FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (10 page)

Chapter Twelve

BUYER BEWARE

So you’re in the market for a trainer. Like a guy in a whorehouse, there are a lot of ways to get screwed—mostly by hiring amateurs. Here are some of the types you might encounter.

THE SOCCER MOM TRAINER

These are usually women who are looking to bring in some extra income to support their shoe shopping habit, because, let’s face it, they can only get yelled at by their husbands so many times before they need to start making their own money. They have to figure out a way to do this and still be available at 3 p.m. to pick up their kids from school and then drop them off again at the soccer, or football, or baseball field. So they need to find work with flexible hours and good pay.

Manolo Blahniks ain’t cheap.

By the way, this isn’t their first job. Some of their other “careers” may include dog walker/groomer/sitter, working as an assistant in a pre-K and doing portrait or sports photography. Hell, I even knew one that tried to be a comedian.

None of these things are bad, necessarily. The problem is that, after failing at all these other “careers,” the “Soccer Mom Trainer” gets the bright idea to take a 10 a.m. aerobic class at a gym. After a week or two, they get to thinking “why am I paying to do this? Why don’t I have someone pay me to do this?”

And a trainer is born.

Verdict: BEWARE.

THE VOLUNTEER TURNED PROFESSIONAL

There’s a bunch of nonprofit organizations out there that look for volunteers to help train people to complete a fitness event. The volunteer doesn’t have to have any knowledge of fitness. Sure, if they’re going to lead a group of joggers, it helps if they’re a weekend runner. Going to lead a group of cyclists? Yeah, it’s great if they’ve spent a little time on a bike. But none of these volunteers are qualified to train people. Nor do they have to be.

A while back, I was asked to ride along on one of these outings. I quickly discovered, to my horror, that there were a couple major problems with the bikes the cyclists were using. Many of the seats were wildly off, either too high or too low. In either case, that’s a recipe for hip, knee and lower back problems.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

On some bikes, the skewer that clamps the wheel to the fork was dangling and loose. In other words: bad shit. Like, losing a half dozen teeth or becoming a quadriplegic bad. And you know who didn’t notice that anything was wrong?

The instructor.

Truth be told, their job is to follow the script handed to them by the organization. And that’s great. The problems begin when these people start thinking they actually know what they’re doing and decide to spread their wings and share their wisdom among others. For money. Your money.

Once again, a trainer is born.

Verdict: BACK OUT OF THE ROOM SLOWLY

THE FRIEL EXPERT

Let’s talk about Joe Friel.

This guy is the real deal. He’s a qualified coach with a master’s degree in exercise science. Last time I checked, this takes longer to get than an hour and a half on a computer. He’s also written many books with detailed workouts to train for anything from marathons to bike racing to a triathlon. In fact, if you’re a beginner aerobic athlete and you want some good advice, you can find plenty of Joe’s workouts on the internet for free. He put them there. And if you want more detail, spend a couple of bucks and actually buy one of his books. You know who else did that?

This asshole.

The Friel Expert (a phrase I’ve coined) is a person who read Joe’s books or found his free workouts on the internet, copied them, and is now selling them to you for hundreds of dollars a month. But wait, there’s more! For a couple extra bucks (around a hundred of them), this jackass will actually let you speak to him for fifteen minutes a week. In fact, the whole package can often cost up to $400 dollars, depending on how much phone time you buy.

I call them the Friel Experts, but these clowns could just as easily have ripped off Hal Higdon or Chris Carmichael or any of the other legitimate fitness experts out there. Want to know something amazing? You can actually hire the real guys for about the same price.

Think about that.

You can actually hire a winning coach of Tour de France athletes for the same amount you’re paying their plagiarists.

Verdict: ASSHOLES

Verdict for the real Joe Friel: THE MAN!

THE MAGAZINE TRAINER

These may be the most worthless of all the “fitness experts.”

At least the Friel Expert is handing out info from Joe Friel who knows what the hell he’s talking about. These nutjobs will tear a “how to get flat abs in ten minutes” article from Cosmo magazine and use it as the basis of your workout.

Here’s the problem. The people writing those articles are usually not fitness experts. They’re writers. You wouldn’t ask a grocery bagger to perform your heart surgery, so don’t ask Ernest Hemingway to come up with your ab workout.

