Kathy Sohor is not your average 55-year-old grandmother – petite, glamorous and with a figure women half her age would envy. But what really separates Kathy from her peers is her choice of pastime: bodybuilding.
It may not even be accurate to call bodybuilding a pastime because, at Kathy’s standard, it is a lifestyle choice. In fact, it’s one that has already brought her national bodybuilding titles, including Miss Physique UK two years ago.
Kathy, of Lostock, Bolton, fell into bodybuilding by accident. She always enjoyed working out at the gym when her two sons were younger but seldom had time to devote to it. When they became more independent, she decided to go more often.
“I liked to use weights so I started more rigorous workouts,” she said. “Then someone suggested I went into competitive bodybuilding.
She was 49 when she entered her first contest, Miss Northern UK and, to her great surprise, she won it. Since then, she has competed seriously, taking national titles along the way.
<h2>Hard work</h2>
None of this, however, came without hard work. Kathy has been such a regular at one Manchester gym that she is now an honorary life member there.
She would be competing currently but a bad chest infection in January meant she missed a month of training in her strict regime. So, she is now looking towards next year’s competitions.
During the run-up, she diets for 16 weeks to get below her normal 10 stone weight to lose all excess body fat. “In fact, you have so little body fat by then that it actually hurts to walk in bare feet because you’re just muscle and bone,” she says.
She cuts out bread and potatoes, concentrating instead on protein and green vegetables, and her training regime involves at least a couple of workouts a day.
Even when she’s not competing, Kathy is up at 6.15am for an hour on her exercise bike. She goes to the gym every day for an hour’s weight training and has recently joined two gyms.