FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (9 page)

Rinse and repeat.

Second category—upper body.

Just like with your legs, there are three exercises that give you the best bang for your buck: bench press, shoulder press and lat pulls. But unlike the three leg exercises, these hit different muscles, which is why you should do all three whenever you’re working upper body.

Finally, abs.

Truth be told, your abs get worked a lot when you’re doing aerobic activity like running, cycling and elliptical, but it doesn’t hurt to throw in some sit-ups or a few sets on the gym’s ab machines when time permits.

This, by the way, brings me to another Vinnie-ism.

You want great abs, work on your diet
.

Contrary to what the magazines would have you believe, the only way to get washboard abs is to lose the fat around your middle. You can do sit-ups and ab work around the clock and never achieve what you’re after because no matter how much muscle you build on your stomach, you can’t see it through fat. And, just to clear up a common misconception, sit-ups don’t help you burn fat around your middle. In fact, you can’t spot-lose fat in any area solely through exercise. As I tell my clients, if you want to spot-lose fat, get liposuction.

In case you’re wondering, getting liposuction is a bad idea, just like taking steroids. Want to know another bad idea? Colonics. They’re basically the same concept as liposuction. With liposuction, you’re paying someone to suck your fat out. With colonics, you’re paying someone to suck your crap out.

Think about that for a second.

There are people out there so desperate to lose weight that they think having a hose shoved up their ass is a reasonable way to accomplish this. And not just for them—for you, too. I've had people try and convince me to let someone bury a hose up my backside as if their lives depended on it. It’s like a cult. You know why I've never done it? It’s not natural. You know how I know that?

My ass didn't come with a spigot.

So, how might a typical one-hour a day, three day a week workout look?

Monday: Forty minutes of cardio. During the remaining twenty minutes, do all three upper body exercises and pick at least one of the leg exercises.

Wednesday: Forty-five to sixty minutes of aerobic activity. And don’t forget the Vinnie Smorgasbord, where you use a variety of machines for shorter lengths of time. This is also a great day to do your ab work—some sit-ups or a set or two on an ab machine.

Friday: Just like Monday. Forty minutes of cardio, twenty minutes of weights. The only difference is that you’re going to want to do at least two of the leg exercises, even at the expense of one or two of the upper body exercises.

By the way, if it takes you a few minutes more than an hour to get in your cardio time along with the weights, I got news for you—the world’s not going to miss you. Take the extra few minutes. Just get it done. And remember, you can’t follow a routine unless you actually get to the gym, so make getting there a priority, even if it’s on a Saturday or Sunday. As I tell my clients:

Your body doesn’t know it’s the weekend
.

Now, do you have to stick with the tyranny of my little schedule? Hell, no. Once you’re there, mix it up. Make it a little different every time. Don’t get stuck in a rut. Take advantage of the classes the gym has to offer. Pilates, yoga, aerobic dance, spinning—they’re usually free with the membership or pretty cheap. Find one you like and do it. If you need motivation, let the teacher give you some.

You paid for all this thin air the gym sold you, so use it! Move your body! Don’t be one of the eighty percent that wastes their hard earned cash. And don’t let the gym push you around with their rules and regulations.

I was at a Bally’s a few years ago, working out on a spinner. You know how when you work out hard, you sweat?

So do I.

After working out for a few hours, I was sweating. Really sweating. In fact, the floor was wet. So the gym manager comes up to me and tells me I need to mop the place when I’m done. I tell him I’m not the janitor. Shouldn’t cleanup be part of my gym membership? He goes away.

Next day, same thing happens.

I’m spinning and sweating. Except, this time, when the manager comes up to me, he brings two musclehead trainers with him. Tells me to get off the equipment because I’m sweating too much. I see these guys and think, good, I’m about to get an upper body workout, too.

Back then, Bally’s had a promotion where they said you’ll “get in the best shape of your life!” Well, while this guy was telling me to get off the equipment, I notice a banner behind him that says exactly that: “Bally’s—for the best shape of your life!”

I tell him, if I get off now, you’re stopping me from getting in the best shape of my life, which would violate your agreement with me, which means I’ll be back with an attorney and, by the time I’m done, “Bally’s” will be renamed “Vinnie’s” (a much better name for a gym, anyway, don’t you think?)

He left and never bothered me again.

Get your workout. Don’t let them push you around.

Now, eventually, you might find yourself enjoying all this physical activity and reaping the benefits of good health so much that you’ll want to take it to the next level. Maybe you want to run a half marathon or your friend told you about a charity bicycle event and you’ve never ridden that far before. Can the trainer at the gym get you ready for this? Probably not. You need someone with a broader range of expertise—a
real
personal trainer.

