Vinnie Tortorich

That title is absolute bullshit. I cringed when I wrote it. It’s like something you’d read on a magazine cover. You know, to sell magazines. You’ve seen the ads to lose 50 pounds by taking Hydroxycut and such. Get great abs overnight, rock-hard gluts in minutes a day…I could go on and on. A couple of years ago I read a book. The title read like one of these “too good to be true” magazines. It was by first-time author Timothy Ferriss. It had a catchy title, the 4-hour Workweek. I read it cover-to-cover. I thought he had some OK advice. Can I tell you something? If a normal person tried one-tenth of his suggestions, they’d be fired on the spot. A big company would have security escort you out. I’ve never actually had a job before where I worked for anyone else. I’ve always worked for myself. I’d be willing to bet nobody in their right mind would put up with that. If any of our readers would like to try it out, I’d like to know what would happen if you walked in and asked to work from home. I told you that to tell you this. It seems like our friend Timothy Ferriss is at it again. Now he’s a fitness expert. You know, like Perez Hilton. Remember when he jumped on the fitness bandwagon with FitPerez.com? I still like the ring to that. I learn so much sitting at the feet of the master. But I digress. So Timothy Ferriss has a new book. It’s called the 4-Hour Body. Usually I put a link to these books. Well, fuck him, I’m not putting one. While waiting for a client to change, I skimmed a few pages of the book. This joker claimed he could put on 30 pounds of lean muscle mass in one month. I’m no Perez Hilton, I have a degree from a major medical university. There I go with my digressions again. I doubt you can put 30 pounds of lean muscle mass on in such a short amount of time. If you want something for nothing, I guess you can go buy the book. It’s nothing more than a glorified fitness magazine with hollow promises. By the way, I want to thank my good friend Bill Meadows. He’s a loyal blog reader. He sent along a Sophia Loren picture I didn’t have. I’ll post that picture again at the end of this blog. If you can find a rare Sophia Loren photo, please send it along. It would be appreciated.

Everybody seems to have something unusual or special about themselves. In most cases it’s not anything so special that you can make money from it or anything. We all seem to do something well. Many years ago I had a roomate named Kristine. She was pretty much a bikini model. For some reason we always think bikini models are only good at wearing a bikini and having their picture taken. She had one of those weird talents. She was good at painting. I’m not talking about painting on a canvas. I’m talking painting the interior of our apartment. All she needed was some masking tape, a brush and some paint. She was as good as any professional. I also have something I do well. I’m able to drive very long distances and stop only for gas. I’ve gone 40-plus hours with no sleep. Somehow I’m just as fresh on the 40th hour as I am on the first hour. Recently I drove from California to Louisiana for the holidays. The trip was just short of 30 hours. I showed up just in time for the beginning of a New Orleans Saints football game. I sat down and watched the entire game before going to sleep. In total, I was up for almost 40 hours. A few days later, I turned around and drove back to Los Angeles, staying awake for a similar amount of hours. The question I’ve gotten over the years has been some variation of “Boy, you sure must drink a lot of coffee right?” Oddly enough, I wouldn’t drink anymore coffee than I do on a regular basis. I probably drink less. I have learned a few tricks to staying awake and alert. I don’t eat a meal. That causes more blood to pool in the stomach for digestion. This makes me feel sluggish and tired, so I don’t do it. My second rule is no sugar. In the interest of full disclosure, what I do eat is almonds and peanuts. Every couple of hours I nibble on either or both. This keeps hunger away and the lack of sugar keeps me from getting a rush then subsequent crash. I’ve been doing this for well over 30 years. It hasn’t failed me yet. I told you that to tell you this. I love sugar. I think I love it more than most. There were many sugarcane farmers in my family. I grew up in sugarcane fields. In the fall, when the cane starts to ripen, I would always have a pocket knife on me to make sure I can get the sugar from the tap, so to speak. Another problem I have with sugar is I don’t get fat from it. The reason is I do at least 20 hours of aerobics per week. That’s a slow week. When I’m training for an ultra event, I easily go over 30 hours. There’s no incentive for me not to eat sugar. My teeth are healthy, I don’t have a diabetes problem, so why shouldn’t I enjoy sugar on a daily basis? But I digress. Because I drove all the way to Louisiana without sugar, then all the way back to California, I went several days without the sweet nectar that I love. You know what? I’ve never felt better. I wasn’t getting the afternoon lull, where I feel like I need to take a nap. The arthritis in my right shoulder just didn’t seem to hurt as much. I seemed to recover from workouts quicker. There’s no shortage of literature condemning sugar. I constantly tell my clients not to touch the stuff. Without an insane amount of aerobics, you will gain weight from it. And yes, it can rot your teeth, unless you are a flossing and brushing freak like me. Will I stay off of sugar forever? Probably not. But I do see positive effects from having a lot less of it. I’ve found good reason to at least keep it to a bare minimum.

