Taste the Power

Life Happens
by Olesya Novik

We're the new breed of women for a reason. Able to overcome it all on our quest for the self-satisfaction that comes with feeling great about our appearance and the healthy lifestyle we lead.

It's not merely stepping on stage and looking good in those bright lights. We transcend being judged by a few men whose opinions on what's attractive are dictated by nothing more than the political nature of various physique organizations.

To us, it's about taking the body to its most remarkable condition — a muscular, lean, sexy yet strong, incredibly curvaceous shape that we can maintain for as long as we live through healthy lifestyles and making intelligent dietary, training, and supplementation choices.

I Own My Body

Some wealthy head of a physique committee may have the power to dictate what's "appealing" by his standards through his judges' biased choices for Figure competition winners. A Figure Athlete, on the other hand, will never allow any one person's ideas or opinions to influence her control of her very own physique.

How absurd! I own my body. How about you? Your body's yours and yours alone to shape, mold, create, and live in. It's the only one you'll ever get, and no one but you has the power to decide how far you want to go in its development. You get to decide whether you want to lead a healthy, fit life where you're ready for a photo shoot within a few days' notice, or whether you'd prefer to have the kind of physique that's nothing but mediocre all year round and possibly pleasing to those few judges on the day of your occasional show.

To us, it's about so much more than competing on stage. It's about competing with ourselves, making the best of our circumstances, dedicating our lives to the iron, and then applying that commitment to our lives.

Think about it: How has the iron changed your life? If you can't answer that, then you owe it to yourself to take a good, hard look at your training program. Surviving four gruesome sets of twenty-rep squats is bound to shape more than just your ass; it'll strengthen your spirit, too. Think back to all those times when you wearily gazed at a loaded bar, the times when it almost had you convinced that you just don't have it in you to lift it, yet everything inside of you screamed otherwise. Then, as the weight shifted, those demons disappeared — and so did your weaknesses. You did it because you knew that you had the power to get your body to do anything you asked of it.

Taste The Power

There's no stopping someone who's tasted that power. Once you've experienced the privilege of shaping your body, your mind, your spirit, your life, there's no going back.That is what being a Figure Athlete is about. The control we have over every single aspect of our lives.

I'm taking every ounce of that power back.

Are you?