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Utah native Keyara Jenkins poses with the Booty Strap, a weight-training aid she invented.

Courtesy Photo

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Utah native Keyara Jenkins demonstrates her own invention, the Booty Strap, which is a weight-training aid.

Courtesy Photo

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The Booty Strap is a weight-training aid invented by Utah native Keyara Jenkins.

Courtesy Photo

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The Booty Strap is a weight-training aid invented by Utah native Keyara Jenkins.

Courtesy Photo

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Utah native Keyara Jenkins poses with the Booty Strap, a weight-training aid that she invented.

Courtesy Photo

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Like everyone else trying to survive the pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020, Utah native Keyara Jenkins was trying not to go stir crazy.

Jenkins, a former Weber State tennis player and a dedicated fitness expert, took her frustrations to the gym. With a little ingenuity and a lot of leg work (literally), Jenkins created a new weight training belt called the “Booty Strap,” which focuses on building legs and glutes.

Jenkins launched the Booty Strap as a product about a year ago and is on the verge of creating a sustainable business. She entered into a national competition sponsored by Ms. Health and Fitness Magazine, which also raises money for the Wounded Warrior Foundation. Online voting pushed Jenkins into the quarterfinals last week. The grand prize is a feature on the cover of the magazine and $20,000, which Jenkins said she would put directly into her new business. The online voting for the semifinals continues at http://mshealthandfitness.com/2023/keyara-jen until June 22.

“I’m not a business person or a social media person,” Jenkins said. “But I’ve funded and worked all of this on my own. I love that I was able to create this. It’s a really great product, not only for people to shape their legs and glutes but for people who are injured or don’t want to get injured in the workouts. I heard from someone in California that uses it to help their elderly client. It’s a little bit different because a strap like this hasn’t been done on cable towers. It’s a versatile product that needs to get out there.”

Here’s the story of the invention of the Booty Strap.

As a former college tennis player, Jenkins said she was always quad dominant. She wanted bigger glutes and more muscly legs. During COVID, she was using a belt on a cable tower but discovered she couldn’t get enough tension to achieve the results she needed. Not only that, the belt she was using left cuts and bruises on her body.

“I looked online,” Jenkins said. “I thought, ‘Surely someone has something that is padded.’ I couldn’t find anything so I decided to go and make it myself.”

Jenkins went to a local fabric store to buy foam, which she fit to length and then cut up some gym pants for athletic fabric. A friend who was a seamstress helped her add poly webbing.

“I started using it in the gym and I loved it,” Jenkins said. “I thought, ‘I have to make more of these.'”

She played around with different foam densities to get it just right. Eventually, she connected with a local manufacturer and had 1,000 straps made. Then came the marketing through social media, mainly on Instagram and TikTok, and her website at bootystrapfitness.com.

“It’s right on the edge of getting out there and having people know about it,” Jenkins said. “You can really use this for all the exercises you know and love for quad dominant people and you can really activate the posterior chain. Because you can use it on a tower, all the weight isn’t on your shoulders or you spine. It has really saved my back.”

The 34-year-old Jenkins, who lives in Farmington, went through a divorce right when she came up with the idea for the Booty Strap and is now a single mother of three children ages 10, 8 and 4.

“It’s been a challenge with my business,” she said. “I’m also a tennis teacher and an MRI tech. I had to move in with my parents, who are wonderful and able to help me. But it’s also been wonderful for my kids. I’m able to wake up early and go train before they go to school then come back to be with them. With this business, they are learning that it takes hard work to make your dreams come true. They can see me working hard for them and their future.”