Verdict: USELESS

THE T.A.M.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1991. Don’t judge, but I spent the first couple years modeling to support myself while I worked on my training career. It turns out that this is 100 percent the opposite of what most people do. Most people try to make money in other careers, usually as waiters but sometimes as trainers, in order to support themselves while they struggle to become models and actors.

This is where we get the T.A.M.’s—the trainer/actor/model.

These people certainly look the part. Their teeth are straight and white. Their tan is perfect. Their hair is clean and shiny and they have biceps and pecs perfectly hewn from hours of gym time. But do they know how to train you?

Not only do they not know how to train you, they could care less because, in their minds, their real career as an actor/model is about to take off at any moment. Why do they think this? Because that’s what some producer told them the night before as they were lured into a bedroom.

Again.

These people are only interested in themselves. Best perk of the job? The mirror in the gym so they can flex. I’ve often witnessed the T.A.M.s texting and taking hour-long phone calls while their clients are paying them good money.

Verdict: RUN, DON’T WALK

THE ONE-RACE EXPERT

These are people who have only done one or two races in their entire lives, which they now think makes them qualified to hang a shingle as the new expert in town. How do you spot them? Easy. They’ll bring up that one race in every conversation. Example:

You: “Wow, I just had the best hamburger in L.A.”

Them: “That’s so funny you’d say that. When I ran the Ojai Marathon, I had the best hamburger I ever had a week later in a different town a hundred miles away.”

Verdict: GO TO IN-N-OUT BURGER

THE GYM RAT

This is one of my favorite groups. These are people who love gyms. If there was a cologne called “sweat” they’d buy it. (Note to self: copyright cologne called “sweat.”)

They could spend every waking hour in a gym and feel it was time well spent. And you know what? Even though many of them don’t have much formal training, they usually know what the hell they’re talking about. They’ve tried it all, done it all, and those kinds of street smarts are worth their weight in gold.

That said, keep in mind that their knowledge is varied. Their advice usually comes from trial and error on themselves. The ones with prison tattoos can probably teach you unusual techniques, like how to get a complete workout with one barbell (the big house is light on ellipticals.)

Out of all the types of trainers we’ve been talking about, I like these guys the best, but if you drop the soap in the shower, leave it.

Verdict: PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Now that you know how to avoid the amateur trainers, you’re probably wondering how you can find the good ones. Like anything worthwhile, it’s going to take some time. You have to do your homework, but there are a few guidelines.

First, a true pro trainer is most likely not going to be associated with a mega gym.

Second, a pro trainer won’t advertise. If they need to advertise to get clients, you don’t want them. In fact, many of the companies that hand out training certificates spend more time teaching their students how to get clients than what to do with them once they have them.

Rule of thumb: good trainers usually have a waiting list.

Third, a pro trainer won’t train more than eight people a day because they’ll want to spend more than an hour a day with you.

Fourth, most pro trainers have, at the very least, a degree in physical education from a major university.

Finally, anyone that claims to be a “trainer to the stars” is probably full of shit. Most pro trainers will never admit who their celebrity clients are to protect their privacy.

So where can you look for people that meet all these criteria? In a big city, try checking out the good private gyms—not the mega gyms. These boutique style gyms generally draw the better trainers, because the trainers there have to bring in their own clientele. Bottom line, if someone’s driving to see this guy, you can probably assume he’s pretty good.

Another place to look? Believe it or not, high schools. P.E. coaches who have lost their jobs due to cutbacks are often good trainers. Even the ones still employed might be looking for clients on the side. You can often find these guys by calling schools or asking friends with school-age kids to let you know who the good coaches are.

Finally, ask around the community to see what trainers people recommend. If the same name keeps coming up, check into the person, but make sure they’ve got the credentials we talked about.

That’s how most people find me. Referrals from clients. And even though new clients usually meet me through my current clients, I’ve been surprised at how often my current clients ask me to throw a party so they can meet each other.

By the way, this could very well be the worst idea ever, and I’m including New Coke.

The last thing I need is for my worlds to collide. I wouldn’t want my 10 a.m., where I end the session with the word “namaste,” to mix with my 5 p.m., where we flip each other off as I leave. My clients are as different from each other as I am from that Brillo-haired, mu-mu wearing muppet Richard Simmons.

It wasn’t always that way.

Thirty years ago, most of my clients were female socialites who wanted to lose weight. They didn’t care about fitness routines, they didn’t want to know how the sausage was made, they just wanted the weight to magically come off. Amazingly, it was often people who didn’t have any weight to lose. A socialite wearing a size 2 might want to drop to a size 0.

