Are you tough enough?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/11/2015 (3949 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The motivational motto on the wall at Aspire Fitness reads, “Unless you puke, faint or die, keep going.”

Trainer Jeff Kearns, one of two fitness professionals who set the workouts at the south Winnipeg gym, thought the slogan provided too much wiggle room. So he decided to do some editing with a couple of pieces of duct tape.

Now it reads, “Unless you die, keep going.”

“Why should you stop if you puke or faint?” he reasoned. “Dying? That I can understand. I guess.”

That pretty much sums up the last two months of my life.

Five or six times a week, I’d walk into the gym and be made to feel like Norm from Cheers. Until I got my shoes on.

Then, for the next 60 to 90 minutes, the setting morphed into Survivor, where the exercises got increasingly more difficult and the number of reps became seemingly endless.

I learned quickly about “Aspire math,” which, as far as I can tell, isn’t taught in any school or university. Essentially, if you’ve got 100 heel touches to do — an abs exercise where you lie on your back and reach from side to side to touch your heels — you’ve actually got 200 reps, because you have to do both sides.

Kearns and fellow trainer Erica Wilken are not the drill-sergeant types who get in your face and scream. They offer polite, sometimes sarcastic, feedback on technique to make sure the exercises are done properly. They won’t stand right beside you the whole time, but they will notice if you try to cheat and slack off.

During slow periods, they monitor the workouts of one or two people; that number goes up to 20 or more during the gym’s peak times. Everybody’s workouts are different and are posted on an electronic board for all to see. While you need to be self-motivated, everybody knows there’s the potential for a little peer pressure. You know, the good kind.

I’m at the three-quarter mark of the newly launched (and named) Grit to Glory (a.k.a. G2G) program at Aspire, the male version of the hugely popular Push-ups to Pin-ups (P2P) program for women. As challenging as the early mornings and late evenings have been at the gym, it was the recommended Paleo diet that required the most attention.

The diet preaches natural foods that could either be grown or killed. So foods such as pastas, cereals, bread, cookies, dairy products and soft drinks — items that are typically produced in a factory — are out and fruit, vegetables, chicken, beef and fish are in.

It sounds harder than it is. In the morning, I eat scrambled eggs and drink a glass of almond milk, which I imagine is what a combination of chalk and Wite-Out would taste like. Or maybe paint.

Then I drink smoothies during the day with the odd piece of fruit thrown in. For dinner, I’ll grill beef, chicken or fish and cook some vegetables and wash it down with another glass of almond paint.

(Apparently, the definition of “kill” is open to interpretation. I told Penner proudly one day that I had “killed” a number of beers the night before but was informed that didn’t count as Paleo. When did killing become so literal?)

He says by this point in the program, I’ve been working out my upper and lower body with a whole range of exercises, some involving weights and others requiring to push or pull my own body weight. And every week, the exercises grow harder and the weights get heavier.

“We’re always building on what we’ve done in the past,” he said. “If you jumped in now, you’d struggle. It’s a progressive workout. We introduce exercises very strategically so later on we can build on them.”

Some of these exercises I’ve never seen before, such as the “leg press toss,” where you sit in the leg-press machine and push the sled into the air and then catch it on the way down. (Oh, and you do it, like, 100 times with 45 kilograms of weight.)

Then there’s the depth pushup. It starts like any old pushup, but it’s done between two weight benches or boxes. The goal is to explode up and land your hands on the benches, which are about half a metre above the ground, before returning to the start position. (Caution: you need to ensure you have enough room for this exercise because if you explode up and one of your elbows hits the bottom of a bench, the resulting bruise on your hip after you come crashing down will look as if you were hit with a cannonball.)

To make the food part more palatable, Aspire partnered with Supper Central, on McGillivray Boulevard, which prepares “Aspire Fitness-approved meals” that customers take home and cook. They make beef, pork, poultry, fish and bison entreés, along with side dishes.

“The idea is to show people you can have real food; you’re not eating like a rabbit. They’re tasty meals, meat and vegetables. You can feed them to the rest of the family and nobody will bat an eye,” he said.

Once the program is over, including the photo shoot for every “model,” there’s still another couple of weeks to go. The idea is to prevent a big letdown and to keep people working toward their goals.

The more they do that, the more they’ll be walking, talking billboards for the team at Aspire.

As long as they don’t die first.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca