She’s dancing, she’s smiling, and then she powers into a series of one-armed pushups.

Pythons flexed, washboard belly tensed, Linda Cusmano’s smile is cast iron, like the tendons in her neck.

The gentle strains of KISS echo in from the weight room and the flying unicorn tattooed on her shoulder pulses with the muscle underneath. She does a pike, hits a raised V-sit position, holds it.

“It’s really tough to hold back, be gentle,” she says of the fitness routine she drills through today. She’s panting, slumping by the floor-to-ceiling mirror between takes. “When you’re the type of person who’s into martial arts you’re a little more brutish.”

Call it another day at the office: 8 a.m. at Spartacus’ Gym on the Drive in Vancouver. In the low-hanging musk of the multi-purpose room, Cusmano, a fitness competitor and bodybuilder in her mid-30s, runs through the new moves for her latest routine.

A hopeful on the road to the B.C. provincial fitness competition in New West, Cusmano has three weeks until her qualifier. In that time the 5’3, 125-pound woman will drop from 14 to 6 per cent body fat. She’ll tighten up her moves, a body-blasting endurance fest filled with leaps, lunges, cartwheels and what can only be described as aerial pushups – Cusmano dives for the floor, lands hands-first, and cushions herself into an impossible body drop.

Her chances of advancing to nationals look pretty good, she thinks – last year she placed fourth, this year she hopes to advance a placing or two. And after that she hopes to win her pro-card for the third time in a decade of hard competing.

Card or no, Cusmano claims she does it for the rush of competing.

“When you come off your routine, you’re high as a kite,” she says.

****

The first time Cusmano took the stage, in a bikini and heels, she didn’t know body-building competitors slathered themselves in bronze body paint. She went au naturel instead.

At 26, she was late to the game against the 19 and early-20-something girls in her category, but she was more curious than informed about the sport.

What she didn’t know yet is “The darker you are the leaner you look and the more your cuts show,” and the bronzer generally gives competitors a leg up over the un-painted.

Traipsing around the stage that day, she says she’s never felt so naked.

The judges didn’t dig her. She didn’t know how to pose properly. She says she felt so self conscious it must have showed, but she couldn’t wait to learn the game.

Cusmano had been working in insurance claims, hated her job, felt uninspired by all the paperwork. So after that first comp, she decided to pump iron and become a personal trainer instead.

She had a choice between figure competitions, what Cusmano describes as a type of “pageant body building,” and fitness competitions. The latter category is more of an “all out” performance burst that combines gymnastics and explosive choreographed moves with the precision of flexed poses.

That was exactly what she wanted to do, run, jump and spin – and pump iron too. And she did well, nabbing golds at Ms. Fitness Nationals, silvers at California’s Ms. Fitness Inland Empire comps, and a bronze at the World Pro Ms. Exercise tourney, she even entered strength competitions and obstacle courses.

After 5 a.m. wake-up calls to crank iron, Cusmano placed house calls in Deep Cove and Ambleside to train up clients. She’d even work out with them, if she could.

But three years ago, the training took its toll.

“I was going for a 205 (pound)-squat dead lift,” she remembers. “I was almost there. Then I felt something really funny in my solar plexus.”

Soon she could barely lift 20 pounds from the crumbling pain in her back. It turned out to be early onset osteoarthritis.

It’s often said that high-level athletes look like they’re in great shape, although they’re not always healthy. Cusmano admits she hasn’t always been the best to her body. She battled anorexia for years, as many body builders and other athletes do. She says she took an asthma drug that leeched the calcium from her bones. Plus she used to train like a demon – those early mornings in the gym and then extra hours with her clients – sometimes more than three hours a day.

“Like most gymnasts and martial artists do, I’ll go through the pain. I’ll go ‘til something breaks,” shrugs Cusmano.

In her weekly timetable, she’s traded in a few hours of dead lifts or drudgery on the stair master for yoga classes.

The idea is to breathe, strengthen her back muscles. It helps the osteoarthritis, she says. But her yoga teacher has to yank her back from cranking on the headstands.

“I stick to down(ward) and up(ward) dogs to ease the back.” Cusmano laughs, because she doesn’t think she’s great at yoga, but sees the “value of working at something you suck at.”

****

Cusmano seems to love working hard, even when she’s taking things easy. After three runs through her fitness routine at Spartacus, she heads to the peck deck.

“I’m just going to go easy today,” she says, raising her voice as Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose” blasts from the corner speakers. The idea is to maintain her muscle mass and shed body fat, something she does by eating egg-white-omlettes and plain Quinoa, not through over training.

She still has to check herself, though.

“Even when you’re a trainer, you don’t always apply all your own rules because you think you’re king sh*t invincible,” she laughs. “But the fact is when you over train, you (get) injured.”

This could be Cusmano’s last season in the fitness category. She’s not sure her back will take another blast of aerial moves. She thinks she might retire to figure modelling. Then she can weight train and pose without the crashing impact of her routines.

“It hurts like hell to pose,” she says, tensing her biceps and her upper body, demonstrating how the moves are gentler than her aerial pushups, “but it’s (body building) still something I would do in my retirement.”

The rest between sets is up. She hops on the captain’s chair, launches into a series of controlled leg raises. That cast iron smile is back, and she’s singing along with Loverboy between breaths. When Mike Reno belts “I’ve gotta do it my way, or no way at all,” Cusmano’s voice belts a little louder.

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com