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68 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 the stage in the second group with seven other women of similar height. She isn't pulling resistance bands like several of the other women. If she does, the veins on her arms will pop, and the striation of her muscles will stand out — both features that show on her easily, and both frowned on for bikini competitors. At 47, she's probably the oldest competitor in her height class. None of the others in her group compete in the over-40 contest later, and only one makes an appearance in the over-35 group. e women move onto the stage on stilettos with transparent heels. One at a time, they take center stage to pose for the judges, first facing front, then back, butt thrust out, back arched. As Napier takes her turn before the judges, the other competitors stand behind her smiling, every muscle tensed. It's an exhausting position. Napier attended several posing practice sessions before the competition to learn how to pull this off. Cleveland — who will win her height class in the figure competition — worked with Napier a few weeks before the contest. As Napier posed, Cleveland issued complex instruc- tions: "Rotate the knees outward. Softly bend the knees. Push the sit bones up and back. Push your weight into the outsides of your feet. Push down through your big toe. Now drive your chest up to the ceiling. So, you're going to have to arch your back quite a bit, almost like you're going to do a backbend." "Did I talk to you about breathing?" Cleveland asked. "You know how to breathe, right?" "No." Proper breathing is similarly complicat- ed, with one objective: Breathe without showing anyone you're breathing. And do that every moment you're onstage. "You have to be overly conditioned to stand like that," Cleveland said. Preparing for these contests is grueling business. Five to six days a week Napier spends two to two and a half hours in the gym, lifting weights. Twelve weeks before competition, when the emphasis is on losing fat to enhance muscle definition, she devotes 45 minutes daily to cardio. ("If I'm not competing, I won't go near a treadmill. I hate it," she says.) She eats six protein-packed meals a day, starting with nine egg whites and one egg, a half-cup of oatmeal and a few berries for breakfast. Before she began her competition diet, she was a muscular 118 pounds; now she's down to 107, with a well-defined six-pack. Although Napier had competed in bodybuilding competitions in her 20s, pregnancy and childbirth put an end to all that. By June 2015, she weighed 140 pounds. at's when she entered a fitness challenge sponsored by Oxygen Magazine. Working up the nerve to send her "before" pictures almost took her out of the competition. "I didn't want to send my pictures. I was so self-conscious about it," she says. "Of course my husband was like, 'You're beautiful.' 'Put down that fork!' is what he should have told me." She lost 24 pounds in that three-month challenge, and while she didn't win the big prize — the cover of Oxygen — she placed in the top 20. Her success inspired her to try competing again, so she contacted Weingarten and asked for a critique. "I said, 'Pick me apart. What do I do if I want to compete?' He told me what I needed to work on, and I just took it from there." Onstage Napier stands with her chin raised and muscles taut, while another competitor goes through her pos- ing routine, tossing her hair and smiling over a shoulder as she pivots to arch into the back pose. Get Cool's "Shawty Got Moves" blasts: "She move it/She move it/ Her body/Her body/So sexy/So sexy/Can't hide it/Can't hide it." Later, another group of women poses to the booming repeated command: "Let me see your chest," in the V.I.C. rap "Wobble." e bikini category can be a slippery one, far more aligned with notions of what makes a woman sexy than the other women's competitions. e Napiers have talked about how sugges- tive it can sometimes seem; Pam showed Eddie a photo of the back pose. His response: "Well, the kids won't be there." e high heels worn by bikini and figure competitors don't exactly scream "athlete." "Heels make a women's legs look better," one trainer says. Yet women's physique contestants compete barefoot. "e only thing I can tell you is, it's show business," Jones, the promoter, says. "e role of the competitors is nonverbal communication: I should win. I have charisma. I have sex appeal. I have all these qualities I want to convey to you. I can't talk to you, so I have to do it through my hair, my suit color. "e sport ended the very moment you got onstage. Now it's show business." Still, during a pre-competition posing workshop, some women were taken aside and coached carefully on how to do the back pose. e idea is to show off the gluteus muscles without looking like a stripper wannabe. Too much butt thrust can get a woman kicked out of the show. Somebody probably needed to tell that to the audience member shouting, "Bend a little more! A little more!" Oddly, men don't need a similar pose to show off their glutes. Do the sexy smiles and artfully tossed hair make a competitive difference? Weingarten doesn't think so. "I was a judge for almost 10 years. I did not pay attention to the female face," he says. Still, looks matter. Could an unattractive woman win one of these competitions? "No more than an unattractive man can win physique," Weingarten says. "e look they want is what every mother would want to bring home to their daughter. But male bodybuilders can be uglier than sin and win. Male physique cannot be." No song lyrics beg men to show off secondary sexual characteristics as they take the stage. Kingery, dressed like his fellow competitors in knee-length board shorts, manages to look relaxed while he flexes. You can bet he's hungry. In fact, he's been hungry for the last nine weeks. Before competition prep began, he ate seven meals a day to keep up with his caloric and protein needs, including a 10-ounce steak twice daily. Now, to heighten muscle definition, he's down to five meals daily, mostly lean proteins: six ounces of turkey or chicken three times daily, and four ounces of turkey or chicken twice a day, plus three cups of egg whites twice daily. It's worked: He has dropped 36 pounds. It was just the latest stage in Kingery's dramatic long-term transformation. In 2010, as his unhappy marriage began to collapse, he weighed more than 300 pounds. "Once I got to that weight, I didn't want to go out. I wanted to be a The women move onto the stage on stilettos with transparent heels.