After Instagram model Sommer Ray, 21, began "taking Instagram seriously" in 2015, she started racking up a million followers a month. Now she has 18.2 million.
Her famous figure, on the other hand, was many more years in the making: The daughter of a body-builder dad and a mother who worked out, too, the social-media star began lifting weights in her home gym at age 14.
Raised in Larkspur, Colorado, with two sisters and a brother, Ray was homeschooled until freshman year of high school. Ahead of summer break, when she was 15, she dropped out due to bullying. "I was slut-shamed in a way — everyone from my hometown judged me," she says of the bare-bottomed photos she began taking before her account took off. "They didn’t understand when I posted pictures of my ass on Instagram, it was because I'd worked hard for it. It’s not a sexualized thing."
Having shown an interest in exercise from a young age — "I was a daddy’s girl," she says — Sommer set her sights on competing in a body-building competition as soon as she qualified at age 16.
With her father as her coach, she spent several years competing in the teen division, doing three in-state shows a year and regularly ranking in the top five.
Having surveyed competitive body-building at the national level — "it’s a whole different world where many girls are on steroids, and I didn’t want to do that to my body," she says — Ray, who was personal training her mom's friends at the time and was considering getting a fitness certification, saw Instagram modeling as a potential source of revenue. That strategy has since paid off, from ad campaigns for brands like Pretty Little Thing to Ray's own projects, like her recently launched fitness app, Evolve, which offers equipment-free workouts and meal plans.
Ray says her great relationship with @WorldStar, an Instagram account that now has 16.1 million followers, helped her personal page grow. But she takes credit where credit is due: "There's so much fake fitness on the Internet," she says, asserting herself as the foil. "I was just a breath of fresh air — all the way natural without fake boobs or a fake butt. People like authenticity. They caught on to what was doing and liked it."
Although Ray has been accused of fake features, she insists the butt you see in her photos is 100 percent real — no editing required. "If there’s something not permanent on my face like a zit, I’ll smooth it," she says of the tweaks she makes before posting. "If I take a photo at a bad angle, I just won't post it. I don't Photoshop my body because it would feel like a false advertisement."
How to Get That Butt
Ray hits the gym about five times a week for up to a 90 minutes on alternate days to give her body time to recover. Two of those five days, she works her lower body. "If my glutes are sore, I tell myself, 'I probably shouldn't work them today,' " she says. "I just listen to my body."
To that end, there's no one routine she practices during every workout. "There’s not a certain exercise or specific workout that’s beneficial," she says. "I switch it up every day and try to make it fun, because as soon as it feels like a job, you don’t want to do it."
Ray begins her butt workouts by foam-rolling her legs, butt, and back, then hits the stair stepper, alternating between one minute of regular climbing and one minute of skipping steps for six minutes before stretching.
When she's ready to get down to business, Ray relies on equipment such as the Smith machine, which holds a barbell on a track during squats; abductor and adductor machines, which engage the inner and outer thighs and butt; the cable machine, which she uses for kickbacks; ankle weights for donkey kicks; and the leg press machine:
Then, she gets creative using standard strength-training machines her own way. For instance, on the hamstring curl machine (below), Ray doesn't just lie face down, hook her ankles behind the bar, and engage the back of her legs to bring the bar toward her butt, as directed:
She lies face-up with her upper back on the pad, the soles of her feet on the ground, and the bar positioned against her hips. Then, she engages her hamstrings and butt to lift her hips against the resistance until her body forms a straight line between her knees and shoulders.
She’s also found a new way to engage her butt using the assisted pull-up machine (below), which features high handlebars and a weighted moving platform you're meant to kneel on:
Instead, Ray places a foot where her knee should go. Beginning with her leg bent, she engages the back of her thigh and butt to extend her knee and push the platform toward the floor.
"If you do any exercise right, with the right form, you learn to isolate your muscles," she says. (You should only practice unconventional moves under the supervision of a certified trainer.)
After workouts, Ray does 6 minutes of high-intensity interval training with a jump rope: She’ll hop for 1 to 3 minutes, take a 30-second break, then repeat for up to six minutes total before calling it a day.
Eating for an Insta-Famous Ass
Because Ray tries to eat 70 grams of protein a day to maintain her glute muscle mass, she starts most mornings with a protein shake, the first of six small meals throughout the day. Sometimes, she'll prepare grilled chicken, veggies and steamed white rice for each of these meals, but more often, she'll eat out. At In-and-Out Burger — one of her favorites — she takes her burger without the bun. She gets her carbs later from starchy veggies and whole grains. At Jersey Mike's, she'll double down on turkey to fill up on protein. At regular restaurants, she looks for seasoned chicken with veggies and sweet potatoes for carbs. On the weekends, and on some weekdays, too, she'll have also have a drink — typically, tequila — and whatever else she's craving: "If I want a slice of pizza, I have a slice of pizza. I want to look good, but I also want to enjoy life," she says.
While it seems like Ray is living the life, she prefers that her fans not follow suit. "I don’t want to motivate women to look like me — I want them to love themselves the way I do," she says. "Society puts on pressure to look and be a certain way — you're your best when you are confident in yourself." A-M-E-N!
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