Oprah has one, Mick Jagger swears by his and Raquel Welch says she couldn`t properly maintain her famous curves without one.
But today celebrities represent just a fraction of the fitness-conscious crowd who rely on personal trainers to coax, nag or bully them into shape. Traditionally used only by athletes and celebrities, trainers now belong to one of the fastest-growing professions in the health/fitness field.
For some clients, a personal trainer represents status. It`s no longer enough to belong to a trendy health club. You have to have a coach at your side as you sweat.
For the timid or uninitiated, a one-on-one relationship with a qualified trainer can provide a nonthreatening, intelligent approach to fitness. A coach designs a personalized program to whip you into shape and teaches you the proper techniques to stay fit.
Part drill sergeant, part cheerleader, and part Jewish mother, a good personal trainer can provide that extra push that keeps you working out-especially if you`re the kind of person who prefers banana splits to barbells.
Can you really buy motivation?
Yes, say a growing number of training aficionados. But it doesn`t come cheap.
Although some trainers say they can train people in their homes with little more than a mat and a few dumbbells, most clients and coaches prefer to work with expensive machines that simulate activities such as climbing stairs, rowing or lifting free weights-the kind of equipment found in a health club.
After you`ve paid your club dues, you have to pay your trainer. Chicago-area coaches charge an hourly fee of anywhere from $20 to $100 and usually recommend that you work with them at least three times a week.
Finding a qualified coach can be difficult. Currently, anyone can call him- or herself a personal trainer. No standards govern the profession, and no generally agreed-upon program has been developed to train the trainers.
”The recent boom in personal training makes me a little uneasy. I worry that a lot of unqualified people are out there giving bad advice,” says Mark Smaha, president of the National Athletic Trainers Association, whose members help rehab injured professional and amateur athletes.
”If you`re in a weight room and some musclebound guy says, `Try this exercise. I`m a personal trainer,` you`d better ask him some hard questions about his background before you make a move, or you could really get hurt.”
To earn NATA certification, association members must have a college degree, usually with an athletic specialty, undergo 800 hours of hands-on coaching with a certified trainer, and pass a rigorous exam. It`s safe to say that most of the lean, spandex-swathed men and women putting clients through their paces in Chicago area health clubs aren`t NATA types.
But that`s OK, counters Dr. Bob Goldman, an osteopath and codirector of the National Academy of Sports Medicine on Chicago`s Near North Side. According to Goldman, if you`re working with healthy clients, practical experience, the ability to read people and common sense can be just as valuable as formalized training. The academy recently developed a three-day seminar for would-be personal coaches already working in some aspect of the fitness field.
When it comes to choosing a trainer, many Chicago-area clients say they simply concentrate on the bottom line. They look for someone they like, who they believe will help them achieve maximum results with minimum pain as quickly as possible. Here`s a look at how four clients and their trainers go about the business of looking and feeling fit.
It`s 8 a.m. on an icy, gray morning. While most of us are still sleep, Dr. Norton Fishman doggedly hoists a barbell in a deserted weight room under the watchful gaze of his trainer, Julie Peavey.
”One, two, three, four . . . keep your eyes open . . . c`monnn, c`monnnn,” Peavey barks. In her black T-shirt and leggings, she looks as if she were chiseled from granite.
” . . . Fiive, siiiix, sevennn . . . good!” Peavey says as Fishman lowers the weight. ”Wanna try for eight?”
Panting, the 52-year-old internist grimaces.
”I should never ask him that question,” Peavey chuckles, shaking her head.
Looking trim and muscular in his navy sweatpants and faded gray T-shirt, Fishman moves on to the weight machines. The soft-spoken doctor, who lives with his wife in north-suburban Wilmette, didn`t always look this good. His youthful body is the result of three grueling workouts a week with Peavey, usually at 5:30 a.m.
Fishman never really exercised until he met Peavey a little over a year ago, just after his 51st birthday,
”I used to be the kind of guy health clubs got rich on,” he says during a break between sets. ”I`d join and show up for only a few weeks. I was starting from ground zero when it came to weights, and I hated to do things I didn`t know anything about.
