fitness. And what fitness is, is it that unbelievable category you see and fitness competitions on TV. And when you go to the shows, the one with the gymnastics performance, so fitness athletes have the same suit as Figure athletes have a very similar physique to Figure athletes. It's a bit more muscular. However, 2/3 of their score is based upon a gymnastics routine. When I first started in fitness, I did very well because back then, The physique was worth 2/3 the score. And I don't know if the gymnastics routine is now worth 1/2 or 2/3. You'd have to check on that, but when they switched it over and when they made the gymnastics routine worth more, we saw all these retired cheerleaders in gymnastics and people with incredible performance ability come out and compete and fitness. And I noticed my placing went from being a top three to being, you know, top 10 very quickly. And I realized that this was not, it was no longer a category that I could be competitive in. I was also getting through the place where I was, you know, 32 and my body wasn't recovering the same way it had in the past. And me not having a dance or gymnastics background was really starting to take its toll. So that's when I retired, when I was 32, I stepped down from fitness and then, three years ago now in 2019, I stepped back out and competed in Figure with WNBF and came back onto the scene. So one more category that I want to acknowledge. This is a category you'll find in federations like IDFA and WBFF is fitness model. So what is this category? It's this beautiful in-between category between Bikini. And Figure so, It's really obvious in these federations that a Bikini athlete is less muscled is more soft and then the fitness model category is going to be that little bit more muscled that little bit more like what you'd see in a fitness magazine comparative to like a sports illustrated magazine type thing. So Bikini would be more of your sports illustrated fitness model would be more of your life fitness magazine, oxygen shape strong all of those magazines and then Figure would be, you know, one step up from that. So, What I love about fitness model categories is that it really gives those in between athletes somewhere to go. With WNBF that doesn't have that in between categories. What we're seeing is, Bikini is becoming more like a fitness model. We're seeing less and less bodies on stage that don't have that foundation of muscle. I think the bodybuilding industry kind of requires it, right. Federations like WBFF that are more fashion forward and are more about the show and about the stage presentation and about the glam and the costumes and the fun. It makes sense that those federations would have a category for women who are less muscular, have the different categories of Bikini fitness model Figure and so on. I don't even know if WBFF still has Figures, I'm sure they still do. All right my friends.
So just to recap, the lowest end of that muscular body would be Bikini and then we move into Figure. And then we move into a fit body. And then we move into bodybuilding and then those other optional categories are available in other federations outside WNBF. But since I exclusively coach for WNBF. Those are the ones that I choose to embrace. If you guys have any questions about this, or if you're ever unsure what category you belong in? Feel free to send me a quick email. Tell me who you are. Tell me a little bit about yourself, how long you've been working out. Um, when you'd like to compete. What categories you're leaning towards, which categories. Beyond the most like you, and then send me a picture of your body and where it's currently at and I will give you some feedback. I'll tell you what my opinion is both as a coach and a judge. And, uh, yeah. And then you can take it from there. All right. Friends. I'll see you next week. Next week, we're going to talk about shoes and suits and hair and makeup and jewelry and all that fun stuff. I'll see you right back here then. Bye for now.
