There are no written rules for judging bodybuilding. At least, there shouldn’t be. Admittedly, this is a controversial statement, but it is true nonetheless. The rules of bodybuilding are merely procedural - that is, how many and what kind of rounds, points or placing system, judging each round separately or one score at the end, scoring the finals or not, weight classes or no weight classes and so forth. When you see terms like shape, proportion, symmetry, muscularity, definition, muscle separation and so forth in a bodybuilding rule book, those are DESCRIPTIONS of what the judges are doing, not instructions.

Judges, in order to be "good," have to already know what a bodybuilder is supposed to look like when they arrive at a contest ready to work. You can instruct them as to procedures but not give them guidelines on "what to look for." A bodybuilding judging panel operates on a consensus basis. That is, all the judges have to have a clear idea of what bodybuilding is all about, and they all have to accept a generally similar idea as to what they are looking for. If a judge is unable to do this - and there are plenty of seemingly knowledgeable individuals, including ex-bodybuilders, who have shown themselves to be not up to the task - he or she should not be used to score bodybuilding competitions. Constant and exaggerated deviations of an individual’s scoring compared to the rest of the panel is a clear signal that the judge simply is not able to be sufficiently objective - or more accurately, subjectively-objective or objectively-subjective. But where does this consensus come from? And why is it you see changes and evolution in the "fashion" of judging over time? Why does one era reward big-and-smooth, another lean-and-cut and yet another huge-and-muscular? If the sense of what bodybuilding standards ought to be is somehow innate in the minds of the judges, why does it change so much over time?

The simple answer is that judges do not set the standards of bodybuilding excellence; the bodybuilders do. The judges LEARN from the bodybuilders. The standards of bodybuilding are based on the ACHIEVEMENTS of the competitors themselves. This applies in many other aesthetically or subjectively scored athletic events. Certainly, a gymnastics judge would never expect to see a "triple something" when everybody in the competition is doing a "double something." But let one competitor actually do a "triple something," and within a short time everyone is trying to do it and the judges are scoring down gymnasts who are merely content to do a double instead of a triple.

Bodybuilding judging has evolved the same way. If the judges have never seen a specific type or level of development, they would hardly be looking for it. Instead, they judge according to what they know, what they have seen in the past, what they know to be achievable, until something better comes along. Once they’ve seen the standard of excellence improved, that’s the standard the incorporate into their judging. This is why, when you look back to the beginning of modern bodybuilding - to the 1940s and even earlier - the championship physiques of those eras look very little like those of today. It took time for bodybuilders to develop to the level at which we seem now. New methods of training and dieting had to be developed on a trial-and-error basis. Indeed, back in the early days, the whole idea of what competitors were hoping to achieve was vastly different.

It is ironic in a way, given the somewhat controversial juxtaposition of female bodybuilding and fitness we see today, that bodybuilding for men got started as an offshoot of fitness events - or something close to it. They were called "Physical Culture" contests, and in the 1920s and 1930s athletes from a variety of sports would be judged on their physical development as well as the ability to display some kind of athletic prowess on stage - it DOES sound like fitness, doesn’t it? Gymnasts would turn flips or do hand-balancing; fighters would shadow-box or jump rope; weightlifters would hoist heavy dumbbells overhead. As female fitness judges are finding out, it is very difficult to judge athletic routines that differ as widely as the ones you see in fitness competitions. Gymnastics, dance, strength moves, aerobics routines - you end up comparing apples and oranges.

The Physical Culture judges had the same problem, only more so. How do you evaluate the performance of a boxer compared to that of a gymnast or a powerful weightlifter? Given this difficulty, as you might expect, the judges tended to fall back on emphasizing the physiques. Over time, the weightlifters began to have a decided advantage. Their muscular physiques were much more impressive, especially when they were on stage and the judges were viewing them from 30 feet away or so. Therefore, the weightlifters began to win these events on a regular basis, which tended to discourage other competitors who, no matter how great their athletic abilities might have been, simply didn’t LOOK as impressive.

This evolution of Physical Culture eventually gave birth to modern bodybuilding. There was a Mr. America contest held in 1939, and the first AAU Mr. America competition began in 1940, and was won two years in a row by the late, legendary John Grimek. Grimek had a terrific physique, but it was more of a weightlifter’s body than those of the champions who followed only a few years later. But, in a holdover from the Physical Culture contests, Grimek could hold an audience spellbound for hours with his feats of strength, flexibility, hand balancing and all-around athletic excellence.

There were two champion bodybuilders in the 1940s that have always seemed to me to be models for the competitors who came after, with physiques that are obviously first-rate even seen from a distance of some 50 years: Clarence Ross and Steve Reeves. Reeves was especially impressive, since he was one of the most beautiful human beings ever on the planet - face, physique, proportions, and even grooming. MUSCLE & FITNESS writer and former Mr. USA Armand Tanny recalls, when Reeves would walk along the beach in Santa Monica in the late 1940s, crowds would follow behind in amazement. Nobody on the planet had EVER looked that way before.

