 "Photo: MATTHEW RION / The Daily Reveille")
Competitive sports usually do not involve rhinestoned bikinis and 5-inch platform heels, but for Amie’ Soileau, a 24-year-old University clinical exercise physiology graduate student, jeweled clothing and sky-high shoes, are essentials.
Soileau participates in fitness competitions, pageants that judge on physical appearance, but also include fitness routines and obstacle courses.
“That was an obstacle,” Soileau said. “Learning how to walk in those shoes — because I’m little miss tomboy and I grew up wearing tennis shoes all the time.
Soileau practices for and competes with LA Explosion, a Louisiana-based fitness competition team, she said.
“We’re judged on poise,” said team member Laurie Daly. “It’s almost like a fitness competition meets a beauty pageant.”
She said that people may think fitness competitions would be full of big, muscular women, but that most competitors are very feminine.
“It’s nothing too outrageous – if you’re overly muscular or overly lean, they won’t choose you,” Daly said.
Judges look for symmetry, muscle tone and femininity, Soileau said.
Soileau said she will participate in a competition August 13 in New Orleans.
Fitness America, a fitness competition organization, will run the event, said Louis Zwick, Fitness America spokesman. The competition will be at the Westwego Performing Arts Center in New Orleans, Zwick said.
He said it will be a regional qualifying competition for the Fitness America national championships in November, Zwick said.
Soileau said she competed in a Las Vegas competition this summer that included an obstacle course round.
“It went very well – I got third in my age division for the figure round and placed top 20 overall for the fitness skills [round] – that composes of bench press, box jumps and shuttle runs, and my obstacle course time dropped four seconds from last year, so I was very, very pleased.”
The goal for most competitors is to get publicity from the competitions, so that they can go on to be featured on Web sites and magazines such as Oxygen Magazine and Fit Magazine, Soileau said.
She said she was on the cover of the University Recreational Center guidebook and hopes to further her publicity in the future.
Diet makes up about 80 percent of the training process, and Soileau said she sticks to a strict, detailed diet to get into competition shape.
She eats six small meals a day instead of three large ones and keeps a close eye on carbohydrates and proteins.
Soileau said her family has a hard time understanding her strict diet.
“They all think I’ve fallen off the deep end,” she laughed. “But if you want something bad enough, you find ways to do it, to overcome obstacles. It’s a priority of mine because I understand the importance of nutrition.”
Eating healthy food can also interfere with her social life, Soileau said.
“You really don’t want to go eat out at restaurants because you don’t really know how they’re prepping the meat,” she said. “I have been known to go to a restaurant and just order a basic salad and bring shrimp in my purse and dump the shrimp on my salad.”
Soileau said that a lot of physical work goes into training for a show as well.
“For this last show in Vegas, I probably worked out six days a week, but now prepping for New Orleans I’m just working out five days – you have to make sure you’re not overtraining yourself.”
Getting into competition shape is hard to do, and many girls take it to the extreme, Soileau said.
Athletes have to lose weight to drop down to competition size. Soileau said she dropped her body fat content to 9 percent for her first competition, but now she is striving for about 12 percent.
“Whatever it takes to make your body look better in the suit on stage, you just go with it,” she said.
Most competitors dehydrate themselves because they want their skin to show every muscle indention, Soileau said.
Some competitors stop drinking water and take laxatives to get rid of water weight, but Soileau said she is not an advocate of that.
“One of the girls last year on stage dehydrated herself and starved herself and it showed up on stage, the judges told her she looked too skinny and hungry and starved,” Soileau said.
Some women may go the extreme route, but the best competitors are usually very healthy, Soileau said.
“I definitely think you have the opportunity to show girls that you can look like this and be healthy and not starve yourself and its okay,” she said. “It lets women express themselves in an individual way, but with camaraderie.”
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