Are we becoming the Huffington Post or what? My friend Dean Lorey, a Hollywood writer and producer, once again has penned a blog post for us to enjoy.

-Vinnie

It’s pretty well known how much I hate to lift weights but, just for the sake of clarity, imagine the cutest yellow duckling you ever saw being crushed under a 40 pound barbell. It’s going to die unless someone lifts that weight off its fragile body. If I’m the “someone,” then I guess you and I know what we’re having for dinner that evening. That said, after losing a bunch of pounds and getting into decent shape, I decided to try and put on some muscle. Why? Two reasons. I heard something about having more muscle and less body fat increases your metabolism and helps you stay thin and I also thought I might look better. So sue me. So I lifted weights on my own for a couple weeks and then I broke down and booked Vinnie to come to my house and help me figure out a routine. You can do that too, by the way, at least if you live in the LA area. I think you just have to send him an email or something. His address is vinnietortorich@msn.com. Anyway, Vinnie shows up and asks some questions about what I want to do and I tell him I’m only going to commit 20 minutes a day to this, three days a week. So he gives me some exercises that he says will give me “bang for my buck.” By the way, if he comes to your house you’re going to have to suffer through a lot of Vinnie-isms. The next time I hear him say “I told you that to tell you this,” I’m going to go on a killing rampage at a Wal-Mart. Which reminds me, half the time he says “I told you that to tell you this” I don’t see any connection between the two thoughts. Truth be told, I think he uses that sentence in place of paragraphs, which seem to mystify him. So anyway, I do his exercises. For the record, they are bench presses, lat pulls (I don’t know if I’m remembering the name right) and squats, along with a few arm curls. And, as I do them, here’s what I realize — he’s flat, fucking wrong. I know these are going to be useless because I can do them easily and with no pain. What I don’t realize is that, the next day, I am going to be brutally sore and wishing for death. But, eventually, the soreness subsides and now I’m just kind of into the routine. Actually, I’ll go further. This is something probably all of you experience all the time, but it’s new to me. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually look forward to the days when I’m going to lift weights. Hell, I’ll go further than that (God hates a coward, right?) I even get disappointed on the days when I can’t. Gotta take every other day off — something about giving your muscles time to recover. I read that somewhere. I should probably ask Vinnie. By the way, I just now realized that I never got around to the point of this blog, which was going to be about how I discovered my heart problems. So since I’ve completely boned it, I’ll go ahead and mention one last useless thing. Since Vinnie mentioned that my buddy Damon Wayans told me “I’m going on the Dean Diet” I now feel like I’m now on the verge of untold riches and superstardom as the planet’s newest diet guru — I mean, that Atkins guy did pretty good, right? — except I can’t quite figure out how to turn it into an entire book, because it can be summed up in just one sentence: “Eat two vegetarian meals a day and one with chicken or fish.” If I can just figure out how to sell that for $12.95 a pop, dinner’s on me. And I can tell you what we’ll be eating. Duckling. But only for the protein. Gotta feed those muscles. Oh, and don’t forget to e-mail Vinnie at vinnietortorich@msn.com if you are in need of a trainer.