Actually, nobody had ever looked like any of the top champions of the 1940s and 1950s. There had been muscular men before, but these athletes trained not only to be strong but to create a certain VISUAL impact as well. Of course, early physique competitors looked different in part because they trained and dieted differently than do those of the present era. They trained like weightlifters - often working the whole body in one session, one set of each exercise, heavy weights and relatively few exercises. They dieted on steak and whole milk. The idea was to create a big, smooth, well balanced and proportioned body. To look good but also strong and powerful. Look at Ross, Reeves, Bill Pearl and Reg Park - outstanding physiques from the pre-1965 (the year of the first Mr. Olympia) - and that’s just what you see.

Judges in those days shared the view of the bodybuilders that a muscular, balanced physique - not fat but not highly-defined either - was the height of bodybuilding excellence. They didn’t judge definition, because there wasn’t much. Occasionally a bodybuilder like Vince Gironda would come along, with a super-defined, ripped physique, but he was way ahead of his time in this regard. It wouldn’t be until years afterward that the judges would see a lot of defined physiques and therefore come to accept that look as an established standard of bodybuilding excellence. But although Gironda didn’t always impress the judges, he certain did teach other bodybuilders that achieving such an extreme level of muscularity was possible.

During the 25 years between 1940 and 1965 the physiques audiences and judges saw on stage gradually changed and evolved because knowledge about training, dieting and supplements was also improving and evolving. Where the early bodybuilders trained like weightlifters, gradually they learned to use the Split System, training only part of the body in each session, to increase their sets and reps,to do a wider variety of exercises, including isolation movements as well as those for mass-building. Joe Weider was a pioneer advocating these methods, carefully observing what the best bodybuilders were doing in the gyms, recruiting individuals knowledgeable in nutrition to write for his magazines and developing the Weider Intensity Training Principles to explain and codify these new developments and make the information more readily available to bodybuilders around the country and all over the world.

One major turning point in modern bodybuilding came in 1968, when Joe Weider brought the young, massive, 265 pound Arnold Schwarzenegger to the United States to compete in Florida against, among others, Frank Zane - who was probably no more than 180-something pounds at the time. Although Frank was diminutive standing next to Arnold, he was so defined and muscular, while Arnold was big and smooth, that he won the title, shocking the Austrian Oak who had been cleaning up on the competition back in Europe. However, since Arnold was more into learning that making excuses, he quickly accepted the idea that definition and muscularity were important in winning bodybuilding championships in addition to mass and shape.. He then moved to California, started sharing an apartment with Zane and proceeded to pick his brain for all the information he could on diet, nutrition and supplements.

All through this period, the judges continued to learn from what they saw on stage in bodybuilding contests. Their understanding of the bodybuilding physique sometimes lagged behind the achievement of the competitors to some degree - a situation most noticeable in judging female bodybuilders in the early 1980s - but they eventually caught up. So the 1970s became, in some regard, the battle of super-definition. Arnold’s bodyweight went down over time from a high of 265 pounds so something closer to 225 to 230 pounds. Sergio Oliva never mastered contest dieting and his career suffered accordingly.

As bodybuilders learned the power of diuretics audiences witnessed such things as Danny Padilla - the "Giant Killer" - appearing on stage so dried-out and emaciated that he might have just stepped out of a concentration camp. Frank Zane, with his exquisite control of competition dieting, won three Mr. Olympia titles. Franco Columbu won two. Competitors were sacrificing mass in favor of cuts and definition - which created an impressive look on stage and allowed you to "pop" when you posed - and that’s what the judges accepted as the standard of the day.

Of course, as great as the competitors of the 1970s were, they were doing a lot of things wrong. They were overtraining - sometimes working out twice a day, six days a week. They were depleted themselves on muscle-starving, zero-carb diets. They were getting rid of subcutaneous fluids using powerful and unsophisticated diuretics like Lasix. As the 1980s got underway, many began doing way, way too much cardio, depleting their bodies of energy and the ability to recover with two hours or more of intense aerobic exercise, in addition to their gym workouts. Some bodybuilders were also taking highly-androgenic anabolics, that lead to excessive water retention which all but REQUIRED them to take diuretics that pulled water out of the muscles - making them flat and lacking in shape- as well as from under the skin.

Bodybuilding pretty much stopped being as much a definition contest when Lee Haney came along. Lee was big AND symmetrical AND highly defined and once the judges saw this was possible they started expecting it of everybody. After Tom Platz displayed muscle separation in his quads deep enough to lose your car in, the judges learned that this was also possible. Rich Gaspari showed up with cross-striations in his glutes and the bar was raised that much higher. When Dorian Yates came on the scene he was even bigger than Lee and as granite-hard as anyone could imagine a bodybuilder becoming. Thus he added that much more information to the mental picture of bodybuilding excellence in the minds of the physique judges.