Ten years later, I started seeing a new type of person. Businessmen who wanted to drop a suit size, mostly to impress their mistresses. The mistresses, of course, only cared about one size—and not the one you’re thinking. They cared about the size of the guys’ wallet.

Then, a decade later, it mutated again.

I started seeing people who wanted to get better at a particular sport: golf, tennis, running a marathon, cycling, triathlon. And they didn’t want to just finish their events, they wanted to win their age group and go on to that sport’s version of a National or World event. Problem was, they didn’t want to spend the time to really earn it. They wanted to use their money to grease the wheels and get it the fast and easy way.

These were the same types of people that paid Sherpas in Nepal to all but piggyback them to the top of Everest so they could say “they” did it. These new kinds of clients weren’t above taking steroids and other sport enhancing drugs to help them win a race. They literally would spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a medal worth three bucks.

In other words, they wanted something for nothing, which is an attitude that actually takes its biggest toll on people’s health.

Chapter Thirteen

SOMETHING FOR NOTHING

It’s easy to understand why we all want the quick fix, the easy way out, because we see it all around us. Talentless people get their own TV shows. Just look at the Kardashians! Quick, tell me what they’re skilled at besides marrying famous athletes. They don’t sing, they don’t act, they don’t dance, they don’t do any of the things you would normally associate with talent. And yet, when Kim went through a seventy-two day marriage, it got more coverage than the tsunami in Japan.

And if adults buy into this crap, what about the most vulnerable members of our society?

Years ago, I started calling the children around me Bumper Sticker Kids. They’re the kids whose parents put bumper stickers on their cars just to brag about how wonderful their children are.

“My kid is an honor student at …”

“My kid is a black-belt at …”

These are the same parents that I’d find whispering to me across the table over dinner. “My kid’s special. He’s in the gifted program. He takes all honor level courses. His cello teacher says he could be a prodigy.”

Where are the regular dumb kids, I would wonder. The kind I grew up with? The ones like me?

It seems like every parent believes that every one of their kids is special—but if they’re all special, doesn’t that mean none of them are special and bring them right back to being normal?

Around this time, I noticed that many communities decided to stop keeping score during their baseball, football and soccer games because “there are no winners or losers. Everyone’s a winner.”

I got news for you, for someone to be a winner, someone’s got to be a loser.

Unfortunately, because everyone gets participation trophies now, trophies don’t mean anything any more. Spoils used to go to the victor. Now they go to everyone. Which causes two problems.

First, it teaches the loser that there’s no reason to work harder to win because losing is just as good as winning.

Second, it teaches the victor “screw it, why try?” because there’s no benefit to winning.

Kids aren’t held accountable any more, which means they don’t feel responsible for the bad things they do, which means they can’t take ownership of the good things they do. And you know how this prepares them for life?

It doesn’t.

These Bumper Sticker kids become adults who take no responsibility for anything. They want the quick fix, the fast cash, the easy way out. And you know what that’s led to?

Thieves.

We’re surrounded by predators looking to exploit this attitude of wanting something for nothing by selling you nothing for something. And you know what that something is? Your hard earned cash. And you know what the nothing they’re selling is?

Diet pills. Weight loss gadgets. Supplements.

All of them are crap.

Let’s talk diet pills. Or as Grace Slick would say,
Go Ask Alice
. Ever listen to the first words in that song? Maybe you’re too young. Or, if you’re old enough, maybe you were too strung out back then to remember. Here’s how it went:

One pill makes you larger/

And one pill makes you small/

And the ones that mother gives you/

Don’t do anything at all

We’ve become a pill culture. Got a problem? Take a pill. Too anxious during the day? Take a pill. Need to fall asleep at night? Pill time. Want to lose weight? There’s a pill for that, too—a million of them. And what’s in those pills?

Speed.

Or, at least the legal version of speed. Look on the bottle. You probably see the words “all natural.” That’s the sales pitch. They claim they’re helping you lose weight the safe and “natural” way, by speeding up your metabolism and suppressing your appetite.

So … do they work?

Sure, for short periods, if you don’t mind having the jitters and the fact that they’re terrible for your heart. You might lose a couple pounds short term but, just like with dieting, you can’t do it long term. It’s a quick fix, not a permanent fix.

