Use veteran fitness competitor Julie Shipley-Childs' back routine for a professional V-taper and her sage advice for a tempered life

By Mark Thorpe | Photos by Joaquin Palting

As a kid, Julie Shipley-Childs was like so many other future fitness performers—a gifted gymnast and a world-class hyperactive who could burn more energy in one day than the Las Vegas electrical grid could in one week. Not even gymnastics was enough to keep her tame, so she also played soccer, where she was on the select team. Dance, too, was necessary to add some flourish to her floor routines. Julie's life wasn't a question of balance—it was an all-out assault on the concept of downtime. Complicating matters were a brother and a sister who also wanted to go places. Quality family time in the Shipley household often took place in a car somewhere on the streets of Seattle.

But mothers, being on occasion mortal, have limits. By the time Julie was 10, her mother was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Soccer had to go. "From fifth grade until 11th, I left school at about 1 p.m. and went to gymnastics until 7 or 8 at night," Julie recalls. "Five days a week. Saturdays and Sundays were meet days."

Gymnastics is a fickle sport,though, and one that frequently eats its own. Julie was good enough to be near the top, a perfect tumble or two away from competing with those who are selected for the Olympics. But she was also 16 years old and hungry for the life of a normal teenager. "When you're in a sport like gymnastics, it becomes your whole life," she says. "So I quit, and my mother cried."

Julie joined her high school gymnastics team and decided to give cheerleading a try, too. "I made the [cheer] squad and learned how to be a real teenager," she says. For the first time since she was 3 years old, there was balance in her life. She attended the University of Washington (Seattle) after high school and majored in economics. Although she didn't cheerlead or compete in gymnastics, she was a bit of an aerobics queen, she says. Julie supported herself by working at a bank, where she would eventually become a mortgage broker.