WOMENS' FITNESS COMPETITION:
WHAT IS IT? WHERE IS IT GOING?
Is Fitness Destined For Wide Popularity,
Or Is It Just A Passing Fad?
WHAT IS FITNESS?
Debbie Kruck, whose body is a beguiling mixture of feminine curves and muscular
definition, was walking along the boardwalk at Venice Beach some months ago.
She was wearing a halter top and a pair of cut-off jeans slit generously up
the side. Debbie, as her friends will tell you, is not shy. Naturally, she
attracted a lot of attention. She usually does.
At one point, a middle-aged lady approached her. She smiled and said, "Young
lady, I wanted to tell you how much I admire your figure. You look fantastic.
Tell me, are you a bodybuilder?" "No," Debbie replied, "I'm
a fitness competitor." "Fitness?" the lady inquired with a
puzzled expression. "What is fitness?"
Indeed. That's a question that a lot of people have been asking.
It's certainly clear that over the past few years, a number of different
promoters have staged contests they have labeled as "fitness competitions."
There are fitness contests being broadcast on television (although in TV Guide
they are listed under the heading of "bodybuilding"). Many of the
bodybuilding magazines have been featuring "fitness girls" in their
pages, often instead of rather than in addition to photos of women bodybuilders.
And as of 1994, both the National Physique Committee and the International
Federation of Bodybuilders, the official governing bodies of the physique
competition, began sanctioning fitness contests as well. But the basic questions
as to what fitness is, what it should be and how it should be judged have
yet to be satisfactorily answered.
HOW FITNESS IS JUDGED
Although much about fitness is still open to debate, everyone seems to agree
that fitness contests feature women with attractive, athletic bodies, but
who are not as muscular as female bodybuilders. Although the rules differ
from event to event, all seem to include some kind of performance round, either
a routine involving some combination of dance, gymnastics and aerobics, some
form of strength/endurance demonstration or an obstacle course. In many of
the contests the women also routinely appear on stage in evening dresses and
high heels. The importance of each of these aspects of competition in the
scoring can differ from one contest to the next, depending on who is promoting
the event.
FROM "SOFT" BODYBUILDING TO FITNESS
Modern fitness competition began in the mid-1980s when Wally Boyco, a promoter
and publisher of the National Fitness Trade Journal, decided to stage what
he called a fitness contest as part of a health industry trade show in Las
Vegas. The competitors were sponsored by various exhibitors at the show and
the idea was to include women who were athletic, fit and attractive but did
not have the muscular development or definition of female bodybuilders.
"Women bodybuilders are generally much too muscular to sell product for
the health and fitness industry," Wally Boyco explains. "The women
I've always looked for in fitness are fit and athletic, but no so developed
that the average woman wouldn't like to look like them or the average man
wouldn't find them attractive."
Actually, although Boyco was the first to stage such a contest, he was not
the first to have the idea. For example, Joe Weider began advocating events
like this back in the early 1980s, believing that the degree of development
achieved by those early competitors (as unimpressive as that looks today)
would alienate a significant portion of the physique audience. Joe advocated
that bodybuilding for women be held in two classes---one scored according
to the traditional standards of bodybuilding and the other judged more on
the basis of shape and symmetry. In Europe this distinction was referred to
as "hard" and "soft" bodybuilding.
SOFT BODYBUILDING AND SEXISM
However, it was soon realized that so-called soft bodybuilding was not really
bodybuilding at all. Bodybuilding is a sport defined by a long tradition And
as we understand the meaning and nature of serious physique competition, there's
nothing "soft" about it.
Furthermore, it became clear, especially in this age of feminism and political
correctness, that serious sexist implications arise when you make such distinctions
between men and women in physique competition. This difference between "hard"
and "soft" doesn't exist in any other sport. Tennis is a game that
both men and women play, using the same rules. In golf, women play shorter
courses since they don't hit the ball as far, but from then on the rules are
just as tough for both genders. In track both men and women run races of the
same distances (women even run marathons nowadays, although a few years ago
this was not considered acceptable because of possible damage to their "female
organs").
SETTING THE STANDARDS
Fitness, although the participants are athletes, is not a sport. It is, in
effect, a specialized kind of beauty contest---a beauty contest for athletic
women.
Of course, this is not to say that fitness is not a difficult and demanding
type of competition or that the women involved don't have to train and diet
with rigorous discipline in order to succeed. Succeeding in fitness not only
takes athletic ability, it also involves a lot of effort, sacrifice and frequently
a good deal of money.
However, since fitness isn't a sport, the rules and judging standards are
necessarily arbitrary. Any promoter or sanctioning body is theoretically free
to lay down any set of rules they desire. For example:
---Gymnastics, dance or athletic performance can be given more or less importance.
---Some promoters discourage obvious muscle, others reward some small degree
of muscularity and definition to varying degrees.
---Beauty of face and physique is always an advantage, but more so in some
contests than in others.
The difficultly in all of this is that competitors often have trouble knowing
what is expected of them in any given contest, how to prepare, and how much
or little muscularity is required.
IS THERE AN AUDIENCE FOR FITNESS?
