FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (8 page)

So how do you beat the odds? How do you get the most out of your gym membership? Two words.

Show up.

Chapter Nine

USE THE GYM, DON’T LET IT USE YOU

So you’ve joined a gym and you’re determined to consistently show up and work out. You know what the gym thinks about this?

They’re thrilled.

Now you can pay for more lessons with that trainer. You remember him, the best one in the place. The fact of the matter is, if you use the free trainer, learn the routines and come back regularly to work out, taking advantage of everything they have to offer, it will be the best money you’ve ever spent.

So let’s say you’re really going to do that. How do you get the most out of the gym? First of all, do you remember what gyms used to be like in the seventies? If you don’t, go watch
Rocky
and then come back.

Okay, you’re back. Adrian!!!

So now you know that gyms in the seventies were pretty much filled with free weights along with a pull up bar and couple jerry-rigged machines. Not to mention a chicken to help you work on your speed because, according to Mick, you gotta “eat lightning and crap thunder!” You know what? That stuff works.

Compare that to mega gyms now.

They’re laid out like grocery stores. Go into any grocery store and what’s the first thing you see? Crap. All the sugary, shitty, Nabisco-y products they want you to buy because they make the most money off them.

The gyms do the same thing.

Right by the register, you’ll find a bunch of “health food” products, everything from protein bars to amino acid drinks. And they all have one thing in common: they’re garbage. Look at the labels. Tons of sugar. Remember, you’re in a health club. Hell, the name implies that you’re in a club dedicated to making you healthy. But the place is sabotaging you as soon as you walk through the door just to make a buck.

And you know what product is the worst of the worst?

Look in the refrigerator next to the vitamin waters and the sport drinks. It’s the thing that probably seems the most healthy, when, in fact, it’s one of the most unhealthy things we consume and it can pack on the pounds quicker than anything else. What am I talking about?

Fruit juice.

Or, as I prefer to call it, a sugar bomb.

Fruit juice usually comes in two forms. Blended, which generally means they’ve added either sugar or other fruit juices to sweeten it, or all-natural. By the way, don’t be fooled by the term “all-natural.” Just because something is “natural” doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Tornados are natural.

Think about what many of us do first thing in the morning to get our day started off on the right foot. We drink a glass of nutritious orange juice. In other words, a sugar bomb.

You’d be better off with the tornado.

Health clubs, like grocery stores, immediately bombard you with all this junk just to make a couple dollars. Ignore that stuff. Do yourself a favor and, on your way to the gym, stop by a convenience store and pick up a half pint of whole milk. It’ll give you protein to build muscles and fat to sustain energy. What it won’t give you is a mid-workout sugar crash.

So now you’ve pushed past the crap by the register. What do you see? In most mega gyms, probably row upon row of treadmills, ellipticals, stair climbers and other aerobic machines. Should you use them? Sure. Nothing wrong with them. You want to burn calories, go for it! They help build your aerobic capacity and they’re also weight-bearing exercises which are great for your skeletal system—not to mention that women usually love what they do for their butts.

The problem is that most gyms place a twenty-minute time limit on the equipment, some even automatically power down the machine. Even though 24-Hour Fitness is open for twenty-four hours, it’s only really busy a couple times a day, usually in the morning after all the mommies drop their kids off at school and in the early evening, after everyone gets out of work. And during that time, they don’t want people waiting for machines. It’s bad for business. But you know what else is bad?

Only doing twenty minutes of cardio.

Without getting too sciency, at twenty minutes, you’ve barely burned through your glycogen (the sugar in your blood), so you’re not burning fat yet. And God help you if you drank that orange juice. It will take you forever to burn that sugar away. The benefit to your aerobic workout largely comes after those first twenty minutes, right when the gym wants you to stop. Bastards!

So what am I saying? Don’t use the cardio machines?

Of course not.

Do it, but just don’t go during rush hour if you can avoid it. And if you have to go during rush hour, do what I call the “Vinnie Smorgasbord.” Do your treadmill for twenty minutes, hop off it and then hop right onto an elliptical machine or stair climber for twenty minutes. Besides, doing one thing for an hour can get boring. Mix it up. Nike sold you those cross trainers, might as well use them.