I spent the weekend in Carlsbad, California. It’s a beautiful community in the deepest, darkest region of southern California. It’s between San Diego and Laguna Niguel. If you’re planning a visit, I highly recommend it. It’s late January, the weather was a perfect 72 degrees. I think I got a little sun. I try not to piss off the readers from Minnesota. Usually at this time of year I’m not down in places like Carlsbad. I’m usually up in Mammoth Lakes. I had a reason to be there. I was there for a marathon. Although I do travel with clients sometimes, it’s not often that I share a room with a client. But in this case I did. It was my girlfriend Serena Scott Thomas. I told you that to tell you this. Serena completed her second marathon. The first one was 11 months ago in Pasadena. She ran this one in 4:16:06, which was more than 22 minutes shaved off her previous time. That’s impressive for a second time out. But Serena’s story is more amazing than that. When we first started dating, she had just completed two half marathons. She was ready to turn it up a bit. So she did what most people would do in this situation. She hired a coach. She turned to a company called Phase 4. This is a hotsy-totsy company in Santa Monica. They have everything from on-staff physical therapists to fitness trainers. By the way, if you ever walk into a training facility that has trainers, you can almost bet there’s an insurance scam going on (in my opinion). One night when I went to pick Serena up for a date, I was reading her training schedule on her fridge. When she came out to meet me in the kitchen, she asked what I thought of the program. I said, “I think it looks great, but there’s a typo. What they want you to do here is humanly impossible.” They wanted her to stay at her anaerobic threshold for 15 minutes for three times in one workout, plus repeat it twice a week. Serena looked at me and said, “You think I’m a wimp?” I said, “No, you can’t do it. Not you, not anyone. It can’t be done.” By definition, you can’t do it. To understand why she even tried it, you’d have to know she came from a military background. Her dad was in the British military. He was a real-life Tom Cruise. The only difference was, her dad was better looking. One day, he didn’t make it back from a mission. He died a hero. But I digress. Serena, being the daughter of man who knew how to push the envelope, tried to do the impossible. She ended up injuring her foot and ankle. For a while, she thought she’d never be able to run a marathon in her life. You know what? She crossed the line today for a second time. I couldn’t get to the finish line so I watched from afar. She did a great job. Just like Dean Lorey, I’m calling her out. I expect 1,000 to 1,500 words on her experience. I love personal stories. I don’t write about Serena much. You may want to look back at an earlier post, like the one about the question “Do these jeans make my ass look fat?”

When I was really young, before my sixth birthday, I had to have surgery. It repaired my hearing. Turns out, I was legally deaf. Some sort of buildup couldn’t drain. The surgery was a complete success. But it left me with a different problem. I had a severe speech impediment. By the time I was in second or third grade, I had become the whipping boy at school. Everyone took shots at me. I was easy pickings when it came to goofing on my voice. Although my name was Vinnie, the kids never called me that. They called me Vinna. That’s what my name sounded like when it came out of my mouth. They would say it as if they were a person who was severely handicapped. Quite frankly, that’s what I sounded like. Here’s the kicker. As many of my readers may know, I went to a private Catholic school. I was taught by nuns. The nuns generally took pride in joining in on the fun. They would often make fun of me in front of other kids. One nun referred to me as Marble Mouth. I was also told to swallow the grits I was eating before I spoke. I couldn’t stand those sadistic bitches. I hated my life as a kid. I was goofed on by fellow students and the only people I could count on, these “Daughters of God,” were even worse. Going to school and getting home was no better. The private school shared a school bus with the public school system. Those kids also took great pride in messing with me on the bus. I wanted to fight back, but I couldn’t. I would only get my ass kicked by groups of kids. I would often dream that I would become a superhero like Superman or Batman or any of the others from comic books. The only problem was, even at the ripe old age of 10, I realized superheros were only cartoon characters. I told you that to tell you this. One Saturday I was flipping through the channels on the television. Back then, we only had three channels. I stopped at one of the three because I saw something interesting. There was a man dressed in a tight black T-shirt with black pants. He had bulging biceps and triceps. He had a huge vein running over the top of his bicep. I was mesmerized. This man looked like a real superhero. His name was Jack LaLanne.

He would lift weights up and down. At the ripe old age of 9, I realized that by pushing weights up and down, I too could look like a superhero. I watched Jack every single Saturday. As he described proper pushups and situps, I listened closely. I found a piece of pipe that I would hang bricks off of the ends and copy what my hero had done. Every now and then the brick would fall and pinch my fingers, causing me to bleed. That pain was nothing compared to the pain I felt in school every day. I continued to exercise. Jack mentioned running, so I did that too. When Jack talked about jumping jacks, I did those as well. I thought jumping jacks were named after him. He said do pullups, I did pullups. I did it all. By the time I was 10 or 11, not only did I have physical power, but I also felt empowered. No longer could these sadistic bitches get to me. No longer could the kids bother me. I learned how to kick ass and take names. Jack gave me something more. He taught me a way of life that I’ve never abandoned. At 48 years old, I still follow those teachings. I always got a kick out of the fact that Jack worked well into his 90s. I love the fact he never abandoned the truth. He never told lies. He never told people they can get in shape in five minutes. I always felt like Jack was a friend, even though I never met him. A man that I never met changed my life as a young kid. It makes me wonder how many other people he helped. I know it’s got to be in the tens of thousands. I grieve with the rest of the world now that he’s gone. I have a feeling he’ll live on forever through his teachings. I just want to say thanks to a man who meant so much to me, even though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him.

