One time, on a shoot for Women’s Health, Kim Strother jumped in the air 84 times. Strother started keeping track because she’d done this particular move—run and leap, run and leap—hundreds, probably thousands of times, and she figured it was time to get a strict accounting. Strother has leaped for sportswear ads and for magazine workout spreads, the images set apart in her portfolio by the color of her sports bra. In these shots, she is the picture of feminine fitness—a powerful woman suspended in midair, her muscles taut but not overwhelming.
Strother is the Gisele of the gym, the go-to fitness model for Nike, Target, and magazines like Shape, Health, and Runner’s World. That’s her ripped stomach in a Fitness spread on “sculpting amazing arms, legs, abs, and butts,” and that’s her doing a back handspring for Self’s primer on how to “put the spring back in your step.” She adopts serene yoga poses for clothes catalogs—photographers tend to prefer tree, Warrior I, Warrior II, and upward dog—and, for reasons she doesn’t understand, often gets asked to glide around on Rollerblades.
Despite her thriving career, the blond, 28-year-old Strother says she “always finds it really awkward” when people ask what she does. Fitness modeling is not a well-known occupation, and those who have heard the term, Strother says, have some misconceptions: “They think you would be one of those girls that’s ‘roided out on the cover of some hard-core fitness magazine.”
Indeed, fitness modeling has traditionally been associated with hypertrophied dudes and dudettes. Fitness competitions and muscle mags, which grew out of the world of bodybuilding, remain a realm of Schwarzenegger-ian physiques. Alicia Marie, owner of the title Ms. Muscle & Fitness and a one-time paramour of John Rocker, is the best-known female fitness model of this ilk. And ex-Army Ranger Greg Plitt, the self-proclaimed top fitness model in America, is something like the Joe DiMaggio of ginormous pecs, having appeared on a magazine cover for 53 consecutive months.
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