Drop Dead Healthy

The Heart, Revisited

The Quest for the Perfect Workout

THE SOLUTION TO MY LACKLUSTER workout schedule, I decide, is to mix things up. Try new activities. Feed my short attention span a bit of aerobic variety. Fortunately, the number of workout options is stunning. It reminds me of my year of living biblically, with the hundreds of different denominations, each with fervent believers devoted to their leader.

So I try a bunch. I try a sadistic ballet-yoga-aerobics cocktail called Physique 57, favored by Kelly Ripa. I try plain old yoga. Then I try AntiGravity yoga, where you move through your poses in your own orange, cocoonlike hammock that hangs from the ceiling.

I take a class for new moms (and dads) called “Strollercise,” where I push Zane’s Maclaren stroller through Central Park while jogging, jumping, stretching, and getting stared at. I try CrossFit training, a high-intensity workout in a low-tech gym filled with barbells and medicine balls. Working out to exhaustion is encouraged. CrossFit’s mascot is named Pukey.

A trainer named Mark Merchant gives me the Roman Legionnaire’s Workout, which involves smashing logs in Central Park with a huge metal mallet. Typical feedback from passersby on the walk home: “Hey, are you Thor?”

And today, I’m trying another: pole dancing. As I mentioned early on, it’s the most popular class at my gym, so I figured I should check it out.

Before I begin, let’s get something straight: Pole dancing has nothing to do with stripping. Aside from the technicality that 95 percent of it takes place at strip clubs.

At least this is the position of pole-dancing evangelists. Pole dancing is an art form, like a vertical ballet. Or a sport, like gymnastics, only with more pelvic gyrations. But it’s not sleazy.

Their line of argument is a tad whitewashed, for sure. But after my pole-dancing session, I can say that the gist is true: Hanging and twirling on a pole will get your ventricles and atria pumping.

When I arrive, thanks to years of training as a sharp-eyed journalist, I observe that I’m the only man. Fifty women and me. This ratio turns out to be common in almost all my classes, not just those involving G-strings and erotic dance. When it comes to fitness, Americans like to reinforce stereotypes: Women prefer community. Men are rugged individualists.

The instructor, a Latina with close-cropped hair, takes us through a series of warm-up stretches and hip thrusts. Here’s where I expend a lot of energy trying not to act or feel creepy. I’m here as a professional, after all. This goal is made much more difficult by several factors. For instance, the instructor repeatedly yells phrases such as “really spread your legs!” Also the outfits don’t help. I try not to stare, but trying to avoid cleavage here is like trying to avoid old white guys on the Senate floor. It’s omnipresent.

After fifteen minutes of warm-up to, what else, Lady Gaga, we choose a pole. I’m alarmed to find out that we aren’t given our own individual pole. You share with three other dancers. I’m assigned to a pole in the corner with a trio of women, each one wearing a different-colored pair of high heels (red, black, and white).

Anna (red) is up first. She’s part Asian and part Swedish. Her T-shirt reads I HAVE A HEART-ON FOR PEACE.

She grabs the pole and does the back hook, the chair, the jump and slide, the fireman’s turn. She wraps her legs around the pole, she slides upside down, she arches her back.

Then she grabs a towel and wipes down the pole. Dr. Tierno would be proud.

My turn. I try to remember the tips from our instructor: “Keep your hips away from the pole when you’re climbing, because otherwise you just look desperate.” And “If you don’t have heels, remember to point your toes.”

I did my best, but as you might expect, my performance resembled a fourth-grade asthmatic trying to climb the rope in gym class.

“I’m impressed that you’re trying,” says Anna. I recognize the tone: It’s what I use when Lucas is trying to read a five-letter word.

“I think I got pole burn,” I say. I point to my red calf. Anna gives me a knowing nod.

“Look at this.” Anna points to her own legs, which are dotted with brown bruises. “You get used to it. I don’t even feel it anymore.”

Turns out Anna is a ringer. She’s president of the U.S. Pole Dance Federation and is organizing next month’s national championships. When she finds out I work at Esquire, she tells me that she’d love it if the magazine would cover the event. She writes down her phone number on a scrap of paper.

When I get home, I show Julie that I have gotten the digits of pole dancing’s most powerful official. “So proud of you!” she says.

The Goal

Friends keep trying to recruit me to their own fitness classes. “Oh, you will love Zumba.” Or hula hooping. Or faith-based aerobics, whatever that is.

Julie got me to attend a class at her gym. The teacher spent the class sitting comfortably in her chair at the front of the room and yelling at us to lift our glutes. I found it offensive. If you’re going to shout about glute-lifting, at least lift a glute or two yourself, right? The instructor’s obesity added to my skepticism.

The variety strategy is backfiring. It’s getting numbing instead of inspiring. It almost always boils down to moving your arms and legs in a room with mirrors.

I need another way to motivate myself to exercise. Maybe I need a goal. All my fitness books talk about goals. You need a goal, and preferably a publicly and loudly stated one, one whose failure results in high levels of humiliation. But what goal?

“Why don’t you do a triathlon?” Julie asks one night as we scrub our BPA-free dishes.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t seem so healthy.”

At the start of my project, I considered a triathlon but dismissed it. I’d even watched a few YouTube videos on triathlons, including one that purported to be a motivational video. It featured stumbling runners collapsing on the road and convulsing. There was a woman on a stretcher. With an IV in her arm. That kind of motivation does not work on me. When I watch Saw III, I don’t say to myself, “Hey, I really want to be chained up in a sociopath’s basement.” Same idea.

Though triathlons have an aura of fitness about them, I’m not sure they’re maximally healthy. Between 2006 and 2008, fourteen people died while doing triathlons, either from heart attacks or drowning. Triathletes abuse their joints. Extreme endurance sports, according to some studies, lower life spans. Or maybe these are just studies designed by lazy people to reinforce their choices.

But Julie pressed on.

“You don’t have to do the ones that make you vomit blood. You could do a smaller one.”

Maybe she had a point. A smaller race would still get me training. And also, I could tell my friends that, yes, I finished a triathlon, which is sort of the fitness equivalent of doing the haftorah at your bar mitzvah. It’d make a man of me.

When I looked online, I found hundreds of triathlons of varying lengths. Since their origins in 1902 in France, “tris,” as those in the know call them, have grown into a $500-million-per-year industry worldwide. (Incidentally, that first triathlon featured canoeing instead of swimming, which sounds much drier and more pleasant.)

Yes, there’s the famed Ironman triathlon—2.4 mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, twenty-six-mile run. But then there are also ones barely more strenuous than a jog around the block.

Julie’s right. I can do one. But which one? I was drawn to the triathlon that was conducted entirely indoors—treadmill, stationary bike, and lap pool. That seemed comfortable. But sadly, as we know, indoor exercise isn’t as healthy as outdoor exercise. I’d have to expose myself to the elements.

I found a race on Staten Island on June 5, just a couple of months away. It was eminently conquerable—twelve-mile bike ride, three-mile run, and quarter-mile swim in open water. It’s an oxymoronic challenge: a moderate extreme sport. My medical advisers were always yapping on about “everything in moderation.” So here it was, the healthiest triathlon possible.

The next day, I announced to Julie, my friends, and my sons: “I’m doing a triathlon.”

I call Julie’s friend Anna, a remarkable athlete and veteran of several triathlons. I tell her I’m joining her ranks and ask her for advice.

“I did a triathlon in early June,” she says. “The water is freezing. It’s horrible. I cried.”

That doesn’t sound moderate.

Fast and Furious

I’ve been reading Aesop’s fables to the boys. And I’ve developed a soft spot for the much maligned hare in the story of the tortoise and the hare.

(I’m also, by the way, a fan of the fox who rationalized that the out-of-reach grapes were sour. That was some good reframing, Fox.)

But back to the hare. The long-eared fellow might have been onto something—and not just because naps are healthy.

The hare’s method has advantages, especially when training for a triathlon. The hare was essentially doing what’s now known as High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Instead of jogging at 60 percent of your ability for forty-five minutes, you go at 100 percent for a mere thirty seconds. Then you stop and rest for a minute. Then sprint again. Then repeat eight times. Total time: twelve minutes. Or less, if you scale back on the rest periods.