“I’m going to help you help yourself.” – Jack LaLanne

Years ago, I read a story about a strange event that I’m pretty sure went on in Spain. If I’m wrong about the place, we’ll say Spain anyway. Let’s face it, this sounds like something that would happen in Spain. There’s a thing called cow lifting. This is an event where men actually lift on their shoulders a full grown cow. I guess you could say it’s a pretty impressive trick when you think about it. Come on, let’s face it, cows ain’t light. But then the piece went on to explain how these men lift these cows. They start off when the cow is still a calf. The men walk into the barn on day one, put the calves on their shoulders and squat up and down several times. The next day, they go back in and repeat the same activity. This goes on day in and day out. I guess you could say two things happen. First off, the young calf gets used to someone handling it every day. They get familiar with the routine. As the cows get heavier, the men become stronger. Once the cow reaches 500, or even 800 pounds, the human can squat down and lift the cow off the ground. Being in the health field, I thought the story was fascinating back when I read it. I wanted to put it to the test. It was the late 1970s at the time. Though I lived out in the country and there were cows available for lifting, I would have to find one right after it was born. The other problem was I would have to explain to the farmer what I was doing in their field. I had two problems too difficult to overcome, especially since I was in school and playing sports. So I figured I could come up with a simple test to prove the theory. So I got on the floor and did 45 pushups. I was in good shape. I could have done another five. I didn’t want to strain myself, so I left some gas in the tank. I told myself every evening after dinner I would go into my room and do one more pushup than I had done before. That I did. Before long I was well over 50. Another week passed, and I was over 60. My goal was to do 100 correct pushups without stopping. I wanted to use the military form. I reached 100 with ease using the cow lifting method set forth by the Spaniards (or whoever it was). Next I went to 110, then 120. I made it all the way to 130. Once, as part of a $20 bet, I did 140-plus without stopping. At that point I lost interest in doing pushups. But there didn’t seem to be an end in sight. It went from anaerobic to aerobic exercise in a way. Cut to several years later, after my football days at Tulane. Weight loss became a priority. I wanted to get my six pack back. Instead of tons of situps, I knew from my study in anatomy and physiology that any simple hip flexor exercise that would cause my rectus abdominis to flex and lengthen over and over would give me the desired results once all the fat was gone. So once every other day I would do 100 situps. Once I lost most of the subcutaneous fat, I began to see the fruit of my labor. Then it happened again. I started reading something. It was in a magazine that talked about a guy who did 2,000 situps. I can’t remember how often he did it. But that was his magical number. I thought back to the Spaniards and their bovine practice. I also thought about my own laboratory back in my bedroom, where I put the theory to the test. Could I possibly use the same approach? Could I do 2,000 nonstop situps? I was willing to try. On day one, I did 100 situps. On day two, I did 110. I added 10 situps every day without fail. Before long I was at 500 situps a day. With ease I made it to 1,000, then 1,500. Soon I was at 2,000 with no problem. Well, there was one problem. Once I got into the high numbers I would often wear a brush burn into my tailbone. That was always fun, especially taking a shower after I was done. Nothing like fresh water on a brush burn. I told you that to tell you this. I was having lunch today with one of the greatest authors this country has ever known. He’s also a new contributor to this blog. He’s my good friend, Dean Lorey. By the way, I have a funny story about Dean. He’s lost so much weight that he was visiting a celebrity friend, Damon Wayans, and the star noticed Dean had lost a lot of weight. Dean told him he lost the weight by eating lots of vegetables. He showed up at his house days later, and found vegetables everywhere. That’s right, he went on a Dean Lorey diet. But I digress. Dean was telling me over lunch about this new app called Two Hundred Situps. Put in the words Two Hundred, not 200, if you’re looking for it (Or check out the previous link on the Apple iTunes Store). From what I can tell from the app, it’s like lifting a cow. And that ain’t no bull.