Punching away the pounds

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Rafael Bustillo returns to the Exchange-based boxing club on McDermot Avenue after running two laps around the building. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS )

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Trainer Sue Scott (centre) watches Irishelle Nollido and right Ken Chisholm's medicine ball technique. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

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Pan Am Boxing Club's gruelling Fight Club program trains participants for the fitness fight. Here trainer Harry Black gives Agata Ploszanski some pointers. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS )

CLUBS. We’ve all got them. Some of us join book clubs or wine clubs or spend our weekends in night clubs or comedy clubs. In school, you could join the chess or debating club. Still others have a love affair with their golf clubs.

Me? I’m joining Fight Club.

No, not Fight Club as in the 1999 movie, in which a bunch of guys meet in the basement of a bar and beat the tar out of each other.

Pan Am Boxing Club’s Fight Club is a new eight-week, high-intensity, no-holds-barred, high-octane, pedalto- the-metal, pump-you-up program designed to get 33 participants into the best shape of their lives.

I’m doing it because I like the challenge and competition but also because I have a love affair with the pecan buns at Einfeld’s Bakery at Victoria Beach, 16 oz. steaks and frosty cold lagers.

Over the next two months, we’ll be doing traditional boxing training, such as hitting the heavy bag, skipping rope, doing squats, hitting hand pads, crunching a variety of abdominal exercises and pounding out push-ups. Lots and lots of push-ups. But there will be a couple of key additions. First, we’ll be doing interval training — essentially working in 30 to 60 second sprints in whatever drill we’re doing — to pump up our heart rates and expand the amount of energy we’re expending. And wherever possible, weight will be added to our exercises, such as running stairs while carrying a medicine ball or hitting the heavy bag wearing wrist weights.

What could be more enjoyable?

To keep us on track, we’ve each been assigned a mentor, a Pan Am instructor whose job is to work with us when possible and provide extra motivation to reach our goals. We also have journals, in which we’re to diarize our workouts and our meals.

Fight Club was the brain child of Sue Scott, one of Pan Am’s trainers.

She said a lot of the conversation in the ladies’ locker room centred around disappointment about not being able to get over a training hump.

"One girl said to me, ‘I’m so frustrated. I work out all of the time and I eat pretty well but I can’t lose that last 10 pounds,’" she says. "She’s typical of about 90 per cent of the women here and I suspect a lot of the guys as well."

Leading the charge is Harry Black, the former Canadian middleweight boxing champion, who runs Pan Am.

He says all of the fighters — a bit of a misnomer, considering sparring isn’t a component of Fight Club — will be trained as if they’re coming out of the amateur ranks and aiming to turn pro.

Every week will be the equivalent of training for another fight.

"We’re going to start off with three to four rounds (the length of an amateur bout) but we’re looking to take people to 10- and 12-round fights," he says. "As your capacity increases, we’re going to increase your load."

Workouts aren’t restricted to the gym or the road, either. Contenders will have to battle the knife and fork, too. Black has outlawed any enriched food, an extensive list that includes desserts, soda and condiments such as mayonnaise. Must-have items include water, whole wheat bread, fruits, vegetables, lean ground beef and chicken.

He says one of society’s problems is that virtually all of us overeat, so we’ve been asked to replace our three squares a day with five to six "fuelling stops."

"We’re throwing out the whole definition of a meal, there are no more meals," he says. "For these eight weeks, food isn’t about taste or a social setting, it’s about fuelling your body so you can do that next workout and facilitate the weight loss you’re looking for."

Scott says even though the overarching theme of Fight Club is total health, most of the participants simply want to shed some pounds.

"Nobody has come in and said, ‘I want to get my resting heart rate to 80 (beats per minute),’" she says. "It’s, ‘I want to be a size 2 or a size 4.’" Agata Ploszanski, 35, a mother of two and a Pan Am member for nearly a year, says she signed up because she liked not only the challenge but the accountability aspect of mentors and diaries.

"Doing it on my own, I find I don’t have enough discipline," she says. "I like it when discipline is forced upon me. I don’t have a lot of fear. I love when I’m signed up and committed."

Her goal is to boost her fitness so she can drop 30 pounds. While that might sound like a lot, she feels it’s attainable when broken down to losing three to four pounds per week.

"I’d like to get more toned and ripped after all this," she says. "I want to be proud when my ‘after’ picture is taken that my weight loss wasn’t through pills or a weird program, it was plain working your ass off."

Black says Fight Club is all about discipline and the goal is for all of us to continue our reprogrammed ways after our final weigh-in on Nov. 14.

"This isn’t just an eight-week program," he says. "People need to realize this is how you have to live your life if you really want to stay healthy. This isn’t a diet where you knock the weight off and put it back on again. You’re only going to keep your health if you work at it every day, not just in fits."

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca