Methodology

Sources

• Federation scorecards — NPC News Online, IFBB Pro League results pages, NABBA archives, WFF results PDFs. Primary source for every placement.
• Wikipedia & Wikidata — for historical edition pages, athlete biographies, and infobox data (height, date of birth, nationality). Cross-checked against scorecards where possible.
• Podcast transcripts — every episode of major female-bodybuilding podcasts is auto-transcribed with Whisper and indexed for quotes. Source attribution links back to the original episode with timestamp.
• Sponsor announcements & brand-ambassador pages — for sponsorship and supplement-stack data.
• Athlete public statements — first-person claims by the athlete (interviews, social captions) explicitly attributed.

Iron Score

Iron Score is a placement-weighted, career-cumulative rating that starts at a baseline of 1200 for every athlete and adds points for each competition result.

score = 1200
     + Σ ( placement_points × tier_multiplier × recency_weight )
     + social_score    (0–500)
     + contribution_score (0–400)
     + cultural_score  (0–500)

placement_points: 1st=100, 2nd=70, 3rd=50, 4th=35, 5th=25, 6th=18,
                  7-10=12, 11-15=6, else=3
tier_multiplier:  apex (Olympia/Arnold/Rising Phoenix) = 3.0
                  pro shows = 2.0
                  amateur qualifier = 1.3
                  amateur regional = 1.0
recency_weight:   1.0 for current year, decays 0.025 per year, floor 0.5

We chose placement-weighted summation over classic ELO because chess-style ELO penalizes a 10-time champion too heavily for a single sub-podium showing. The full formula is in scripts/recompute-rankings.sh in the public repository.

Muscle Dominance Heatmap

Each muscle group on an Iron Card receives a 0–100 dominance score, computed nightly as a weighted composite of six signals:

1. Placement signal (40%) — wins and podiums in shows where the muscle group is decisive in judging criteria for that division.
2. Mention signal (25%) — positively-sentimented references to the muscle group in podcast quotes about the athlete.
3. Statement signal (15%) — first-person claims by the athlete about the muscle group, with source URL.
4. Pose signal (10%) — the mandatory pose at which she placed highest, mapped to its primary muscle.
5. Measurement signal (5%, optional) — when public tape measurements exist for the athlete.
6. Coach archetype (5%) — pattern of physiques produced by the same coach. Tie-breaker only.

Tape measurements for female bodybuilders are rarely public, so we deliberately avoid making them the primary driver. Each cell links to its contributing source URLs on the athlete's profile.

Iron Card

An Iron Card is a stylized identity graphic generated entirely from public data. The silhouette is one of four parametric body archetypes selected by BMI cluster — not a portrait. The heatmap, division code, signature pose, and Iron Score all derive from public facts cited on the athlete's profile page.

We do not generate AI photographs of real athletes. Iron Cards are heraldic representations of public statistics, comparable to the diagrams in a sports encyclopedia.

What we don't do

• We do not estimate measurements an athlete has not made public.
• We do not publish AI-generated photorealistic images of real people.
• We do not invent statistics; missing data is shown as —.
• We do not claim affiliation with any federation. We are an independent reference.

Found something wrong?

Tell us. We log every report, fix what is wrong within 48 hours, and publish the correction.