If so, great! By all means, hire one. But, just like with health clubs, there’s a lot of ways you can get screwed.

Chapter Eleven

TRAINERS ARE LIKE ASTRONAUTS

You ever see the movie
The Right Stuff
? Great movie. It’s about the history of the astronaut program. In the beginning, they took test pilots, duct-taped them into tin cans and shot them into space. They were like monkeys. In fact, they actually started with monkeys and worked up to these idiots.

No offense. To monkeys.

Let’s take a second to imagine the conversation that led up to this.

Science guy: “Okay, Jimmy. Here’s what we’re gonna do. You see this gigantic bomb filled with enough highly explosive material to blow it all the way to space? Now, you see that little thing on the tip of the bomb? We call that a chair, Jimmy. You’re gonna sit in it and then we’re gonna light this thing on fire and see what happens.”

Jimmy: “Okay.”

Science guy: “Now stick with me. We think there’s a fifty-fifty chance we can shoot you into outer space. But here’s the problem.”

Jimmy: “The fifty-fifty wasn’t the problem?”

Science guy: “No. If we get lucky and you end up in space, we don’t really know how to get you back. So you might just bounce along the outer atmosphere until you disintegrate. Sound good?”

Jimmy: “Okay.”

So, that’s how NASA started. But as the space program evolved, Jimmy wasn’t good enough any more. We needed a different kind of cowboy. One with balls the size of Montana attached to a brain the size of, well, Montana.

Because we were getting fancy.

Now we wanted Jimmy to actually do stuff—like pilot the ship and walk on the moon. Astronauts had to become highly skilled.

Same with trainers.

In the sixties, a trainer was a guy in a gym with great pecs and biceps wearing a stained t-shirt with block lettering that simply said “TRAINER.” We haven’t improved much on the t-shirt, but the quality of trainer has come a long way.

Back then, trainers only had to know one thing—how to lift weights.

Jogging was non-existent. Since jogging was non-existent, so were marathons. Well, they existed, but they were left to runners, not joggers. Cycling? Say what? Competitive swimming? Forget it. The only time we even saw a swimmer was in the Olympics. And triathlons didn’t even start as a sport until the late 1970s. So all a trainer had to know back then was how to do a bench press and a squat.

Compare that to now. Today’s trainers are expected to be a combination of running coach, cycling coach, weight-lifting coach, nutritionist, stretching instructor, amateur orthopedist, motivational speaker and armchair psychologist.

In other words, not Jimmy.

So how do today’s trainers acquire all these skills? By putting in the time.

At fifteen years old, I started teaching people over twice my age how to lift weights at Joe’s Health Club. That’s Joe as in Joe Bonadona. I was flying by the seat of my pants, kind of like Jimmy duct-taped to that rocket. And I loved it.

By the time I was eighteen, I got a scholarship to Tulane University, one of the foremost medical schools in the country. I knew I wanted to do one thing and one thing only.

Become a P.E. teacher.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Vinnie, you sure set your sights high.” But remember, I worked in a gym for many years for no money. My only pay was a key to the gym. All I cared about in life was how to get myself and other people fit.

At Tulane, where I went to college, in order to get a physical education degree, you had to jump through two hoops. First, you had to get your teaching credentials by being accepted into their secondary education program. Second, you had to take classes about the human body, which you could only get in their pre-med department.

That’s how I ended up taking courses in biology, kinesiology, physiology and gross anatomy. The classes were difficult as hell, but I found learning how the human body functions fascinating. Still do.

As science and medicine advance, I’m right there trying to learn everything I can. After doing this for almost three decades, I think that I have the bare minimum of knowledge and practice that it takes to be considered an “expert.”

But that’s not the case with many so-called trainers today. Sure, there are a lot of good ones, even great ones. I’d like to say there are also a lot of shitty ones, but it’s worse than that. A shitty trainer will take your money without helping you improve, which means all you’ll lose is time and money. A worse than shitty trainer will get you hurt—sometimes permanently. So how are people like that able to call themselves trainers?

The same way dog walkers are able to call themselves dog walkers.

If someone wants to be a dog walker, they can literally wake up, pour a cup of coffee and utter the words “I think I want to be a dog walker” and they’re in business. All they need is a clientele of dogs.

Same with trainers.

Anyone can claim to be a trainer.

In the early eighties, my training business was rolling right along down in New Orleans. I was one of the few trainers in the city or, to be honest, in the whole country. Jake, as in “Body By”, had been doing his thing out in L.A. for a few years but I guess people were tired of writing about him and were looking for a different face, so I started getting some press. I even made it into an issue of SHAPE magazine. I wondered when the competition would come along.

What I didn’t realize was that my competition was right under my nose.

