A flawed individual’s guide to 2014 fitness resolutions

I was at my gym — TheGymKC, in midtown — not long ago, and my lower back was sore. It has been sore approximately half the time since the 2011 afternoon when I threw out my back carrying a window air-conditioning unit up two flights of stairs. I was 28. Now I’m 31, an age that seems too young to be griping every other day about back pain.

Usually it’s a dull, low-grade ache, but I had played pickup basketball a few days before and awakened the following morning struggling to turn over in bed. After several days of amassing sympathy — hobbling around the office, whining to friends — I heard it suggested that my back might be less prone to these problems if I, you know, exercised it. Maybe, the thinking went, if I regularly activated those muscles, rather than twisting my body in grotesque ways to avoid using them, things would improve.

How had I not thought of that? Also, how does a person exercise his lower back?

So I was lurking around the gym, trying to identify which machines might do the trick. Most workout machines have an illustration of a human body on them, emphasizing the muscles targeted. I moved casually from station to station, stealing glances at the drawings, striving to appear aloof. Eventually I found what looked like a match for my aching back.

I still had to figure out how the thing worked. I looked for another typical gym sight: a three-step illustrated explanation indicating what your body should be doing while you’re using a given machine. This wasn’t a straightforward butterfly or shoulder-press piece of equipment, though. It involved a very elaborate harness. So I stood there and examined it with my hands crossed over my head, pretending to catch my breath in between reps of an extremely vigorous routine.

After about a minute, I felt confident that I could strap in. I stuck the pin into a low weight, stepped in and positioned my arms and legs where I thought they were supposed to go. Then I tried to move my torso forward, as instructed. That didn’t work, so I tried moving backward. Nothing. I figured that maybe I’d set the weight too high, so I adjusted it to the lowest possible setting, then tried again. Nothing. Went backward again. Nothing. I adjusted my arms to the other side of the bar they were resting on. Nope.

I stared at the illustrations — artwork designed to be intuited in an instant, without the aid of words — but my tiny brain just couldn’t process what it confronted. Finally I disentangled myself from the machine and stood next to it like an idiot, staring at my feet to avoid the gaze of the hundreds of other gym members. That’s when I had my revelation, my rock-bottom moment: I need some outside help here.

Because I belong to a gym, where I’ve gone about three times a week for the past three years, I’ve deluded myself into believing that I’m improving my body. But on closer examination, I’m not doing much there. I do three rounds of four workouts: arm curls, a rowing machine, an incline press and a hold-barbells-while-I-squat thing that I’m pretty sure I invented. I flail on the elliptical trainer for the length of a podcast. I rarely sweat. And in the past year, without my changing any aspect of my lifestyle, I’ve gained about 10 pounds.

About that lifestyle: There’s room to rein in some excess. During the day, I behave pretty well. I eat things like granola and eggs and wheat toast, and I make fruit-and-vegetable smoothies with a Magic Bullet. But come 6 or 7 p.m., I turn into a monster. Crazed with hunger, my body demands huge, salty, fatty meals, and I oblige it. I drive to a taco shop or a pizza place or to Oklahoma Joe’s (pro tip: Avoid the line and call in the order). And I eat until my body tells me that it can’t handle more food. Often the food is gone before this signal arrives.

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I’m reluctant to disclose how much I drink because there are some people out there, like doctors, who might infer that I have a drinking problem. I do not have a drinking problem. I don’t crave liquor in the morning, and I don’t drink to silence demons, and I don’t require alcohol to fall asleep at night. I drink mostly because going out to bars and shows usually seems like the most fun thing to do. If I’m addicted to anything, it’s to having fun. And in my time on earth, drinking has proved to be a very effective way for me to have fun. If I had to honestly answer that doctor’s-office question about how many drinks I consume in a week, most weeks it’d be in the 25–30 range. On a Christmas-break type of week, we might be getting up into the low 40s.

“I’ll tell you how you could lose a little weight,” a health-conscious friend said recently. “You’re not gonna like it. You just have to drink less beer. If you stopped drinking beer, I bet you’d lose 20 pounds.”

