Articles Bios & Interviews Rx Girl Female Physique & Bodybuilding Bev Francis. . . Pioneer of Power!
In my last ‘Time Capsule' interview I featured an article I did with Bev Francis revolving around the 1987 Ms Olympia. That same year I also did an interview with Bev which covered her time in power lifting and her switch to the sport of bodybuilding. So, without further ado, here is my interview from ‘Strength Athlete' magazine in its entirety....
So tell me Bev, just how did you get into the sport of power lifting?
"I started off lifting weights, doing the bench press and the squat, to help my shot putting on the advice of the 
coach that I had. I had no idea that those two lifts were two of the power lifts, but they were the two lifts that I was doing constantly, daily. I was working on those two lifts, just getting stronger. At that point I competed as a shot putter/discus thrower (Bev competed successfully in two Commonwealth Games). I trained with two other girls, one javelin thrower and another shot putter/discus thrower. We started breaking state records and then national records in the shot put and attracted some publicity. They were writing about how we were weight training and we were getting publicity in the local press. The Power lifting Association, which was just starting up at that stage in Australia, saw the press, wanted to get power lifting started as a sport in the state and contacted us, asking us if we'd lift in a power lifting contest. None of us had heard of power lifting so they had to describe what it was! When we found out that two of the lifts were the bench press and the squat we felt quite at home. So we went out and just treated it as a day's entertainment! We went to the competition, did the squat and the bench press - they had to show us what a deadlift was so that we could do it - and we all won our respective weight classes. I know in my weight class I recorded world's best marks in all three lifts. There weren't any world records at this stage because the national body wasn't affiliated into an international federation, but on record my lifts were the best ever recorded. Which is nice when you are just this amateur athlete and you come along and do this sport for the first time and find out that no one else has done better.
"That was in 1977. From there the association started and formed a state association and we had national and state championships which I won for the next two or three years. 1980 brought about the first world championships. I went to them and won them, breaking world records. That is when my power lifting career took off and became my number one sport."
So what was the attitude at the time to what you were doing? I mean you could hardly say that power lifting was the thing that all suburban mothers dreamed of for their daughters...
"The attitude was very negative. ‘Why do you want to be strong?' was a real common question. To me that seemed like a silly question. I mean why do you want to climb the mountain? Because it is there! I mean they never asked a woman sprinter ‘Why do you want to be fast?' It's just something that you can do well and you want to do it. It was a wonderful feeling to get stronger."
You must have been naturally strong....
"Yeah I was. As soon as I walked in the gym I was strong. I was the strongest girl in the whole class, in the physical education group. I'd always been involved in sport. I always used to climb things and that sort of helped my arms and my abdominals. I'd always done stomach work as a kid. Also I had been a dancer so that helped my legs. I'd always done sport and I was naturally strong and had a stocky build. I was never thin, never. I was always interested in being strong. At that stage I didn't know that it was possible for a woman to be very strong. I thought I was stuck because I was a woman, because I was female, with weakness. I mean that changed as soon as I started training. I realized that wasn't true and no one ever knew that before, so I didn't have any role models. So to me it wasn't something that you shouldn't do, it was just something that I didn't know I could do. It felt so good to do it, and I admired strength so much, that the fact that it was looked down upon, frowned upon, didn't worry me."
Just for those people not ‘in the know' Bev, what were your greatest achievements as a power lifter?
"The lifts that I have done in competition are a 479lb squat, in training I've done a double at 500lbs. In the bench press competition 331 lbs, in training 335lbs. In the dead lift competition 475lbs, in training 501 lbs. These are fairly heavy lifts. The men in the same weight classes do much more but then again women, even though they are weaker than the men, they are not weak, and that's the point. Those lifts are far more than most men, even men that train, can do."
What sort of training were you doing at the time?
"Very basic training. I used to train the actual lifts, bench press and squat, and only for the last six weeks up to a competition I'd dead lift. I would do very few assistance exercises. I would do a few what I would call ‘play days' where I would do a few arm curls, a few pulleys, a few sit-ups, but basically I used to bench press and squat, heavy and hard, six or seven days a week."
What sort of rep range were you doing?
"A big rep range. Some days I would do sets of tens, some days I would do eights, sixes, fives, fours and threes, but I would always do a lot of sets. No matter what the rep range was I would always do at least a total of ten sets for each lift. Sometimes I'd do twenty sets."
What was an average day like for you back then...?
"I used to get up in the morning at 5.30am, go for a four mile run. I'd come back, shower, breakfast, go to work (teaching physical education and mathematics) at high school. At 4 o clock I'd leave there, go immediately to the university where I trained. Usually my workout consisted of about a mile and a half jogging, shot putting for about an hour, then a sprinting workout - something like ten 200's, twenty 100's, five 300's. Then I would go to the weight room and spend an hour and a half in the weight room. Then I would go home, make dinner, shower and collapse into bed."
You must have suffered from the effects of overtraining at times from a schedule like this...
"I over trained sure, every now and again. I would train until I broke down, either from injury or sickness. I just loved what I was doing so much."
When it comes to your diet at that time, I guess the diet of a power lifter is less restrictive than that of a bodybuilder...
"Right, as a power lifter I guess I had the luxury of being able to compete in any weight class I wanted to. Whatever weight class I was in at that particular time I still won. In other words, I didn't have to train in one class and then diet down to compete against people who were lighter than me like a lot of people did. I just used to eat and lift and compete.
"In fact at that time I had a very high fat diet. My favorite snack was salami and cheese. I used to eat a lot of red meat. I used to cook things in butter and I used to enjoy my sweets. I was never grossly fat though. I still had abdominals when I was nearly 180lbs. So I never carried a huge amount of body fat but I was very big legged and I carried a fair amount on my hips. "
So how did you find the transition from power lifting to bodybuilding?
"The initial transition was relatively easy because probably the hardest thing a bodybuilder has to do is build muscle and that part was done. I mean most beginners try and get into a competition too soon as far as I'm concerned; they get into it before they've built the muscle. They don't realize that it takes at least three years to build muscle and they want to compete the first year that they are training. So, because I never had the pressure of worrying about bodybuilding, I'd gone through years and years of heavy training, I'd built the muscle. When I came into the sport I had to change my shape. I had to learn how to diet and I had to change the way I trained. Changing the way I trained was no hassle; I was used to hard training so that was easy. The diet took a lot of learning and a lot of willpower and I still find it very hard."
Do you have any regrets when it comes to leaving power lifting?
"No, I feel I achieved as much as anyone would want to have achieved in power lifting. I can't ask for more. I mean I lost count of the number of world records I broke. I know it was over forty. Six world championships, unbeaten in any competition. Really what more could I ask for..."
What would you say the highlight of your power lifting career was?
"It would be hard to decide between two things. When I broke the bench press record in 1981 in Hawaii every woman had finished bench pressing before I started and bench pressed far beyond any woman. No woman had ever bench pressed 300 at that stage, very few have still, but I did 331. I remember going up for my last lift and the announcer introduced me as probably the greatest woman bench presser of all time...which as a young athlete meant a lot! That was a high point.
"Also when the world championships were in Australia, in Adelaide in 1984, my parents were there in the front row to see me win and I broke a world record in the squat and in the total. For them to see that, to see the looks on their faces, was a memorable moment."
So there you have it, another trip down memory lane with one of bodybuilding's all time greats. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed re-living the experience!
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