Let’s call this woman Emily. I guess I worked with her for two weeks, a total of six times. Emily was different from every other client I’d had up until that point. Most of my uptown socialites didn’t care how they were losing weight. They just wanted to know that they could continue to eat shrimp remoulade and still fit into a size 2.

Not Emily!

She wanted to know how it worked, how the routines were laid out. She paid attention to sets and reps and wrote everything down. She even took me for coffee afterwards where she grilled me for details. She cared.

I loved her. It was like I had my first groupie.

But after exactly six hours of training her, she didn’t schedule any more sessions and I couldn’t get her on the phone. Within a month, I started hearing about a new trainer in town …

I don’t really need to tell you who it was, do I?

My old client, Emily, became a personal trainer just by taking a couple sessions and then calling herself a trainer. She had no degree, no certification, no anything.

Things haven’t improved much since then. The only real difference is that, now, prospective trainers usually want to get some kind of certificate because most gyms require them for insurance reasons.

So where do you get one of these magical pieces of paper?

Well, you used to have to take a weekend course. In other words, these people covered in one weekend what it took me four years at a medical university to learn. But apparently, a weekend was too much of a time investment for a lot of people, so they made it even easier to get a certificate.

I mentioned this to my buddy, Scott. He didn’t believe me. So he went on the internet and, within an hour and a half, became a certified fitness trainer with a certificate that would be accepted at any gym. Scott’s day job? Attorney. Which means, when he hurts a client, he can now sue himself.

By the way, don’t laugh. Scott could just as easily have become an ordained minister. Don’t believe me? Google it. You’ll find a hundred websites that tell you to fill out a form and pay a fee. Three days later, you’ll be legally performing weddings.

You know what I call ministers like that? Frauds.

You know what I call personal trainers with these bullshit online degrees? You got it. Ministers.

How insane is it that you can get a certificate asking people to trust you with their bodies simply by spending a few minutes online? Who are these organizations handing out certificates to trainers like condoms at the free clinic?

Remember our dog walker? Well, one day, his dog walking business dried up, so he decided to open a training certification business. It’s that easy … and that corrupt.

Knowing all this, how do you find a personal trainer with legitimate credentials like an actual college degree in fitness?

Not by asking them.

Many trainers have figured out that prospective clients, especially in Beverly Hills, expect them to have a college diploma, so they’ll lie and say they do. You need to make sure. Ask your potential trainer to physically show you their diploma. Anyone who actually graduated from a university should be happy, even proud, to prove they did. And if you’re too shy to ask, call their university. They’ll let you know.

This may seem like overkill, but it’s your health we’re talking about. People spend more time researching a pair of tennis shoes on the internet then they do making sure their trainer is qualified to keep them safe. Do it right.

So how do you figure out the best trainer for you?

In general, trainers who are not attached to a gym are usually better than trainers who are. Why? Two reasons.

First, money. Trainers at a gym have to split their fee with the gym, sometimes giving them as much as 50 to 70 percent. But if you’re not attached to a gym, you don’t have to pay that. So why would someone be affiliated with a gym?

Because they have to be.

Trainers attach themselves to gyms because they’re not good enough to get clients on their own. Look, here’s how I get clients. I train someone, they like what I’m doing for them, they tell a friend and then I get hired by that person.

But that’s not how trainers in gyms get clients.

They work like ski instructors. Ski instructors use a “turn and burn” system. They realize that you’re only going to be at the resort for a week, so they don’t care about return business. The gym trainer also doesn’t have to worry about return business because, chances are, you won’t return after the first couple weeks—most members don’t. Besides, they don’t need you long-term because the gym will just throw them another client. Unlike personal trainers in business for themselves, the gym guys don’t have to earn their clients through hard work and knowledge—they just have to be breathing.

The bar is … low.

By the way, when I talk about gym trainers, I’m talking about the guys who work in mega gyms. The trainers who work in small, private gyms usually know what the hell they’re talking about.

Want another story?

In the late nineties, I was working out at a mega gym. My grandfather was a janitor his whole life, which is why I have a soft spot for them. I respect them. The janitor at this place was named Jorge. He literally swabbed out the toilets. Every time I saw him, I said hi.

Nice guy. We were friendly. This went on for a year.

One day, while I was working out, I saw him on the fitness floor wearing a “TRAINER” t-shirt. I asked him what was going on. He said they told him they needed a Spanish-speaking trainer and then gave him the shirt. Those were his qualifications.

He could speak Spanish and wear a shirt.

Caveat emptor, which Wikipedia tells me means “buyer beware.” So, buyer, let me tell you exactly what to beware of so that, just like with gym memberships, you don’t get ripped off.