Okay, now you’ve burned some calories and you’re ready to put on muscle or get toned, which means you’re headed to the most intimidating part of the gym—the weights. People usually avoid this area like the plague. Why is it so scary? Two reasons. The equipment itself is a little nerve wracking but even more daunting are the people using it.

They’re generally muscular, which is unsettling if you aren’t. But that’s not the worst part. It’s the look on their faces as they sit and stare at you when you enter. You think they’re sizing you up, like you accidentally wandered into a lion’s den and they’re looking for fresh meat, waiting to pounce.

I have good news for you. They’re not.

If you look at the people back in the aerobic area, you’ll probably notice that they’re all lost in their own worlds as they grind away on their machines. That’s just the nature of aerobic exercise.

Weight lifting is different.

When you lift weights, you have a few seconds of intense activity followed by a couple minutes of sitting there while your body recharges before the next set. And what do you have to do in that couple minutes?

Nothing.

So when someone new walks in, you naturally turn to them because you have, literally, nothing else to do. They’re not lions lying in wait, looking for their next kill. They’re just people trying to catch their breath. Don’t believe me? Try this. Next time you walk into a weight room, look at one of them and wave. You know what they’ll do?

Wave back.

Trust me on this. If you need some help understanding the equipment, if you need someone to spot you while you lift, any of these people will be more than happy to lend a hand. Believe it or not, they tend to be far more friendly than the islands of solitude hammering away on the elliptical machines. Want to test that theory? During rush hour, go just one minute over on the stair climber and watch people scream for your head.

You won’t find that in the weight room.

So what about the equipment? It sure looks intimidating. There seem to be a million different machines all doing a million different things. Not only that, for every exercise, there are usually several different brands of machine. You need to do a bench press? You might find a Nautilus, a Hoist and an Icarian. Why does the gym stock so many? Just to confuse you even more?

Not really. It’s part of the sales pitch. They’re trying to increase the odds that they have the particular brand that a prospective member might be familiar with. Don’t let this throw you. You’re looking at the forest. Focus on the tree, one machine at a time.

Remember that trainer you got free lessons from, the best one in the gym? Pluck him for information. If you didn’t get any free lessons and you have no idea what you’re doing, hiring one of those guys for a session or two will be money well spent. And if you can’t do that, just ask around. Usually the other folks working out will be happy to help.

As useful as these machines are for building muscle and tone, there’s something even better. If you’ve hit a plateau or your workout has gotten stale, maybe it’s time to consider the next step up. Problem is, a lot of gyms have gotten rid of them. And many of the mega gyms, if they still have them, have shifted them into such a small area that they’re hard to find. What am I talking about?

Free weights.

I know what you’re thinking—please, God, don’t make me use the free weights. If the machines are hard to figure out, and they only do one thing each, how am I ever going to figure out the damn free weights? There are infinite ways to use them, which means there are infinite ways to screw up.

I get it. They are more complicated. And for that reason it’s best to move into them slowly. There’s no shame in sticking with the machines. They can give you a great workout. But the men and women with the best bodies are going to be over by the free weights, because every single exercise you do with machines, you can do better with free weights. Why?

Your core.

First of all, what is your core? It’s kind of like your lap. When you sit down, you have a lap. When you stand, it goes away. Or, if you don’t like that analogy, try this one. It’s like chicken nuggets. They exist in food form but try to point to one on a chicken.

The core is the same way.

We know it exists, we just don’t really know where it is—like a g-spot. But now, everybody’s obsessed with their core. We usually think of our core as our trunk, but it really refers to all of the support muscles that help the main muscles do their job. It used to be that you worked all those support muscles automatically. How?

Free weights.

Take a bicep curl. When you use a weight machine to work your bicep, it isolates only that muscle. But if you do the same thing with free weights while standing, you’re not just working the bicep, but also your stomach, your total back, your hip flexors and your glutes, just to name a few.

In other words, your core.

Core, by the way, is a new term. We had to make it up because it used to be that you worked all those muscles automatically. Now you have to go to a Pilates teacher just to cover what you’re lacking. We broke what was fixed. The bottom line is that free weights, used properly, are better for you than weight machines.

But try finding them in a mega gym.

Why? Liability. If used improperly, you can get hurt, which means lawsuits, which means money, something their bean counters don’t like to part with. So how do you use them properly? If you still have some of those free training sessions left, I’d recommend that you do a session or two with the trainer and then try to do a session on your own. You know what you’ll get out of that?

