The more prep time you can have for your posing practice, the better. Some initial poses can take a reasonable amount of time to get dialed in effectively. If you consider this and know that you will be doing a contest, then it’s recommended to do posing practice several times a week in your off-season. This will give you enough time to be confident in your posing and stage ready. Even a year of posing 1 to 2 times a week would be beneficial, or even just hitting a few poses after each workout. 

For example, if you’re doing a 30-week contest prep (I cover the length of times in this article (link here) ), you would start your posing practice 40 to 50 weeks before the show in your off-season. In this stage, you should only be posing twice weekly as you don’t want to burn yourself out. Once the contest prep starts, you can begin posing three days a week for a set amount of time, say 15 minutes. Remember, at this point in your contest prep, you should be effectively going into the poses, but you should still do everything I discussed to ensure they stay on point. 

Add more frequency per week or time per session every couple of weeks as you ramp things up until show day. 

It would help if you were posing daily as you get close to show day. 

How long should I pose during a posing practice session?

The time spent in a posing session will be ramped up each week for approximately 30 weeks before the competition. Initially, you’ll start with 5 minutes and add five additional minutes every third week until you get to the point where you can do a 60-minute session. At this point, you do not need to pose for 60 minutes each day, but you should build your endurance so that you CAN pose for 60 minutes once a week, and then the rest of your posing sessions could be 20 to 30 minutes. 

How long should I hold each pose?

First and foremost, don’t worry about holding poses until you learn how to get into the pose effectively. Once you’ve established the pose, you’ll start practicing at 30ish weeks out by keeping your pose for 2-5 seconds. Every week you should add 2 to 5 seconds to the point where you can easily hold a pose for one minute. It’s worth noting that holding a pose will be difficult if you don’t practice your breathing, if you don’t have the stamina in your muscles to withstand being tense for that time, or if your cardiovascular health is not strong right now. You will want to work up to hold the poses for one minute. This will ensure that no matter what happens on stage, you will be the one that looks calm and in control no matter how long the judges have you hold any specific pose. This could set you apart from first or second place in a show.

Thank you for reading.