”One afternoon, I was sitting in my office talking to a patient when I looked down and saw the bulge of my belly. At that moment, I realized that I was closer to 100 years old than to zero and I`d better do something about it.”
Enter Peavey, a 30-year-old former anorexic who turned her life around through exercise and now competes as a bodybuilder. Fishman decided to try Muscle Station, the small weight-training gym Peavey operates with her husband, on the recommendation of a clerk at his health-food store.
Tucked next to a gas station on the second floor of an old white building on Highland Park`s outskirts, the two-year-old gym is a no-frills, down-to-earth place where most of the clients know one another and about a third of them use Peavey and her husband as personal trainers.
For Peavey, weight training is more than a hobby or even a profession-it`s a calling.
”Most people are into pain avoidance,” she says. ”I try to teach them that suffering a little and working hard to reach a goal is actually easier than slacking off because you end up liking yourself a lot better. I know.”
She points proudly to the photos that hang on the wall behind her. They show Peavey in a bikini, her skin oiled, her muscles rippling, posing at a recent bodybuilding competition.
”I have a reputation around here. They say that if you hear screaming as you climb the stairs to the gym, it`s probably coming from one of my clients.”
Despite her tough talk, Peavey is also a mother hen who thinks nothing of giving her home phone number to clients who might need a quick dose of encouragement or a bit of nagging when they stray off their diets.
Before she designs their programs, she tries to figure out what makes her charges tick. She characterizes Fishman as ”someone who needs to be pushed.” ”To get a good life, you have to have tunnel vision and forget about everything else. But (Fishman) is in a demanding profession where you have to think all day long. So once he walks into the gym, I think for him.”
Apparently she`s right. Fishman says he has tried lifting without Peavey, ”but it didn`t work. I didn`t show up.”
Peavey continually modifies Fishman`s program to keep him interested and challenged. She currently has him doing a high-intensity, short-duration workout, which means that he pushes, pulls and lifts a lot of wrenchingly heavy weight for a few repetitions.
Peavey has no degrees or formal certifications, and she doesn`t think she needs them. She bases her training techniques on her own nine years of weight- lifting experience.
Fishman has no complaints.
”Put it this way: Before I started working out, the last time I saw a bicep as developed as mine is now, it was on a cadaver,” he says, grinning, as he heads for the shower.
Diamonds glitter, weights clank and long frosted hair is flying under the carefully calibrated lights. Welcome to the battle of the quads at the East Bank Club in what is perhaps the best-equipped weight-machine room in the Chicago area.
As their personal trainers look on, K.C. Meitus and another woman take turns performing sets on the leg-press machine. The two 40-ish, expertly made- up women don`t exchange a word, but the scent of competition is definitely in the air.
Flick! Meitus tosses her hair back, adjusts her black spandex muscle shirt and lowers herself onto the machine`s upholstered seat. Coral lips pursed, she pushes the machine`s pin in at the 100-pound mark, places her feet on the chrome pedals and starts pumping.
Her counterpart sets the machine a little higher, at 150, when it`s her turn. Then Meitus takes the seat again, performing a bit faster.
”I can do much heavier weight than I did today,” Meitus confides when she`s finished. ”But Dave has me on this periodization program. I`ve spent two weeks putting different types of stress on my body. Now, I`m into lighter weights and lots of reps.”
The former flight attendant has come a long way since she and her girlfriend joined the chi-chi club ”mostly to have an interesting place to eat lunch.”
With its parquet floors, three restaurants and atrium fountain, East Bank is more of a country club than a gym. It`s a place where you can take a nap in a private cubicle, people-watch on cushy couches, have your nails or your laundry done, take a sauna or book a tanning bed.
Meitus didn`t begin to seriously explore the club`s exercise facilities until an airline strike five years ago left her with lots of free time. She progressed gradually, from riding an exercycle and playing tennis to performing sets on Nautilus machines to her current killer program of weight training four times a week.
Dave Smith, 35, who heads the club`s personal-training program, is her third personal trainer and, according to Meitus, her best.