Diet pills also have diminishing returns. As every drug addict knows, your body gets used to the stuff and you need increasingly larger doses for it to give you the same effect.

If they’re so terrible, why does the FDA permit them?

Because the FDA doesn’t regulate them. In fact, no one does. Remember what FDA stands for? Food and Drug Administration. They consider these diet pills somewhere between a food and a drug. Neat trick, huh? Can you say “lobby”?

Historically, the only time the FDA steps in is after people die and it hits the media. As I always tell my clients:

You can’t get fitness in a bottle
.

Diet pills? Bad idea. But does that mean I hate everything that comes in a pill? Nope. Let me give you a quick history of vitamins.

The first one was identified in 1905. A scientist was trying to figure out why people were getting Beriberi disease on a diet of polished rice—polishing is the process they used to remove the husk. What they discovered was that the good stuff, the stuff that prevented Beriberi, was in the husk.

A couple years after that, a Polish scientist named Funk figured out that we needed certain nutrients to stay healthy. He called the nutritional parts of food “vitamine” which was later shortened to vitamin. Over the years, we’ve taken more and more of those good nutrients out of food, but instead of just putting them back in (which would have been too easy and sensible), we created pills to replace what was lost.

Vitamins.

Is this a bad thing? Not really, as long as you take a multi-vitamin every day. It covers you like an insurance policy, making up whatever you’re missing. By the way, you don’t need to get the fancy expensive brand. The grocery store brand has exactly the same stuff in it for a fraction of the cost. And, believe it or not, Flintstones has the same vitamins as the expensive one. They just add sugar.

So if you need a multi-vitamin a day, what about minerals like calcium, magnesium, chloride, sodium and potassium—otherwise known as electrolytes? Do you need more of those? Only if you’re doing a job or sport that causes you to sweat a lot. Think of these as the oil in a car. You only notice it when it’s gone and the engine shuts down. Same with the body. Like I tell my clients, if you’re dehydrated, you’re not just missing water.

So how do you replenish your electrolytes? The health food store might suggest that you need a separate bottle of each of these minerals. Please don’t do that. Don’t let their fake holistic kumbaya bullshit fool you into thinking they have your best interests in mind. Make no mistake, most of these health food chains are publicly traded companies that are in the business of selling you stuff. Do yourself and your wallet a favor and just get a single bottle of all-in-one capsules filled with electrolytes. Any cycling, running or sports outlets will carry them.

I’m often asked if it’s possible to overdose on vitamins and electrolytes. The answer is no. It’s virtually impossible if used as directed. Your body will use what it needs and the rest will become the world’s most expensive pee.

But what about the rest of the stuff in the health food store?

Look at the shelves. There are literally thousands of bottles. What’s in them? Do you need them? I’d like to say the answer is no but it’s actually hell, no. Ever look at the guy who’s trying to sell you the stuff? Does the gray hue of his skin and the sunken eyes of his vegan lifestyle look good to you?

One day I went into a health food store, and while I was picking up my multi-vitamin, the clerk asked if I needed help. Because I had some time on my hands and, well, I’m me, I decided to screw with him and said “sure.” I proceeded to go up and down every aisle, pointing to bottle after bottle while asking him if I actually needed each one. The clerk’s answer every time was a resounding “yes” with a detailed explanation for why I couldn’t live without the pills in whatever bottle I was pointing at. When we were done, I said “So, what you’re saying is, in order to live, I need one of every bottle in here?”

Finally, the guy who had an answer for everything, was stumped. He had no reply. Screw that guy.

So what kind of pills are we talking about?

Dozens of brands of plant sterols, along with hundreds of amino acids from L-Arginine to L-Tryptophan, not to mention supplemental fish oil. That’s right, they squeeze the oil out of fish and want you to take it by the spoonful.

You know how else you can get fish oil? By eating fish.

Know how else you can get plant sterols? By eating plants.

Know how else you can get amino acids? By eating an egg.

All of these things we get naturally in a normal diet but, according to the clerk, in order be healthy, I needed to take one of everything in the store. They call these things supplements, but you don’t need to pay absurd amounts of money to supplement anything.

You just need to eat right.

I’d like to say that health food stores have become the new drug dealers, but I can’t because the products that drug dealers sell actually do something. When you buy cocaine, you can be pretty sure you’re going to get high, and if you don’t, you won’t go back to that dealer. But when you buy L-Carnitine or fish oil capsules you don’t feel any different. Are you healthier? Who the hell knows? None of these products are FDA regulated which means you’re relying on the honor of a snake oil salesman.

