An independent, athlete-led standards body
The Physique Competition Standards Council standardizes the instrument: sixteen judged elements, six bands of written wording behind every score, a published table for every division, one rule about how a panel must work, and published health limits that cap what extreme conditioning can earn. Run your show however you like. Free to adopt, free to publish before entries open, and the band wording is the one part nobody edits.
Document status
Why a standard
Every federation has criteria. Almost none publish what a given level of each one looks like, so an athlete prepares to a rumor and a coach prepares to a rumor with more experience behind it. A published band table closes that gap: shows that run it unmodified produce scores that compare directly with each other, and an athlete can read the instrument before deciding to enter.
The moment the head judge, the most famous judge or simply the loudest judge says what they thought, a panel of seven becomes one judge and six ratifiers. The disagreement the show recruited seven judges to get is smoothed away before it can count for anything. Scores that lock before anybody speaks are the only version of a panel that is actually a panel.
Placings get published; the reasoning behind them does not. Without a per-element scoresheet an athlete leaves knowing they came fourth and nothing they can act on, and the promoter has nothing to point at when the result is questioned. A 7.4 on Conditioning, against published wording, is something a person can train.
A rubric that has no ceiling has published an instruction to keep going.
The Standard, Section 1.2
Where nothing caps a conditioning score, the only safe assumption an athlete can make is that drier, leaner and more depleted scores higher, because on any given night it sometimes has. The instrument never said so. The instrument never said anything, which is the problem. Athletes take real risks to guess at a ceiling nobody wrote down.
Section 1.2 writes the ceiling down. Named, observable conditions cap named elements at a published number: a distended midsection caps Muscular Development, visible depletion caps Definition and Separation, striations in a shape division cap Condition and Tone. Caps are applied by the chair, not by a judge, and every applied cap is disclosed on that athlete's own scoresheet with the condition named. And an athlete removed for acute distress is never scored down for it.
What is standardized
The Council standardizes the instrument, the way it is scored, and the health limits that cap it. How you run your show is yours, and the guidance we publish for it binds nobody.
The Council does not require any particular software, and any platform that preserves the published weights, locks scores before discussion and delivers a per-element scoresheet conforms to the Standard. It can be run on paper. The Council names LiveJudge™ as a reference implementation because the locking, the drop, the normalization and the scoresheet are built into it: see Software.
The standard
It is a finished instrument, published in full so the founding board, and anybody else in the sport, can argue with it in specifics rather than in principle.
Read the StandardThe band wording is used as published, and that is the one line a show may not cross. Keep it, lock scores before discussion, publish before entries open, apply the health limits and give every athlete their scoresheet, and your show is judged to the Physique Standard. Change the classes, the stage, the tanning rule or the running order and it still is: those live in the Event Guidelines, which recommend and require nothing. The seal is free to display.
How to cite this standard
Physique Competition Standards Council. (2026). The Judging Standard for Physique Competition, Version 1.0 draft. physiquecouncil.org/rubric/
Adoption
There is no application, no fee, no sanction and nothing sent to the Council. If your show meets these four conditions, it is judged to the Physique Standard and you may say so.
The division tables, the band wording and the health limits, published at or about the time entries open. An athlete should be able to read the instrument before deciding to step on that stage, and a coach should be able to prepare to it.
Every element of the division's published table, scored from the published band wording at the published weights. Weights may be declared within the published allowance; nothing else moves.
Every judge locks a score for every element before any comparison is discussed and before the head judge speaks. The chair does not score. High and low are dropped and each judge's spread is normalized, both as published. This is the condition that decides whether a total means anything.
Publish the placings with the table the class ran, and give every athlete their own per-element scoresheet within twenty-four hours, with any health cap disclosed and the condition named. An athlete should leave knowing where they lost, not just that they lost.
One claim, one seal. A show that keeps the four conditions above is judged to the Physique Standard and may say so. Everything the seal does not cover, the classes, the stage, the tanning rule, the running order, is yours, and changing it costs you nothing. Free to display, nothing to sign, in light and dark versions.
Get a sealContact
All three go to the same address, and all three get an answer. Tell us which show, which section, and what you would change.