But that gets into my whole theory about the tyranny of healthy living. Stay with me for a second. There’s that story from World War II about Winston Churchill’s advisers coming to him and suggesting that Britain cut funding for the arts in order to pay for the war. Churchill refused, saying, “Then what are we fighting for?” — the idea being that a country without the arts is hardly a country worth saving.

That’s roughly the way I feel about my lifestyle as it relates to fitness. Yes, I want to be healthy, look good, live long. I want to win the war. But I’m not willing to cut funding for delicious pies and cakes. If I can’t drink nine beers on a Friday night and stop by the gyro truck on the way home, that sounds like a shitty life to me. I’d rather be a fat fuck than give up those freedoms.

I realize, of course, that there’s a middle ground. I’m not an unreasonable man. I’m willing to make concessions in order to lose weight and gain muscle. I’m willing to eat healthier dinners. I’m willing to curb some of my drinking, or drink a different kind of alcohol. I’m willing to exercise more strenuously.

I’m willing, in other words, to get the help I need. So recently — more recently than that bad day at the gym — I looked up some people in town who know about this sort of thing.

My first stop was Biofit, a fitness operation at 12076 Blue Valley Parkway, in Overland Park. Its founders, Scott Heffner and Justin Prier, are certified personal trainers. Prier is also a physical therapist who favors a neuromuscular approach, which is unusual in the profession. (Heffner and Prier initially bonded over a shared enthusiasm for muscle-activation techniques, which identify and eliminate muscular issues that cause restricted motion, pain and injury.) Biofit’s comprehensive approach makes it attractive to athletes seeking rehabilitation and endurance training — it counts Chiefs players, college tennis players, high school golfers and Olympic athletes among its clients.

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But Biofit also works for a schmo like me, who wants to ease a trouble spot and is looking for a little guidance on better workouts and nutrition. The process is necessarily slow-going. I didn’t do a lick of exercise on my first visit. Prier and I talked over my goals (“Look kinda better with my shirt off”), and then he took me through a range-of-motion assessment. (Prices run anywhere between $45 and $99 per session.)

“If some part of your body is weak, other parts of your body are compensating for it,” Prier told me. “So one of the first things we do with clients is a range-of-motion assessment to see where their deficits are.”

It was a simple evaluation. For example, I was asked to turn my left hip a certain way, then turn my right hip a certain way. As I complied, Prier noted the differences. Among other things, it was revealed that I have some seriously bizarre deficits in my left ankle; it moves about half as well as my right ankle, and I could barely balance myself for longer than a few seconds on my left leg. “So when we start working you out, we take those irregularities into account,” Prier said.

The next step: muscle-activation technique, which seeks to jump-start those weak muscles. So Prier had me lie down so that he could target those nerve and muscle areas by massaging them or having me resist pressure he applied to those spots. The idea is that this sends signals to the spinal cord that those muscles haven’t been working properly, which in turn awakens them.

From there, the actual workout begins. Biofit is big on resistance training, but the regimens are tailored to the clients’ personal goals. “It’s just a matter of you telling us what you want — whether you want to run a marathon or you want a six-pack or bigger muscles,” Prier said. “We’ll figure it out. You just show up, and we’ll take you through the workouts and get you there.”

Prier also continually stressed the importance of nutrition, an ongoing source of confusion for me. On my third visit to Biofit, I was given a body-fat-percentage test. Heffner took my height (6 feet 1 inch) and weighed me (191 pounds), then used an instrument that grabbed at and measured the excess skin in various parts of my body. Then that information went into a formula, which determined that I have 16.2 percent body fat — 159 pounds of lean mass, 31 pounds of fat — which, I was surprised to learn, falls in the “healthy” range. We agreed that 10 percent body fat, which would drop me to about 180 pounds, would be a reasonable goal to set.

I then took the opportunity to pepper Heffner with a variety of nutrition-related questions.

How many calories per day should I be shooting for?

“For you, at first at least, I’d recommend 3,000 calories per day, assuming you’re engaged in moderate activity — exercising three to five days a week. Of that food, I’d recommend 30 percent proteins, 20 percent fats and 50 percent carbohydrates. And obviously, it’s important to remember that 3,000 calories of fish, chicken, brown rice and sweet potatoes is different than 2,800 calories of pizza.”

