Pair pumped up to muscle-in on titles | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

Building the body beautiful is a real passion for Rachel and Bevan Mackenzie.

The Masterton gym-owning couple are past regional bodybuilding champions and for several months they have been furiously training and dieting to compete, as a couple and individually, at the New Zealand Federation of Body Building North Island Championships to be held in the town next weekend.

Their all-hours fully equipped private gym - attached to the Bentley St home they share with their children Katia, 9, Jayden, 8, and Maia, 5 - is today reaching capacity membership after they risked all three years ago to "follow a dream".

Bevan, 37, is 1.88m tall and started lifting weights at the Masterton YMCA 21 years ago as a way of filling out his "beanpole" physique.

Back then he barely tipped the scales at 65kg but in two decades of training he has hit a maximum weight of 128kg and will take to the stage next weekend at an absolutely "ripped" 108kg.

Rachel, who is 1.6m tall, started her prize-winning pursuit of competitive muscle after helping her husband backstage in 2006, despite vowing to never tread the boards as a bodybuilder.

She said her change of heart, and body shape, was also spurred at about the same time she was diagnosed with gall-stones and was forced to overhaul her diet.

Rachel, who has dropped from about 75kg when she started weight-training to 52kg today, went on to win her class - novice figure short - as well as the overall women's title at a championship in Masterton in 2007, which was the first time a regional bodybuilding event had been held in the town for more than a decade.

In 2008 she won the open section of the same class and the overall women's title for a second year running.

Rachel turns 34 today and along with up to 50 other competitors will also be joined next Saturday by fellow Wai Weight members Sheryl Blade (over 55kg open physique women), Linda Oldfield (over 45 senior figure) and Sarah Beesley (over 35 senior figure).

Women are able to compete in physique (bigger) or figure (buffer) although the difference in dimensions between the Mackenzies is most startling when the tale of their tape is told - his bicep, at about 50cm, is the same diameter as her thigh while his thigh is greater around than her waist.

Bevan, who turns 38 on the day of the Masterton showdown, will also compete at a regional event in Wellington next month and a national event in Auckland in October.

Wai Weight gym has been the major sponsor since 2007 of the North Island championships in Masterton, Bevan said, which the couple have also used to cut their teeth as event organisers.

Their coincidence of roles has been paced throughout by a strict diet, which against popular belief has the couple eating more not less, as they have each prepared to compete as well.

The couple met in Palmerston North - at a gym of course - while Bevan was managing a shop and Rachel was completing a social sciences degree.

"We grew up round the corner from each other. I walked past his house every day to go to school then we meet in another city, and yes, it had to be at a gym," Rachel says.

During their time together, the couple have shifted from Wairarapa to other North Island centres as Bevan worked his way through a successful though ultimately unrewarding career in retail management, he said.

"Whenever we've shifted to a new town or city I'd find a gym first - then somewhere to live. I suppose that gives you an idea of just how important we take this.

"But we're not forcing it on to our kids, they can find it for themselves in their own good time, or not."

It was after the couple returned to Masterton in 2006 that Bevan risked their funds from the sale of a home in Hamilton and invested in a container full of gym machines and weights.

The pair rented a property with a 200sq m shed which they fitted with the equipment and Wai Weight was born.

Gym membership soon outstripped the premises and last year the couple bought a home and section on the same street.

They redesigned and expanded an onsite building to 300sq m and and re-opened as an even more spacious and better-equipped gymnasium.

He centres his gym philosophy on his experiences and needs over the past two decades and his members stay "because they want to, not because they're forced to through a contract".

"It's not a business that makes you rich, we do it because it's something we love."