”You can ask him any question about exercise and the human body and when he answers you, he doesn`t guess,” she says later over a carrot muffin and decaf in the club coffee shop. Meitus has worked with Smith for almost two years.
Why does she need a trainer after all this time?
Motivation. ”If Dave tells me to do 10 reps, something clicks in my head and I can get to 10. Knowing that he`s here waiting for me is what gets me to drive downtown from Evanston four mornings a week,” Meitus says. She lives in the near-north suburb with her 7-year-old daughter and her husband, who also uses a personal trainer.
Smith considers coaching Meitus, as well as his other clients (who include Oprah Winfrey) a very serious business. He`s certified as a trainer by both the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Strength and Conditioning Association and is currently working on his master`s degree in adult and corporate fitness.
With his penetrating gat females aren`t supposed to be strong,” he says, stretching his long legs out as he sits in one of the EBC`s lounges. ”It`s especially rewarding to work with these women, to watch them grow stronger and confident.”
The EBC matches clients such as Meitus with trainers through a complicated system designed to protect clients from injury. First the club requires members in search of a trainer to fill out health-history forms and list their fitness goals.
Next an exercise physiologist evaluates the forms and recommends the appropriate type of exercise. Those recommendations go to Smith, who chooses a trainer for each client. The two meet and get to know each other. Then, and only then, do the workouts begin.
The system has worked for Meitus. ”I love to cook, and I love to eat. Now working with Dave, I can look good and still do both.”
”OK, keep your leg bent. Don`t let me pull it straight,” orders the lean young woman in an oatmeal sweater, sneakers and blue jeans. She stands over a mustachioed white-haired man who lies on his back on a peeling mat atop a beatup massage table.
”Fine,” she says, pausing to jot something down on her clipboard. Then she reaches for his ankle. ”Now we`re going to reverse it. Straighten your leg. Don`t let me push it in. That`s right.
”What I`m doing is giving every joint in your body a little stress test. If nothing screams at you, that`s good.”
As his wife looks on, Owen Brumbaugh, 72, undergoes a detailed evaluation of his flexibility and strength that anyone who`s into fitness would kill for. When he and his wife, Connie, 59, decided to begin doing more than an occasional swim and their nightly mile walk, they didn`t go to a doctor or a fancy health club. They went to the High Ridge YMCA in Rogers Park.
Here, as part of a new program in personal training, clients are evaluated by a bona fide physical therapist who designs and teaches them customized workouts in a single session. Contracted as consultants, the therapists work with Y staffers, who are always available to provide clients with help and brushup advice for no additional fee.
”I feel like I`m training for the Bears,” says Connie, a free-lance advertising copywriter. Her evaluation completed, she sits on a folding chair, her blue eyes twinkling as her husband, an engineer and the chairman of E&G Associates, is put through his paces.
”We chose the Y because it`s a good, clean place,” Connie says. ”I belonged to a fancy health club, but there was never anyone around to give you advice. That`s probably because most of the people there were more interested invery strong, Owen needs to work on his flexibility. Connie, on the other hand, is relatively limber but must strengthen her muscles.
Pierce teaches Connie and Owen specific exercises that address their individual problems. Next she accompanies them to the cramped strength-training room to demonstrate how to use the treadmill, exercycle and stair machine-all of which improve tone and endurance with a minimum risk of injury. ”What I`m doing is really preventive medicine,” the physical therapist says later, between sips from a can of juice. ”I just get more people interested if I call it personal training.
”I used to send patients I`d treated to their health clubs to work with these so-called personal coaches. They`d usually reinjure themselves and be back in my office again within two months. So I decided to go with them once to their clubs for no additional charge just to see that they`re working out safely.
”Doing evaluations for people before they exercised seemed like the next logical step.”
As someone who deals with people and pain on a regular basis, Pierce doubts that you can buy motivation by the hour from a trainer.
”If you`re going to exercise, you have to find your motivation from within,” she says. ”You can set someone up with a program they like.
”But when you exercise on your own and learn what you`re working on and why, that`s the only way you become more aware of your body and truly learn about yourself.”
