Bonny Priest
By Hans
hans@powerdivas.com
Bonny
Priest isn't sure exactly when she first decided she wanted to be a
bodybuilder. She can definitely remember asking her mom to buy her bodybuilding
magazines when was in seventh grade. Her mom, on the other hand, insists
it was when she was in the fifth grade. In any case, by the time she
was in junior high, Bonny would spend hours in her bedroom gazing at
pictures of female bodybuilders like Cory Everson, Tonya Knight and
Sharon Bruneau. "I would look and them over and over again,"
she remembers. "I just thought it was so cool!"
But although Bonny
loved the way female bodybuilders looked, as a little girl growing up
in Fredericksburg, Texas, she never imagined she ever could ever get a
body like that herself. She was fit, with muscular arms and legs, but
like many of us, she just didn't think she had what it took. "I just
thought it was beyond my reach," she says.
Bonny, now 30 years
old and a national-level heavyweight bodybuilder, has definitely come
a long way. At 5-foot-5 1/2 and 160 pounds in contest shape and anywhere
from 180 to 185 in the off-season, Bonny possesses a stunningly developed
physique with 15-and-a-half-inch arms and 25-inch quads. She blew away
the competition in the amateur show at Betty Pariso's Southwest Pro Cup
in Dallas in May, and now has her sights set on the NPC Nationals in November.
But despite her impressive
proportions, it's as if Bonny still can't quite believe what she has achieved.
Before the Southwest Pro Cup, Lisa Bavington saw Bonny in the lobby of
the contest hotel and mistook her for a pro. "I was totally shocked,"
Bonny says. "I didn't know how I would compare. You know, my husband
kept saying I looked like a pro as well, but I just thought he was biased."
It was Bonny's husband,
Alan Anderson, who finally got Bonny into serious bodybuilding in 1996,
when she was 23. She had moved from Fredericksburg to San Angelo, Texas,
where he owned a gym. Bonny had started working out when she was 16, but
not consistently enough to put on serious size. Alan, who had competed
himself until 1993, told her she had potential, but Bonny still had her
doubts and thought she might do better in fitness. "I just didn't
think I could get big enough to be a bodybuilder," she says. But
as soon as she stepped up her training and diet she started to see some
"real big changes," which convinced her to try competing. She
won her first show, the Heart of Texas, and that was it. "I thought,
'This is for me!'" she says.
Over the next few
years, Bonny continued to make her way through local and regional shows
in Texas and placed third in the Junior Nationals in 1999. Meanwhile,
in the off-season, she decided to give powerlifting a try, "to keep
me training hard." Much to her own surprise, she broke the US bench
press record for her weight with a bench press of 352 pounds in only her
second competition. Despite this phenomenal success, however, she was
soon itching to get back onstage. "Bodybuilding is my first love,"
she says. She put competition on hold for another year while she and Alan
focused on opening a gym, The Fitness Zone, in San Angelo (where she now
works as a personal trainer), and finally returned to competition at the
Southwest Pro Cup in May 2002.
"It felt awesome,"
she says. "I was a little nervous, because I didn't know what my
body was going to look like because it had been so long since I'd been
that lean." In fact, the time off had done her good. "I had
a lot of bodyparts, like my like my arms, shoulders, back, and chest,
that looked completely different from the last show," she says.
Bonny's mother Faye,
who bought her those magazines back when she was in junior high, continued
to support her, even as Bonny transformed her body into a hardcore bodybuilder's
physique. "She thinks it's totally cool," Bonny says. In fact,
she has attended every one of Bonny's bodybuilding shows. "She's
60, but she acts 20," Bonny says. "I always warn her about how
small the posing suits are. She says, 'If I had a butt like that, I'd
show it off too!'"
For Bonny, the best
part of being a bodybuilder is the feeling of being onstage in contest
shape. "I love to pose," she says. "You know, I'm a really
shy person, but when I get ready for a show, I know I look the best I've
looked all year - possibly ever - and that really feels great." Back
in San Angelo, Bonny tends to dress down - usually in a baseball cap,
t-shirt and shorts - so she also makes the most of the rare opportunity
to get dressed up when she's at a show. "Yeah," she laughs.
"When I'm in contest shape, with a tan, I like to show off a little."
As proud as she is
of her physique, Bonny still has a lot she wants to improve. "I need
a little more width in my shoulders and back and more size in my arms
and calves," she says. In order to make those improvements, Bonny's
training strategy is simple. "We just go heavy, heavy, heavy,"
she says. At the Nationals this November, she plans to come in leaner
than at the Southwest Pro Cup. She knows the competition will be stiff,
but compliments from pros like Lisa Bavington have helped to fire her
up. "I want to win and get that pro card so bad," she says.
"But if place in the top five I'll be pretty happy."
Of course, if Bonny
does turn pro, she will probably have little girls gazing in awe at pictures
of her in the same way as she did when she was in junior high. But don't
expect it to go to her head. In fact, her attitude will probably remain
just the same as when she was in fifth grade. "It sounds silly,"
she says, "but I still feel like this little kid dreaming - which
is good, because it keeps the fire burning." 
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