Questions. Good ones.

Write them down. Note the exercise you’re confused about along with the weight you’re using. Then schedule your next session with the trainer and get the answers.

Now I know what you’re thinking. How much is this guy expecting me to do? I’m not looking to be a bodybuilder. I can’t live in a gym. I have a life.

Of course you do. I know how busy you are. You work. You have to get the kids to their violin lessons and it’s not like there’s no traffic on the freeways nowadays. Which is why I’d love to be able to tell you that you can have ripped abs and buns of steel working out only ten minutes a day.

But I can’t because it’s not true.

Look, I promised not to lie to you because you’ve been lied to enough by unscrupulous magazines, infomercials, and ads that are all trying to sell you the idea that you can get the body of your dreams in no time flat. How do I know they’re all bullshit?

Years ago, in my twenties, I was hired to star in an infomercial for a fitness product that promised to give you a rock hard body in just “minutes a day.” They filmed me for over two days, showing my well-oiled muscles glistening as I used their machine. What they didn’t show was that I had never even seen this machine before I got hired to do the commercial. And, as for their claim that you could have a body like I did back then in just “minutes a day”? It was absolutely true.

As long as you were talking about two hundred and forty minutes a day.

That’s right. It took me four hours of intense weight lifting and aerobics, along with the perfect diet, in order to get the body that they promised their machine would give you in no time flat. They ran that ad for well over a year and it actually won infomercial awards.

That’s right. In Hollywood, they even have awards for lying.

Which is why, as much as I’d love to promise you that you can have the body you want with no work and no time investment, I can’t. I’d rather tell you the truth and have you accomplish something real, than lie to you and have you accomplish nothing. But first, let me ask you a question.

Why do you want to exercise?

Chapter Ten

WHY DO YOU WANT TO EXERCISE?

I’m not trying to be cute, it’s an honest question.

We normally go out of our ways to avoid doing anything that requires effort. Case in point, back-up cameras in cars. Remember when you used to have to go through the trouble of actually turning around to see what’s behind you? Not any more. You run over a kid today, you meant to. We’ll do anything we can to avoid actual effort so, with that in mind, let me ask you again … why do you want to exercise?

Here’s what most people answer: “Because I want to lose weight.”

That’s fair. In fact, the entire exercise industry—including what I do—is built on selling you the idea that exercise will lead to a leaner you. But I promised to tell you the truth, so here it is.

Sweat does not equal fat loss
.

If you take a pound of fat and wring it out, not one drop of sweat will come out. You can sweat your ass off but that won’t get rid of your ass. To be clear, working out and burning calories certainly won’t hurt your weight loss, but the single most important thing you can do to lose weight is to focus on your diet. As we talked about before, a proper diet—no sugar, no grains—is the most critical weapon in your weight-loss arsenal.

Want me to prove it?

Take a look at linemen in the NFL. These are huge guys. Want to know their average weight? Over three hundred pounds. Do you know how much time these guys put in the gym? Tons—which, by the way, is what they’re lifting.

These guys aren’t messing around with yoga and Pilates class. They’re slinging steel. I’m talking about quarter of a ton squats and dead lifts. I’m talking about workouts so strenuous, just watching them do it makes you want to take a knee. Moving that much mass for hours on end burns a ton of calories.

But, Vinnie, you say, what about cardio? Sure, they’re lifting weight, but do they run? That’s where you really burn calories, right?

Sure, they run. Not only do they have off-season sprint programs put together by their team experts, they also have agility drills on top of loads of time on the spinner for general fitness. These guys burn massive amounts of calories in the gym—far more than you or I ever will.

And, yet, they’re fat.

The reason? These guys, the linemen, intentionally eat to pack on the pounds.

Because diet is, by far, the most important factor in weight loss and gain
.

Why do they eat like this? Why do they want to gain so much weight? Survival. They know they’re going to be slamming up against guys with as much or more weight than they have. In fact, the NFL has been quietly trying to get these guys to slim down to keep them healthy. Not that the NFL is some kind of kumbaya Florence Nightingale organization, they just want to protect their investment.

