Grab your sneaks and Bengay; we’re training with trainers. It’s one thing to have them work with you one-on-one or to take their classes, but keeping up with fitness pros while they do their own workout is … well, painful. And I have the sore muscles to prove it.
I usually take TRX, boot camp and Jazzercise (a girl’s gotta dance) to stay in shape. Teaching fitness classes twice a week helps, but I often spend more time checking students’ form than working out. I suspect the same is true for other instructors, so I teamed up with a couple in the Washington area for a peek at their routines.
Personal trainer Abe Cruz has a pretty hectic schedule with 20 clients and four classes a week at Crunch Fitness downtown in Washington and UFC Gym in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. Still, he manages to fit in two workouts a day: 30 to 45 minutes of running in the morning and an hour or more of weightlifting in the afternoon.
“You have to find time to train yourself,” Cruz said. “How can you teach other people if you can’t teach yourself? It’s my time to clear my head, set personal fitness goals and try to achieve them.”
To prevent muscle fatigue from overtraining, Cruz focuses on two muscle groups a day: Mondays and Thursdays he does chest and back, Tuesdays and Fridays are for legs and triceps, and Wednesdays and Saturday are biceps and deltoid days.
Sounds hard-core, but how bad could it be? Famous last words.
It was a Saturday, so after a five-minute warmup on the treadmill, Cruz and I started one of four circuits he’s designed to work shoulders and biceps. Each circuit consists of two or three exercises, such as deltoid cable raises and alternating dumbbell curls.
Some exercises called for what are known as drop sets, where you perform an exercise for a set number of repetitions and then reduce the weight for the next set. (People often reduce both the weight and the reps, but not Cruz.)
We did four rounds of each circuit before moving on to the next set of exercises, with no more than 60 seconds of rest in between each round. Fun times. My arms started to quiver on the fourth round of overhead shoulder presses.
“Four is a nice even number, and it gets the job done. Three rounds in, you’re working hard. But by round four, you’re really pushing yourself,” Cruz tells me.
He’s right about that fourth round, but few people can carve out nearly two hours in their day to lift, which is about how long it took us to complete the entire workout. In a pinch for time, Cruz suggests paring down the number of circuits. But if you can spare an hour or two, I highly recommend the full routine.
A glutton for punishment, I met up next with Neechie Greer, co-founder of FITT Bootcamp in Washington, for a shorter but no less intense workout.
Greer teaches 10 to 15 classes a week in addition to training 10 to 15 client sessions at corporate gyms and martial-arts school BETA Academy in the District.
Much like me, she gets in a workout while teaching and by attending classes at BETA.
“I train my clients a lot tougher when it’s my workout day, so a lot of them have grudges at this point,” Greer said. “I build their programs with the same philosophy I use for myself, so it’s perfect for me to jump into the workout.”
The warm-up included combination moves — plank, push-up, followed by a burpee.
Some of the exercises were defensive, including a rotational chest pass that involved hoisting a medicine ball over my shoulder while lying down.
The idea, she said, was to “imagine throwing someone off of you as they attempted to pin you down.” After two rounds, I was ready for a match.
Most of the hour Greer and I spent together involved a series of exercises on a TRX suspension system, a set of straps with handles that fasten to the ceiling.
Using the weight and angle of our bodies to control the resistance, we did suspended chest presses and so-called power pulls — holding both straps with one hand while leaning back on your heels and then rotating the free hand up to the straps.
“Focusing on push-and-pull exercises is a great way to achieve balance in your workouts,” Greer said. “And that balance is at the heart of my training and how I train others.”