What’s an ideal breakfast?

“There’s that saying that you should eat like a king in the morning, a prince in the afternoon and a pauper at night. And I think that’s mostly true. So for breakfast, maybe crack four eggs, do just the egg whites for two of them, have a couple pieces of wheat toast, maybe some potatoes or hash browns, maybe a little turkey breast.”

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What’s a good lunch?

“Today I had boneless, skinless baked chicken, Broccolini florets and roasted garlic couscous that I made at home. Smoothies and shakes are good for lunch if you don’t love vegetables. Throw in an apple, banana, berries, spinach — you can put a lot of greens and veggies into a smoothie, and the taste is masked by the fruits.”

What’s a good dinner?

“Maybe a salad with some grilled shrimp or salmon, an oil-based dressing, and some tomatoes and peppers.”

Is it better to eat a bunch of little meals throughout the day or eat three square meals?

“Personally, I prefer eating throughout the day because it stabilizes the blood sugar and keeps you from having that huge desire to gorge at dinner.”

What’s the healthiest kind of alcohol to drink?

“Straight alcohol — the less mixers the better. Think about a margarita. They add all kinds of sugars and juices to those things on top of the alcohol. You have a big margarita at dinner and you’re adding 1,000 calories to the meal.”

Is vodka healthier than whiskey?

“Not in any way that significantly matters.”

Are there any especially effective ways to lose weight in my bulging stomach?

“You really can’t target body-fat loss. When you start losing weight, you lose all over. But if you have more weight to lose in your stomach, it’ll seem like it’s harder to lose. That’s because there was more there to begin with, so it takes longer to lose it.”

Hard truths. But on my way out the door, Heffner did give me one bit of advice with a little sunshine in it: “I think the 80–20 rule is a pretty good one to go by,” he said. “Stay locked into these healthy foods about 80 percent of the time, and the other 20 percent of the time, you don’t have to feel guilty about going out for pizza and beers. You can be realistic about this stuff. You know, I’m not going to go to my daughter’s birthday party and not eat the cake.”

Before he was a personal trainer, Derek McQuinn played college football at MidAmerica Nazarene University. He transitioned from that into a career on the professional wrestling circuit. He went through the Harley Race Wrestling Academy in Eldon, Missouri, and spent seven years knocking around the Midwest as “Dangerous Derek.” He even made it onto a couple of WWE events, playing the bad guy against the league’s superstars. His signature hold was the “Spear of Mass Destruction.”

About a year ago, McQuinn relocated from the Lake of the Ozarks to Kansas City, where he was raised. He trains clients at Excel Wellness Studio, at 11705 College Boulevard, in Overland Park. His fitness philosophy is, not surprisingly, informed by intense sports.

McQuinn is one of about 60 or so “masterminds,” personal trainers in the United States who have studied under Todd Durkin, a San Diego–based strength-and-conditioning expert who has coached elite football players such as Drew Brees, LaDainian Tomlinson and Aaron Rodgers. Durkin’s philosophy — and, by extension, McQuinn’s — is to “train the Joes like the pros.”

“The best-conditioned people in the world are professional athletes,” McQuinn told me. “So why not train the way they do? The idea is that you can simulate those guys’ workouts without doing 500-pound lifts. The reason they have bodies like they do is because they’re using all their muscles when they work out.”

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What that translates to are workouts with an emphasis on core strength, balance, joint integrity, hand-eye coordination — and very little rest. Our first session went from a five-minute treadmill walk to rounds of jumping jacks to “dirty dogs” (a crouching thing in which you bend your leg out like a dog urinating) to tossing around a medicine ball to walking lunges with dumbbells to a bench press on a Swiss ball to — I honestly can’t remember because I had to cut short our first session when I started seeing stars. (I don’t recommend skipping breakfast before attempting a Todd Durkin–inspired workout.) I plopped down on the closest exercise bike and asked for a minute. Then I went into the restroom because I thought I was going to vomit. But instead I just sat in there trying to lose the dizziness. I glanced at the mirror. My face looked like a glass of milk.

