February 1, 2006

The Return of Shape – The IFBB’s "Classic Bodybuilding" Initiative

The look that most bodybuilders have has never really caught on with the public, although there was a time in the ‘80s and part way through the ‘90s when bodybuilding had a reasonably high level of public acceptance. These days, however, the sport is going further underground, seemingly as far away as from the public eye as possible, and with less exposure than it’s seen in years. The public, for the most part, just doesn’t want to see the massive, bloated physiques that many of today’s top pros exhibit, some of them weighing close to, and sometimes more than, 300 pounds.

The public is one thing, mind you, and not really a great indicator of any sport’s success. However, more and more bodybuilding fans today are also shying away from the over-the-top mass-monsters that have been dominating the professional stages for many years now. Simply take a look at the professional contests for proof – there are fewer and fewer people in the audience each year, and fewer contests too. Bodybuilding isn’t just alienating the public; bodybuilding is alienating its own fans. Now that’s a problem.

Ask many of the one-time fans and they’ll often tell you that "they’ve had enough" – they’ve had enough of the size-for-the-sake-of-size mentality, and they’ve had enough of things like the bloated guts that many of the pros now display. After all, does it make sense that the top pro bodybuilders in the world have stomachs bigger than Santa Claus?

In short, many of the pros simply don’t look good anymore, and most people who train don’t really want to look like the top guys in the sport, which certainly wasn’t the way it was decades ago when guys like Oliva, Schwarzenegger and Zane ruled. Bodybuilding has become a sport that’s mostly concerned with size, and the physiques have become grotesque. What seems to have been lost today is any concern for what’s referred to as shape.

So while men’s pro bodybuilding seems to be going down the toilet with its size-at-all-costs attitude, there seems to be a glimmer of hope with a new event that’s just been announced by the IFBB. They’re calling it "Classic Bodybuilding," and it could well bring shape back to prominence, at least for the amateurs, since that’s where it’s first being introduced. This new division will make its international debut at the IFBB World Championships in Spain later this year, and Canada may well send a team to participate in it, since it’s already scheduled in for the CBBF National World Qualifier to be held in August.

The rules for Classic Bodybuilding were just released by the Canadian Bodybuilding Federation (CBBF). The division uses height and weight to divide competitors into classes, instead of just one or the other, which is the way it has traditionally been in the bodybuilding world. Honestly, I don’t know if this has ever been done before – but with the state of things today, it’s at least worth a try.

There will be three height classes called Short, Medium and Tall. Short will be up to 170 cm, Medium will be up to 178 cm, and Tall will be more than 178 cm. The key here, though, is that weight factors in. What they will do is measure the height of the competitor to first determine which class that person will be in. Then, 100 will be subtracted from the height to determine a base weight for that competitor in kilograms. From that base weight, the competitor can weigh his base weight plus an additional two kilograms to be in the Short class, an additional four kilograms to be in the Medium class, or an additional six kilograms to be in the Tall class. Confusing? Kind of – but here’s an example to help clarify.

Say a competitor is six-feet tall – that’s 72 inches, which is 182.88 cm. That means this person will definitely be in the Tall class. Next, we have to check the weight too. You take his height – 182.88 – and subtract 100 to get 82.88. That’s his base weight in kilograms – 82.88 kilograms. By the rules of the Tall class, there is a six-kilogram allowance, so that person can weigh up to 88.88 kilograms (82.88 + 6), which translates into 195.5 pounds.

I admit the complexity of the class structure is a little overwhelming, but why I favor this new division is because: 1) with the "cap" on weight, it will force competitors to be concerned with their shape more than size, which should translate into better-looking physiques onstage, and 2) it will likely have a significant impact on our Canadian competitors, who go to the Worlds in terms of their placings. In fact, it will likely give us a fighting chance and make us competitive again, because we’re not competitive right now.

It’s no secret that Canada has some of the best drug-testing policies in the world, and our competitors who go to the Worlds have to adhere to them. Now, I won’t say that there isn’t anyone in Canada who tries to cheat the testing process, but I will say that these people are in the minority -- they’re certainly not the majority. (Competitors who go into drug-tested contests and cheat to win against clean competitors by trying to "beat" the test is a topic for a future article – I promise!) By and large, our Canadian competitors who go to the Worlds go clean, and this is the main reason that they get destroyed in that competition year after year. Other competitors and other countries don’t necessarily play by the same rules. As a result, there’s rarely a Canadian who makes the top 15. As one competitor who went one year told me, "It’s like I was in a fight and I had a pocketknife while everyone else had machine guns."

Frankly, this situation is just not fair for those who play by the rules. And it’s also not fair for those who do have the shape to compete at this high level, but who don’t have the freaky size – something you’re not likely to get unless you have a whole lot of drugs to use.

Take, for example, Canada’s Guy Bourgon, who is featured on our cover this month (and also in the photo above right). I saw Guy compete at the 2004 IFBB Men’s World Championships that were held in Russia (the photo of Guy was taken backstage, minutes before the first round of prejudging). Guy showed up in Russia in the best shape of anyone on the Canadian team. As a matter of fact, he looked better than anyone I’ve seen go on the Canadian team in the last six or seven years. Guy has a physique that I think looks 50 percent Arnold Schwarzenegger and 50 percent Frank Zane, two of the greatest bodybuilders of all-time – he’s a splendid combination of shape, size, and conditioning. If Guy had competed in the ‘70s looking like he did in Russia in 2004, he would have been a force back then, and the magazines would have probably run stories on him and praised him for his size and shape. Perhaps we’d still be reading about him today as we do Schwarzenegger and Zane. But Guy was born 30 years too late.

Guy should have been a force in Russia, but he’s about six feet tall, and he weighed less than 198 pounds at that competition. Although his conditioning was as good as anyone in the top five, and his overall shape and structure was as good as anyone in the top ten, he was up against guys six inches shorter who weighed about the same as he did. These "big little guys" he was up against were impressive in the way Coleman and Cutler and a number of the "big" pros are today – big, blocky chunks of muscle with overwhelming size, but seemingly little concern for shape. As a result, with judging criteria that emphasize size over pretty much anything else, even at the World Championships, Guy didn’t even make the top 15.

Classic Bodybuilding can change all that, and I believe that it could make an athlete like Guy competitive to the point that he might even win! Guy could squeeze into the upper limit of the Tall class. (He weighed in at less than 198 in Russia, so I suspect that getting down to 195 should be a cinch.) It’s the kind of situation that can convince someone to take a run at the Worlds again, instead of hanging up the posing trunks and saying, "Why bother?"

Granted, some may balk at the idea of combining size and weight to determine class distinctions, arguing that bodybuilders should be allowed to be as heavy as they want. To that I say this: fine. The IFBB isn’t eliminating their weight classes, and competitors can continue to compete that way, should they please. There are still going to be World Championships that are split into weight categories with no concern for height. There’s nothing changing there, and nothing’s changing with the pros either.

This new Classic Bodybuilding division, however, is a bright light that brings back the old-school days where men stood on a competitive stage looking like Greek gods, not like mutants. They cared as much about their shape as their size, and they had a look that inspired people to train, appealing to people in such a way that many looked up to them in admiration, instead of disbelief, or sometimes even disgust, which is often the way it is today. The old days of bodybuilding rewarded shape, and I believe Classic Bodybuilding will do the same when it makes its debut this year. Bodybuilding needs that now – and perhaps if it succeeds, the pros might start listening too.

...Doug Schneider, Publisher
das@seriousaboutmuscle.com

Doug Schneider is the publisher and chief photographer for SeriousAboutMuscle.com, BodyBuildingLive.com, and SeriousAboutFitness.com.