Promoters of fitness frequently talk about wanting to attract a "general
audience." But whether that audience actually exists or not is problematical.
While there are many very attractive fitness women, with some exceptions they
can't compete for beauty and sexy figures with the girls who enter, for example,
the Hawaiian Tropic bikini contests.
While many of them are skilled at gymnastics or dance, they don't perform
at the level of Olympic gymnasts or the Bolshoi Ballet.
And the fact remains that the majority of the public, at least to this point,
haven't developed much appreciation for muscular women---even those with the
relatively small amount of development of fitness women.
The one audience fitness can hope to win over is the physique audience. The
same people who go to bodybuilding contests and read the bodybuilding magazines.
A great many of them do like women with (at least some) muscle, and many who
don't like highly-developed female bodybuilders find fitness women a welcome
alternative.
The question at this point is what is it going to take to get this audience
to support fitness contests on an ongoing basis?
FITNESS AND THE MEDIA
Selling tickets to fitness contests has frequently been a problem.
Wally Boyco's contests are essentially television shows. His ultimate product
is a syndicated television package and a live, ticket-buying audience, while
desirable, is not really necessary.
Lou Zwick's fitness shows are also created for television, in this case ESPN
rather than syndication. Cable television generates much less income than
does syndication, so for Lou Zwick a paying audience is more important. But
his events have not traditionally attracted particularly large audiences.
So it remains an open question as to how big an audience for fitness actually
exists.
Magazines don't have to worry about selling tickets, of course, only magazines.
In this regard, the decision-makers at MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT, MUSCLE MAG and
IRON MAN have decided that their readers want fitness, not female bodybuilding,
and are featuring fitness competitors (or sometimes just babes in bikinis)
more and more in their pages.
However, it remains to be seen how successful a strategy this will turn out
to be. FLEX magazine is the one publication among the "hard-core"
group that puts the emphasis on bodybuilding rather than fitness, and it outsells
it's competitors by quite a large margin. Even MUSCLE & FITNESS, which
aims for a more general audience, gives coverage to the women bodybuilders.
But given the success of the magazines which continue to feature women's bodybuilding,
and the relatively anemic ticket sales for most fitness contests, it's still
an open question whether or not a loyal audience for fitness competition exits
and to what degree readers will buy physique magazines which focus more on
T&A than they do on the athletic female body.
ENTER THE NPC/IFBB
The 1995 season was the first in which the NPC and the IFBB began sanctioning
fitness events.
Unlike the other fitness contests, which rely on television to make money,
NPC and IFBB events will depend a great deal on selling tickets in order to
be successful. "There seems to be a lot of interest in fitness,"
says NPC honcho Jim Manion, "so we're going to give it a try. If enough
people buy tickets to these shows, we'll keep sanctioning them. If not, we
won't. It's up to the audiences to tell us whether they'll support fitness
contests or not."
The judging procedures being used by the NPC for fitness differs significantly
from that of other contests, Jim Manion explains. In both Boyco and Zwick
events, the performance round is extremely important. What this means is that
it is possible to choose a winner that does extremely well in the performance
round but who is lacking when it comes to overall beauty or physical development.
"In our contests," Jim Manion says, "we have a performance
round and two physique rounds, but we only give one score at the end of the
contest, just as we do in bodybuilding. This allows the judges to take everything
into consideration---face, the development of the physique, the overall impression
made by the competitor and performance as well. I think this allows us to
come up with the kind of balanced judging that will produce the sort of champions
our audiences want to see."
How the IFBB contests will be judged in the future is still up in the air.
The IFBB is still in the process of evaluating the 1995 Ms. Olympia Fitness
Contest and deciding what adjustments to make in judging standards for upcoming
competitions.
THE FUTURE OF FITNESS
That brings us to a final point. What do fitness contests have to be in order
to succeed? What are they for? What's the point? What, in essence, is the
purpose of fitness contests? How do they need to be structured in order to
attract audiences, to bring in sponsors and to allow the women involved at
the pro level to make a living from fitness?
Economics is always important. If fitness is going to grow and develop, somebody
has to pay for it. So that somebody has to be able make money. Certainly,
the competitors themselves have to have some hope of earning money, both at
pro competitions and afterwards as well.
How can this be made to happen?
Suppose we consider that the purpose of fitness contests is primarily to produce
spokesmodels for the fitness industry. This solves a lot of problems. It means
that judging standards should be set in order to produce winners who will
be in demand as spokesmodels. For advertising, guest-posing, posters, appearances
on television or in sponsor's booths at trade shows. Muscular enough to make
it clear they are not simply bikini models, not as muscular as the top female
bodybuilders and beautiful enough to be on the cover of MUSCLE & FITNESS.
This approach puts performance in perspective. It should play a part, certainly,
but who would you hire to be in your booth at a trade show: a great gymnast
or an M&F cover model with an attractive, athletic figure?
As spokesmodels, fitness competitors become very visible to the trade and
to the physique audience. They attract sponsors. They sell tickets and magazines.
And as more fitness women begin to make more money as the result of winning
contests, it is likely that more women will be attracted to fitness competition
and the pool of potential champions will increase.
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