There is more than meets the eye to the glamorous and seamlessly perfect stage body.
For Wānaka bodybuilder Dayna Lawton the road to getting on stage in front of judges and her peers is a disciplined one and a mentally challenging time.
Miss Lawton has always been active from a young age. She was a competitive swimmer at high school which meant lessons both before and after school.
Discipline comes easier for her than most.
On any given day you will find her at the gym in Wānaka, or up a mountain, and she is always watching what she eats – this is her normal.
"You have to be regimented with your intake. You shut off from the rest of the world," she said.
This means missing dinners with friends, and even her partner at times, just to stay focused while leading into competition. It has paid off — she won her first professional competition last year and just last month came first place in the bikini athletic category at the Fitness Muscle Glamour competition in Auckland.
Not bad for someone who has only been in the game for two years.
Bodybuilding was an accident in a way.
Recovering from an injury she could no longer run the distances she wanted to and train for an Ironman event. So she needed something else to focus on and bumped into her eventual trainer at an engagement party.
Miss Lawton wanted people to know there were downsides to having little body fat like she did, and that was not just missing out on cake here and there.
"There are lot of people that think bodybuilding is just achieving as little body fat as possible but we spend most of our time in a calorie surplus."
This meant spending up to six months building muscle and eating a lot of food. It meant putting on 10kg before shredding much of that, too.
Then they flicked the switch into a calorie deficit, and she admitted this part was harder both physically and mentally.
"You are super irritable, there are a lot of tears just doing simple things. Dropping something on the floor, things set you off. You know when you are tired you cannot control your emotions. Your body is in this state of high cortisol all the time. Your body wakes you up in the night, it is disrupted sleep."
"I was crying some days getting my steps in, to move, to function. It is also hard on people around you."
However, because of her knowledge as a personal trainer, Miss Lawton did not get too bogged down with how her body could change so rapidly. She said the personal satisfaction of showing discipline and seeing the results was worth the pain.
"If you go into body building, you hear a lot end up being not in a mentally happy space, but that's because they go into it maybe not having the right goals. The goal is to be able to stand up on stage and show a level of discipline, whereas some go in wanting to look shredded and have abs. But it is not sustainable."
She said what most did not see was the come down after a competition, the rebuild of the body and the hormonal imbalance especially for female bodybuilders.
"On the other end there is the lack of energy. If you have never experienced depletion before, it’s a really hard thing. It is hard to put one foot in front of the other — you can't think.
"The lack of power in your muscles, you feel like your limbs are jelly the entire time when in that level of depletion."
The drive came from her childhood. At school she was teased because her muscles were bigger than the boys. At the time it hurt, now she saw the positive side of a strong and muscular body.
"I felt sadness and confusion about my body at that time. Nowadays you can gain access to better education."
She said it was important for other women too, to see the benefits of being strong, rather than super thin like the media portrayed to her age group growing up.
"As females we have been fed to believe to watch our portion and do your cardio and that makes us frail and hormonally not good."
"It’s important to show the journey and the ups and downs.
"We are changing the standards of beauty — women want to look strong."