That experience and the subsequent soreness served to hammer home just how little my bullshit workout routine had been doing for my body as a whole. It had basically called out a number of muscles that probably assumed they would never be asked to function in any meaningful way.

At our second session ($55–$65, depending on the package), McQuinn took me through what a normal person, a person whose body was not in a state of prolonged atrophy, would have completed on a first visit. He’s a fan of TRX, suspension-training products made by a company born of the Navy SEALs. Essentially, you use some simple tools along with your body weight to achieve better results than you get from exercise machines. I simulated pushups while standing by tying a cord to a bar above and behind me, lowering myself and pushing myself back upright. Toward the end, I placed around my waist a gigantic rubber band, which was tied to a pole, and then I ran forward as far as I could before being pulled backward. McQuinn likes to stick to a formula of threes: Do a “push” exercise (like a pushup), a “pull” exercise (a pullup), and then something for the lower body (a squat or a lunge).

Again, all this was done at a pretty rapid-fire pace. That’s part of McQuinn’s philosophy of efficiency. “To me, it makes more sense to do five minutes of intense exercise, where your whole body is working, than do 40 easy minutes on the treadmill,” he said. “Plus, at least to me, it’s way more fun to use these fitness toys and techniques that a quarterback would use to train than to sit at some exercise machine.”

I suppose it might go without saying that I’m not a particularly flexible person. There has never been a time in my adult life when I’ve been able to touch my toes. Also, the idea of sitting in a roomful of attractive women and looking like a gangly, sweaty, uncoordinated clown has never seemed like a confidence-forward way to spend an hour. So I have resisted yoga, even as more and more people I know and respect have embraced it. The way I see it, if I’m going to fail at exercise, I’ll fail in the privacy of my home or at the gym at the most off-peak hours available.

But the point of this project was to get me out of my comfort zone, so I scheduled a private session with a yoga instructor at Maya Yoga, 215 West 18th Street, in the Crossroads District ($75 for an hour). I figured such a consultation would limit my humiliation to one witness, as opposed to an entire class. But the minute I showed up, I saw that my plan was ill-conceived: The instructor, a woman named Jordan Ryan, was preposterously beautiful. And now there was nowhere for me to hide.

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Ryan practices a style of yoga called Ashtanga, so that’s what we did during our session. “There are hundreds of different styles of yoga,” she told me. “You just have to find what works for you.”

She gravitated toward Ashtanga, in part, because of its discipline. (The practice asks you to attend a session six days a week; Saturdays, full moons and new moons are days of rest.)

“I like that it’s kind of humbling — it makes you look at yourself, and it’s not something you can easily flirt with,” Ryan said. “It’s a style that asks you to be equally strong and flexible. I think some people might argue that it requires too much exertion, but for me it’s the perfect balance.”

Ryan gave me a little background about the lineage and history of Ashtanga, but she didn’t push the spirituality aspect of yoga too hard. I asked her if she thought it possible for somebody who doesn’t buy into the mystical-spiritual side of yoga to get a lot out of it. “Absolutely,” she said, “anyone can benefit from linking movement and breath. That’s what’s so wonderful about yoga, that you can take it however deep you want to take it and make your own relationship with it.”

I’m still a little unclear on how easy Ryan took it on me. Afterward, she said I had “good body awareness,” but I’m pretty sure she was just being polite. More than a few times, she demonstrated fairly simple-looking poses that I nevertheless struggled to re-create with my own limbs and torso. Imagine sitting next to somebody who draws a rectangle on a sheet of paper and asks you to do the same. Now imagine that you respond by drawing a squiggly triangle. That’s about what I was doing half the time.

Still, even though I sweated through my shirt — and beads ran down my face and splattered onto the borrowed yoga mat — Ashtanga seemed like an activity I could get reasonably better at with a little perseverance. Only once, during a forward fold, did I feel like I might tip over and pass out. You will not faint in front of this woman, I repeated to myself. You will not faint in front of this woman. So I did at least find a mantra.

At the end of a yoga session, you lie on the mat on your back, in silence, for five minutes, spacing out, letting your mind wander. “Some people really struggle with this part — the sitting still and being silent,” Ryan said. At that, at least, I was an old pro.