The point is, even though the calories burned during exercise will contribute to weight loss, you don’t have to exercise to lose weight. You can lose all the weight you want through diet alone. In fact, my nephew wanted to test this theory. He didn’t have a gym membership, never stepped on a treadmill and never lifted a barbell and yet he lost over sixty-five pounds strictly through diet. If he can do it, so can you.

Now, with that sobering fact in mind, let me ask you again:

Why do you want to exercise
?

Remember, aerobic exercise is great for your cardiovascular system, not to mention your muscular and skeletal systems, but you don’t have to do it to lose weight.

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Let me take a crack at it. We need to exercise because, in order to achieve a maximum level of health and fitness, we have to move our bodies.

Did you just nod off?

Well, I did and I was actually the one doing the talking. Look, what I just said is the truth—in order to stay healthy, we have to exercise. But here’s another, bigger truth: you probably don’t care. I could write chapter after chapter explaining how exercise strengthens your heart and can help improve your longevity but, let’s be honest, at the end of the day what most people care about is how they look.

We care about this so much, in fact, we’ll pursue sex appeal even at the expense of our health. Case in point, men and women actually inject poison into their faces to get rid of wrinkles. We have no idea what the long-term effects of Botox are, but people do it anyway because they want to look great. I don’t think Botox makes you attractive, by the way, unless you think looking perpetually startled is sexy.

Even though most people care more about their looks than about their health, I have some good news for you—exercise gives you both. It’s a two-fer. Like I tell my clients:

If I can get you healthy by appealing to your vanity, I’m not above it
.

So how does exercise improve your looks if you don’t really need to do it to drop weight? Let me ask you a question. What’s the best-looking version of you? Is it the skinniest version?

Magazine ads want you to think so.

How many times do we have to see what I call “the supermodel race” to see which sticks out farther, their cheek or hip bones? If you saw these women on the street, you’d think they were heroin addicts. When did we start using the aliens at the end of Close Encounters as the model for beauty? You know who thinks these emaciated women are sexy?

No one.

At least no one sane. If you’re a woman and you finally made it to a size 0 but you have a saggy butt and loose skin on your arms due to muscle loss, is that what you were looking for? A body that looks like Willem Dafoe’s face? If you’re a guy and you hop on a scale and you’re the lightest you’ve ever been in your adult life, but you just lost an arm wrestling match to a toddler, is that what you were looking for?

It’s true that diet will help you lose weight, but losing weight is only one side of the coin. The other side—just as important—is putting on lean muscle mass. That’s what turns Olive Oyl into Shakira and Shaggy into Channing Tatum, but you can’t get there through diet alone. So let’s talk exercise. How much do you need to do per week to see results?

Well, let’s look at our options.

If we follow Tim Ferriss’s plan in
The Four Hour Body
, we only have to invest four hours a month in the gym to get the body we want. That’s pretty good! That’s only one hour a week, or just over seven minutes a day. I’ll take it!

But wait! Why settle for spending all that time in the gym when we could follow Jennifer Jolan’s advice in
5-Second Flat Belly Secret
. My God, Jennifer is telling us that we can have a flat belly by working at it just five seconds at a time. That’s way shorter than seven minutes!

Tim, you suck!

Not only that, but Jennifer promises we can get there without hard exercise and eating differently. We just have to use the palm of our hand to “literally ‘burn’ fat cells away.” I’ve used the palm of my hand for many things, but never that!

Holy shit, let’s do it!

By the way, her book sells on Amazon for $2.99. I’ll make you a deal. Give me two dollars and I’ll save you a buck by telling you not to buy it.

Here’s the truth, and like most things that are true, you probably already knew it.

When it comes to exercise, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it
.

Is one hour a day, three days a week enough time to see results? Sure is. Give me that and I can show you definite improvement. But you want to know what will give you even better results?

One hour a day, four days a week.

And guess what will give you even better results than that?

One hour a day, five days a week.

And it doesn’t even have to be an hour a day. You could do a couple hours a day a couple times a week. You get out of it what you put into it. As I tell my clients, lean muscle mass ain’t cheap and you can’t buy it with money.

Exercise is a great leveler. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t just buy your way into a great body. You have to do the work. Lady Gaga has to grind her way through a workout just like the rest of us. I find that comforting. It’s one of the few things in life where we’re all on a level playing field.

But what about steroids, you ask? Aren’t they a great short cut? Won’t they make me bigger, stronger and give me that lean muscle mass?

