Amber Larsen knows there’s much more to physique than just flexing muscles. The Flin Flon-born bodybuilder has pressed through years of health complications and nearly a decade away from competition to earn pro status this fall.
Every bodybuilding competitor takes a long road to the stage - for Larsen, the road was longer and bumpier than most. She fought through a pair of serious health issues that could have derailed her bid just to get back in the gym - and triumphed in spite of them both.
Larsen began bodybuilding when she moved to B.C. in 2014. Interested in the sport as a kid but never able to seriously pursue it at home, Larsen met a coach close to where she lived and began training. She competed in the women’s physique category, a classification of the sport that heavily emphasizes muscle mass and particular types of builds not as well covered by other disciplines. The category fit Larsen like a glove - she began competition in 2015.
“I really love to lift. I had a bit more muscle than most girls and I wasn’t really willing to downsize - that wasn’t something I wanted to do,” she said.
Larsen won her first competition and had dreams of going professional, perhaps one day qualifying for the Ms. Olympia competition - the pinnacle of women’s bodybuilding, held each year in Las Vegas. She aspired to get what bodybuilders call “the pro card” - a signifier of professional status awarded by the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) that allows holders to enter exclusive, world championship-tier tournaments.
Those plans were derailed not long after the first competition. Larsen got very sick following the competition and went on a two-year-long journey to figure out what was wrong. Her body was constantly inflamed - her digestive system seemed to be fighting her. Appointments and doctors weren’t able to find the root cause of her issues and her pain, day to day, was excruciating.
“I’ll be very honest - I was on percocets and morphine for almost two years. I was having chronic attacks,” she said.
“They were trying to find out what was making me sick, what was going on. There were certain markers, things they were pulling out of bloodwork and I was always highly inflamed. I was struggling with digesting food.”
After years of struggling, Larsen finally got a diagnosis - eosinophilic esophagitis (EOE), a chronic disease of the esophagus, the long tube-shaped organ tasked with taking food from the mouth to the stomach. If the esophagus works properly, it uses muscle contractions to pump food down to the stomach - Larsen’s esophagus was becoming inflamed and not contracting right due to a series of allergic reactions to food. Her white blood cell count, which grows high as the body fights off infections or allergens, was off the charts.
“Some people that have EOE can never eat food a day in their life,” she said.
“I was having attacks every day, sleep, low energy, fatigue, all those sorts of things.”
Larsen’s condition meant she had to heavily restrict her diet, finding that some foods would trigger her EOE while others wouldn’t. She would have to undergo strict dietary rules for six months to find what would attack and what was safe.
That was one health battle. A second was coming around the corner.
By 2020, Larsen was out of competitive bodybuilding and decided to stop taking birth control. Within a couple months, she had new inflammation, giving rise to a second diagnosis - polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal imbalance that affects the ovaries and causes a long list of painful symptoms.
“My goal through that whole span was just, ‘I want to feel better. I just want to feel okay,’” she said.
“That was kind of the secret life mission I was on - just to deal with these issues now and for the rest of my life, to figure out how I can master this in a way where I could still do what I wanted to do.”
Despite two diagnoses, Larsen found herself drawn back to her bodybuilding dream. Both conditions would make it hard to get ahead - EOE can limit what foods and protein sources the body can use, while some of PCOS’ symptoms include acne, abnormal hair growth weight gain, all big issues to deal with in bodybuilding. Taking on those challenges would be part of the deal for Larsen if she wanted to step back on stage - she began training again last January, with an old friend coaching her, in hopes of making a comeback.
“She reached out to me and said, just posing a question, ‘When are you going to compete again?’ I was thinking I was never really planning on it, I’d thought that ship had sailed,” said Larsen.
“I did some reflecting, it took me about a week. I messaged her back and was like, ‘Let’s do this.’ We joined up together, she took me on as a coach and we took this whole year to build.”
For the next seven months, Larsen built herself back from the ground up, getting ready for her first competition in almost a decade. Larsen’s goal was to enter a tournament in Saskatoon in September, the Golden Prairie Cup. If she won there, she would qualify for the Canadian National Pro Qualifier in Toronto Oct. 2 - and there would be a pro card available for the winner of Larsen’s class.
“I went through a building season for six to seven months, then we had a whole plan in place for me to get my pro card in kind of one shot,” she said.
Larsen’s plan switched from “bulk” to “cut” in June, going from building muscle to burning off fat. By the time the Saskatoon competition came around, Larsen had gone from a starting weight of 135 pounds to a 150-pound lean, mean posing machine. While others who had been through what Larsen got through might have entered nervous, she said she came in focused.
“My whole life, I've kind of felt this mission where I have to prove myself - you know, type A personality, perfectionist. Doing bodybuilding, I don't ever feel like I have to prove myself. It just feels like what I'm meant to do, like I'm being called to it,” she said.
The call to Saskatoon paid off. At the competition, Larsen won every category she entered in, qualifying for nationals. A couple weeks later, she was on stage in Toronto, pro card on the line, ready to make all the hard work - the perseverance through adverse health, the time spent away from the sport, the months of preparation, all of it - pay off.
“It felt like I was fulfilling my calling,” she said.
“When I was around eight or nine, I had an older brother who was kind of into strongman and all that kind of stuff and at that time, they had a lot of that stuff on TV - Olympia, Arnold, strongman, these were all things on TV. One day, I saw a girl competitor coming on. I just leaned in, in awe of them - but something in me knew those people had to work their butts off, had to develop certain virtues and characteristics to build their bodies like this. Something within me was like, ‘I want to do that. That’s how I want to live. I want to be strong.’ In that moment, on stage, it felt full circle to me.”
Once the scores came in from the judges, Larsen finished first in both the women’s physique masters 35-plus and women’s physique open class B categories. Those two wins got her the pro card she coveted for years, pushing through everything that came over the decade previous.
“I'm going to show up and I’ll do this for all those people out there that are also fighting, because I want people to see that if you stay in the good fight, you can get the things that you want. I wanted people to not give up on themselves, to say, ‘Yes, I can. Why not me?’ she said.
Larsen already has her sights set on the next step. With her pro card in hand, she wants to aim for the pinnacle of bodybuilding competitions - the same one she saw when she was a kid, that started the dream in the first place.
“What comes next? Olympia. That is the ultimate childhood dream. I’ve spoken with my coach and we’ve got a two-year plan in place to get myself to Olympia in Oct. 2026. The plan is to take the next year, the next year and a half to add on solid muscle and we’re confident that I can make that happen,” she said.
