Yes, even non-competitors.
If you have any desire to step on stage, you need to being practicing your posing now. It is absolutely impossible to spend too much time working on it. The more time you spend on it, the more automatic it becomes. The more opportunity you have to see room for improvements and adjust the way you are positioned in a specific pose. The more opportunity you have to identify weak areas in your physique that have maybe gone unnoticed before.
And perhaps most importantly: the greater the opportunity to better understand your body.
Let’s start with the basics – when you learn how to pose correctly, you can actually see what kind of changes your body is making. If you’re not posing, you’re taking part in what I like to call mugshot progress pics.
Nice traps, but no legs.
When you just stand there in front of the camera, you can make a great deal of progress over the course of weeks and months and struggle to see it. But when you learn to pose correctly and actually, you know, flex some of the muscle you’re busting your butt to build, results become more evident.
Case in point: my client Alison. When she started with me she admittedly had no clue about posing, but managed to figure it out pretty quickly. She made great progress over her first 12 weeks, and combined with learning how to pose, she ended up looking pretty much like a completely different person at the 3-month mark.
Got it?
And now my second point: when you learn to pose, you’re really just learning how to flex a muscle isometrically. Easy peasy, right? Everyone can flex their bicep. Well, can you flex your lats, or your hamstrings without bending your knee? If you’re an experienced competitor, do you remember a time when you couldn’t? Once you learn this stuff and take it with you into the gym, everything changes. Finally figured out how to flare your lats? Great, now those pullups and pulldowns are going to feel a lot more productive. Finally figured out how to engage those hamstrings on your back double bicep pose? Awesome, now enjoy getting more out of a light warmup set of Romanian deadlifts than you ever would have thought possible.
Regardless of your competitive ambitions – or lack thereof – take advantage of the opportunity that posing offers in order to increase your body awareness, get more out of your lifts, and be better able to see those changes in your photos.
