Like most of those here, I grew up before the internet. Tell a 12-year-old me that one day all a muscle-hungry adolescent would have to do is type a few words into youtube search to see all the female bodybuilders he could possibly imagine, and it would have blown my little mind. But at least I grew up in the eighties when fbb was beginning to boom. I feel sorry for those of previous generations who really would have been starved of material.
I've been into strong women for as long as I can possibly remember, long before puberty hit. First it was literally just that - strength. Superhuman strength of the old Lynda Carter Wonder Woman, then the one episode of The Hulk cartoon when the introduced She-Hulk. I didn't know why I was so fascinated, only that it sent my imagination reeling. I remember seeing through a shop window while being dragged around the shops Castle Grayskull only it had a woman standing there instead of He-Man. It was my first introduction to She-Ra and I quickly became an obsessive fan.
Then on some TV chat-show the guest was some female bodybuilder - just to introduce this new and novel concept to the world as a whole. And my world changed from then onwards. The concept that a woman could have real muscles was the most exciting thing imaginable. When I hit puberty my fascination for strong woman expanded into a lust and fascination for their actual bodies too. I scoured newsagents for (excruciatingly hard to find) female bodybuilding magazines which I would blushingly buy from variously amused, smirking, bemused and indifferent shop clerks.
I saw in the TV guide that showing at 4AM in the morning was a TV movie "Getting Physical" about a woman who becomes a bodybuilder. I didn't have a VCR to save it for posterity but I stayed up all night to watch it, excitedly savouring ever minute, volume turned down to a whisper so as not to wake my parents, a dressing gown across the crack under the door in case someone got up in the night and noticed the light.
Then there was Gladiators which did such sterling work in bringing female muscle into the mainstream. I've since watched as over the years, it's become more prevalent. A least, a lot easier to find. Finally getting a VCR helped a lot too, both to save those episodes and fleeting glimpses of female muscle the TV offered up, and to scour the video-rental stores for any dodgy B-movie that even hinted it might contain a muscled / karate-kicking babe. I swear my taste in low-budget trash was shaped by desperately seeking Amazons, stock token female baddies, hench-women, kung fu fighters and the like.