Now we have Ronnie Coleman - with a 31 inch waist at a body weight exceeding 265 pounds - and Flex Wheeler, displaying a hitherto unthinkable degree of shape and symmetry and many other top pros like Nasser El Sonbaty and Kevin Levrone, all of whom could likely blow the 1970s champions right out of the water. And Lee Priest - talk about your "Giant Killers"! Because the judges learn from the achievements of the bodybuilders, and because bodybuilding excellence has come so far, so have the standards the officials set for the competitors. Nowadays you have to be super-good just to be considered mediocre! Of course, in any contest the judges’ job is to select the best competitor, not one that is ideal, so the winner of a local amateur contest is not going to have the degree of size, shape and muscularity as a top pro. But as the achievements of the best continue to get more extreme, the standards are raised for everybody. Today’s Mr. California would likely have had a good shot at winning the early Mr. Olympia events.

What is true for men’s bodybuilding is just as true when it comes to judging women. While the scoring at female bodybuilding contests has become fairly dependable in the past few years, this wasn’t always so. When the women first started competing, judges had not had the time or experience to develop this innate and intuitive understanding of what they were looking at. They tended to bring all sorts of non-bodybuilding factors into the equation. Fortunately, the sport was kept on track by champions of the quality of Rachel McLish and Cory Everson (among others), who combined bodybuilding excellence with convention beauty, making the job of the judges of female bodybuilding that much easier.

There were always some controversies with the women’s judging, as is common in any subjectively-judged athletic competition. But the only real problems developed in 1992. The IFBB tried to change the judging standards and INSTRUCT the judges what to look for - which, as I’ve explained, isn’t really possible given the nature of bodybuilding judging. The result was disastrous, with undeserving winners taking titles and audiences becoming alienated to the point where the large potential audience for the Ms. Olympia that year was reluctant to buy tickets to what they perceived would be a "beauty contest." This experiment was quickly terminated and, whatever the problems facing women’s bodybuilding since, judging hasn’t been one of them. There has actually been LESS controversy with the women than there has in many competitions for men.

In another irony, while you hear some critics of female bodybuilding saying the women have "gone too far," that’s EXACTLY what many of the old-time bodybuilders from the 1940s and 1950s say about men’s bodybuilding today. They call today’s competitors "freaks" and long for the days of Bill Pearl, Reg Park and Larry Scott. As I’ve frequently pointed out, bodybuilding for the men and for the women isn’t really all that different!

We’ve already seen how competitors over time, from Reeves to Arnold to Zane to Haney to Yates to Wheeler to Coleman have caused the judges to escalate the standards by which they judge men’s bodybuilding. In women’s bodybuilding, Rachel McLish, while not very big, set a terrific standard of aesthetic quality and definition. Cory Everson came along with excellent shape and symmetry but raised the standard as far as mass and size was concerned. Lenda Murray, the "female Flex Wheeler," surpassed all other women competitors with her display of muscularity, shape and symmetry. Then Kim Chizevsky entered the picture, winning the Ms. Olympia titles in 1996 through 1999, and proved to be bigger and harder than anyone else, looking as somebody said recently "carved out of ice," and everyone has been chasing this new standard since.

Women’s physique competition is 40 years younger than men’s bodybuilding, so it still has a way to go. But it is following the same path of physical achievement and parallel evolution of judging standards that we’ve seen in bodybuilding for men. This shows that there is only one sport of bodybuilding, and that men and women compete in it - as is also true in sports like tennis, golf, basketball, track and field and many others.

Understanding this process of the evolution of judging standards should teach us is the danger of introducing ANY non-bodybuilding criteria into a bodybuilding contest. Any criteria that do not arise from the innate and intuitive understanding the judges have of bodybuilding excellence eventually destroys the credibility of the scoring. Witness the so-called "natural" contests. They don’t do drug testing, but a competitor can be marked down because he or she "looks" as if they are using drugs. In other words, they are out of luck if they look too good. So a competitor who doesn’t use anabolics but simply has terrific genetics for size and cuts would be disqualified unfairly.

As I’ve explained, telling judges to lower the score of a bodybuilder who "looks" like he or she is using anabolics destroys the credibility of the scoring. Judging "faces," that is marking down competitors whose faces look too drawn and depleted also introduces a level of personal subjectivity that makes accurate judging impossible. In 1992, asking the judges to evaluate female competitors for "femininity" had the same disastrous effect. All you can ever do is instruct the judges to select the best bodybuilders on stage, applying what they understand from their experience is the correct criteria for evaluating the bodybuilding physique, and except in the cases of too-close-to-call tie-breakers not to incorporate into their scoring (at least, not to any great degree) their personal tastes in physiques, what kind of body they happen to like best.

Any judge who can’t do this should be invited not to officiate in the future. If you indeed can weed out the judges who don’t seem capable of achieving this level of objective-subjectivity, and if you then employ a panel of seven or nine judges and throw out the high and low scores to eliminate exaggerated deviations - you are going to have the best chance of seeing accurate judging, at least as accurate as you can expect from a sport where there ARE NO actual guidelines for the judges to objectively apply.