Annnnnd, as a bodybuilder, you are required to execute A LOT of different poses. You are also required to perform a posing routine that is choreographed to music. In this routine you display your best features and show off your personality to the audience and judges.
I remember being more stressed out about the posing routine to music than I was with the nutrition and exercise part of competition prep.
Because of this, I spent every day dissecting each and every pose and working on mastering the execution of every one of them. My hard work paid off and I would consistently win best poser awards at all of my shows.
Then in 2004 I switched to the figure division and l remember thinking there are much less poses than in bodybuilding, but now I was stressing about having to do them balancing in heels, and also having to do a fancy walk on stage smiling like I'm having the time of my life. My demeanor is much more serious so this was a challenge for me to break out from at first.
So once again I dissected every component of posing and presentation and worked on mastering the poses, mastering how to walk and pose in high heels, and choreographing every component of my stage presence. My hard work paid off again and, over the years, I earned three pro cards in three different federations.
Then about a decade into my career, I bought a fitness facility and started hosting group posing classes. This was still ten years ago from today so there wasn't the workshops, posing coaches, or online tutorials at this time either.
My unique background having competed in 6 federations, and mastering the posing skills in all of them, and now judging competitions as well, meant that I had a unique set of skills that allowed me to invite competitors, both men and women, to come learn how to pose from me no matter what federation they planned to compete.
I can literally switch between teaching the posing requirements of all the federations in an instant.
People kept coming back to learn how to pose for different federations, and some would come back consistently to continue making improvements from show to show. I had people travel four hours one way to come master their posing and presentation skills. Especially when they were preparing for their first show and had never stepped on stage before in their life.
The bodybuilding division is the core division, think of it like the parent division, of the entire sport. Every division today is a spin off of bodybuilding. Having started as a bodybuilder allowed me to see things in people's posing and stage presence in every category of the sport that they would not have been able to see on their own without my experience. The bodybuilding category is hyper specific and it taught me to look at each and every part of the body with extreme detail.
So I was now looking at each and every one of my clients with extreme detail. I knew exactly what areas of their body they needed to accentuate. I also knew the areas they needed to draw less attention to as well. And I understood the psychology of what they are feeling, so I knew how to draw them out of their shell like I had to do for myself.
Throughout the years, I helped competitors who struggled with feeling overall clumsy when executing their poses go from awkward to effortless on stage.
I helped competitors go from walking like a linebacker in heels to commanding the stage like a professional.
And I helped competitors who are naturally shy or super serious go from forgettable or "meh" to absolute stand outs on stage.
On the flip side, I have been judging for the past 10 years and I have seen countless competitors get marked down and miss out on higher placements because they lacked the posing skills to make them more competitive.
They didn't understand the fundamentals of posing.
They didn't understand what they were being judged on so the could be more competitive.
And, worse, they lacked confidence on stage.
After over two decades in the sport of bodybuilding, I know how easily these things can be avoided with the proper education.
I also know, up until now, there hasn't been a resource out there teaching these things so people have been left to guess and count on posing tutorials that make it all look easy, when in reality, learning how to pose effectively is far from easy.