And what’s getting us to buy the most snake oil?

Infomercials!

Let’s talk about a great man: Ron Popeil. Without him, we would never have had the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone and the Veg-O-Matic. Remember them? The Pocket Fisherman made fishing easy. The Veg-O-Matic made slicing and dicing vegetables a snap. And Mr. Microphone taught us how to snag chicks just like the guy in the commercial who tells the girl “Hey, good looking. I’ll be back to pick you up later!”

By the way, that line doesn’t work.

Ron Popeil was one-of-a-kind. When his infomercials came on, you saw the product, you knew what it did and you wanted it. Ron didn’t lie. His products did make life easier.

Or at least we thought they did.

Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to fitness products in the infomercial world. Most of them are crap and always have been. Remember the Belt Shaker? Sure, we laugh about it now, but not so long ago people thought you could actually “shake” the fat off your body.

Crazy, right?

But is that any crazier than the people today who think they can use an Electrical Stimulation Machine (E-Stim) to spot-lose fat on their stomachs? It seems crazy but there is no shortage of people out there buying products like the AbTronic that are trying to do just that.

Look, I get it. We hear about spot losing weight so much that we want to believe it’s possible. Even my clients continually ask me why they can’t spot lose weight. I tell them to visualize a pro cyclist. This guy is lean all over, right? But think about it, he only uses his legs to pedal. If spot losing weight were possible, only his legs would be lean.

But that’s not the way it works, which doesn’t stop people from trying to sell us gadgets that promise otherwise. Look at the fitness products sold on television over the past ten years. Most of them start with the word “ab”. Usually ab is followed by a word like “crunch” or “energizer” or “flyer” or “rocker” or “twister”—all real products by the way. They all promise to give you washboard abs but, as I said, the only thing that can give you washboard abs is your diet.

And it’s not just ab gadgets that try to sell you on spot losing weight. Think of one of the all-time top-selling pieces of fitness equipment that people hoped would do just that. If you said the “Thighmaster” pat yourself on the back. Sure, it might build some thigh muscles, but will you spot-lose weight with it?

Forget it.

What about things like the Perfect Pushup? They say that by putting a little twist into the pushups, not only are you working your pecs and your triceps but you’re also working your abs.

Really, folks?

I’m supposed to spend close to a hundred dollars on something I can do for free? Hardly any exercise in life requires less equipment than a pushup. All you need is … the Earth. And this isn’t even a crazy product.

Compare it to the Shake Weight. You’ve seen this ridiculous thing. The ads make it look like you get your workout by jerking off a dumbell! And yet it’s selling like crazy.

But the Shake Weight looks positively effective compared to the iGallop. The concept behind this genius device? That horseback riding is great exercise.

Absolutely true—if you’re the horse.

The ad goes on to explain that not everyone has a horse, which is why you should get this horse substitute. Then we see a dozen sexy women riding this insane thing as they do a really bad impression of Debra Winger in
Urban Cowboy
. In fact, they actually wore chaps and cowboy hats in the ad while pretending to shoot finger guns.

Not to be outdone, have you seen the Range Of Motion machine, otherwise known as the “ROM” Time Machine? This device promises to give you a complete workout in just four minutes a day. Four minutes a day! That’s fantastic! How much would you pay for a product that gives you a complete workout in just four minutes a day? I know I would pay a little extra for a product that did something so miraculous. So what’s a good price for it? A hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars? Would you pay as much as three hundred dollars? I would!

Actual cost: around fifteen thousand dollars.

And, no, that’s not a typo.

Look, the Range Of Motion machine actually does work your whole body, and it even does it in four minutes a day. The problem is that it won’t get you into optimal shape in just four minutes a day. You know how I know that? Because nothing can get you there in just four minutes a day!

You’d need to spend more time with the thing … and you’d have to have fifteen grand just lying around.

But what if you don’t?

Don’t worry. You’re in luck. There’s a product on the market right now that’s actually “too good to be true!”

It works your upper body, your lower body, your core! It’s a weight bearing exercise that strengthens your entire skeletal and muscular system! It’s also aerobic, which is great for your cardiovascular system and helps you lose inches around the middle! And, if that’s not enough, it increases both your eye/hand and eye/foot coordination!