It’s an astounding time-saver. And growing evidence shows it might be just as effective as long, moderate exercise. Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone, including the obese.

The catch is, it hurts. “There’s no free lunch,” Martin Gibala of McMaster University, one of the HIIT experts, told me. It’s akin to the Band-Aid Removal Preference Dilemma: Would you rather rip it off quickly (intense pain, but over in a flash)? Or pull it off slowly (wee bit of pain, but drags on much longer).

HIIT is the aerobic cousin of the slow-cadence weights workout I did with Adam Zickerman. But it has more studies to back up its big claims.

To take one of the most famous: In a 1996 study by Izumi Tabata, a researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Fitness and Sports, athletes spent twenty seconds huffing as hard as possible on a specially designed stationary bike, followed by a ten-second rest. They did this for a total of four minutes, four times a week. At month’s end, they showed amazing gains in their metabolism—more than those athletes who pedaled at a moderate pace for forty-five minutes per session (what’s known as steady-state exercise, with a whiff of condescension).

The benefits are many: raised endurance, lower blood sugar, improved lung capacity, and weight loss. HIIT seems to alter the metabolism and muscle structure, so you burn more calories throughout the day. The idea of HIIT has been around for decades, but in the last couple of years it has inched closer to the mainstream. (Tim Ferriss writes about it in The 4-Hour Body.)

Tony gave me a HIIT session today. We used a stationary bicycle, since running full-speed can be hard on the joints.

We cranked up the bike all the way.

“Now go as fast as you can!”

Tony once told me that in some L.A. gyms, people keep their faces deadpan like Buster Keaton. They don’t want to cause wrinkles.

But today, I needed to grimace. And grunt. And shut my eyes and rock my head back and forth like Stevie Wonder.

I’m doing HIIT only once a week. First, because there need to be more long-term studies—such as whether it prevents heart disease as effectively as normal exercise. And second, because it makes me nauseated.

Checkup: Month 18

Weight: 159

Push-ups till exhaustion: 100 (though admittedly with a few breaks)

Percentage of fruits and vegetables organic: 60

Days I activated Freedom software (prevents Internet access, thus lowering stress and improving concentration): 19

Days I rebooted my computer in order to short-circuit Freedom software: 15

My big accomplishment this month is that I set up an interview with Jack LaLanne. He’s ninety-six and still going. He’s not tugging seventy boats behind him as he swims across Long Beach Harbor, as he did on his seventieth birthday. But he’s still going.

The date has taken a while to nail down. He’s a busy man. When I first approached him, I got this e-mail from his assistant. “Jack has been in New Jersey all week, shooting a new juicer infomercial. We will get back to you next week. Healthfully, Claire.” As far as excuses go, a juicer commercial is in the top five I’ve ever received.

But now it’s all come together, and I’ve bought a plane ticket to see him at his home in Morro Bay, California. His house has two gyms and a swimming pool that he still uses every day.

I love researching LaLanne. I knew he was early on the fitness train, but I didn’t know what a rebel he was. “People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he said. “The doctors were against me. They said working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they’d lose their sex drive.”

He started out as a junk-food addict but had his Road-to-Damascus moment when he was fifteen and attended a health lecture. His diet from then on consisted of raw fruits, vegetables, fish, oatmeal, and egg whites—come to think of it, pretty much my diet. Our lifestyles are remarkably similar. Except he avoids coffee. Also, he used to drink a daily quart of blood. Oh, and the towing of the boats on his birthday thing.

His quotes are both hilarious and inspiring: “Fifteen minutes to warm up? Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry? ‘Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.’ No! He just goes out there and eats the sucker.” I printed that out and put it on my wall next to the passage from Carl Sagan.

Along with healthy eating and lots of exercise, the third pillar of Jack’s lifestyle is sleep. He goes to bed between 9 and 10 p.m. (though he is nearly a hundred years old, so I guess that’s not exactly a shocker). But it’s good motivation. I need to work on my nighttime health.