Of course they will.

But there’s a trade-off. A big one.

There are many kinds of steroids out there and, if used properly under a doctor’s supervision, and at the right dosage, they’re enormously helpful and can save lives. Often, they’re employed to put lean muscle mass on patients who are wasting away. Guess who noticed that particular effect and said to themselves “I wonder …?”

Yeah. Bodybuilders … along with other athletes and coaches.

Instead of taking a carefully prescribed dose to treat an actual illness, these bodybuilders started injecting themselves with massive quantities of the stuff. Ten, twenty, even thirty times larger than the amounts used in medicine. And guess what they were delighted to discover?

It worked!

Still does. If you slam yourself with a ton of steroids, pump iron and eat protein, you are going to put on tons of muscle, guaranteed. The steroids artificially increase your testosterone, which is instrumental in causing the growth of lean muscle mass.

At a price.

Like the fabled blues players who wanted to be the best musicians in the world by going to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil, those athletes were making their own deal with the devil. Testosterone in such absurd quantities wreaks havoc with your endocrine system, which can have a bunch of terrible side effects.

Guys, do you like having zits and hair sprout across your entire body, while your ball sack shrinks to the size of a peanut? Not that a giant ball sack is the height of beauty.

Ladies, do you like having a penis-sized clitoris, along with a voice deeper than James Earl Jones? In fact, in the early eighties, the coach of an Olympic female volleyball team from one of the Eastern Bloc countries was asked why the voices of the women on his team were so manly. His reply, “We came to win, not sing.”

And those are only some of the
cosmetic
side effects.

Let’s not even talk about the real danger—the damage to your kidneys, liver and other vital organs. You can die from abusing these medications.

To summarize, here’s the good news. Steroids work!

Here’s the bad news. They will make your balls shrink, your clitoris grow and may end up killing you!

As I like to tell my clients:

Steroids can turn you into a great looking corpse
.

So now that we’ve agreed to pass on the steroids, let’s talk about what you can accomplish in a gym in an hour a day, three days a week, which, as your trainer, I think is a reasonable amount to ask you to do. Some days you might want to spend the whole hour doing cardio—elliptical, treadmill, the spinner (otherwise known as the stationary bike.) Other days, you might want to split it up and work in some weights.

The bottom line is, on an hour a day, three day a week workout, the most important thing you can do is vary your routine.

Let’s talk weights. What exercises can you do that will give you the most bang for your buck in the shortest amount of time? By that I mean which exercises will work the most muscles at once?

First up—legs.

The three exercises that work the most leg muscles (including your butt) are: squats, lunges and leg press.

Before we go any further, I debated whether I should use some of those little illustrations to demonstrate how to do these exercises. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones like this:

Do you like those? Me neither. If you’re going to spend all that money to make a book, why hire a fifth-grader to do the illustrations? I hate those things. Know what I hate even more? Photos of the author demonstrating the technique with the gratuitous “Oh, I didn’t know my bare abs were actually showing in this picture, but aren’t they great?” shot. So I was trying to come up with a way that I didn’t hate to show you how to do this stuff, and I finally found one. If you go to
www.youtube.com/user/AngriestTrainer
it’ll take you to my YouTube channel where you can see videos of people demonstrating these techniques and many others. We’re only going to skim the surface of these exercises here. If you want to learn about them in depth, check out the videos.

Okay, back to legs. Squats, lunges and leg press are the exercises you want to focus on. You can choose to do one, two or all three per session, depending on the amount of time you have.

How do you know how much weight to use for a given exercise? It’s simple. If you’ve never lifted weight before, or it’s been a long time, you pick an amount of weight that you can easily handle for up to fifteen repetitions over the course of no more than two sets. To be clear, a repetition (or rep) is the number of times you lift the weights in a row. When you’re done, that’s considered a set. Do this for a couple of weeks before you graduate to the kind of lifting you’ll be doing from then on.

At this point, you want to pick an amount of weight that you can do for three sets of ten repetitions with some difficulty. Once you can easily do three sets of ten reps, increase the number of reps to eleven each set. Once you can easily do that, increase the number of reps to twelve. And once you can do three sets of twelve reps each, then it’s time to move up in weight. How much more weight? Enough to make three sets of ten reps difficult once again.