Vinnie Tortorich

I got a call from my friend Katie the other day. I like Katie, she’s from small town Georgia. She’s highly competitive. Her sport is tennis. You can take everything I know about tennis and fit it on the sharp end of a needle. But that’s not the advice Katie was looking for. She just wants to stay in tip-top shape so she can continue to kick ass in the sport. I guess that’s where I come in handy. I told you that to tell you this. Katie’s questions concerned stretching. The first question was when to stretch. She said she had heard from some to stretch before, others to stretch after. She was right on both accounts. It’s good to warm up with stretching, but it doesn’t have to be a lot. The majority should come after exercise is done, during the cool down period. I was almost off the phone when she said something else. I almost thought she was kidding. She said, “I do about 10 seconds on each muscle after tennis and jogging.” I asked if she was kidding. “No, no one ever tells you how long to stretch,” she said. She was shocked when I said each stretch should be held at a minimum of one minute. I mentioned I hold stretches for three and four minutes when I have the time. She was surprised by this information. That’s why I figured if someone as fit as Katie didn’t know this, it might be a good idea to mention it on this blog. While I’m at it, if you have the time and the money for a yoga class, great idea. But as mentioned in this blog before, yoga won’t do much more than make you flexible. It’s not a fitness routine.

I had a lot going on in New Orleans throughout the 1980s and early 90s. I had one of the most popular fitness classes in town. I was the fitness coordinator for a prestigious private school. I had a popular radio talk show called Talking Fitness. And I had more private clients than I knew what to do with. I guess you could say I was hitting on all cylinders back then. At the height of it all, I decided to move to Los Angeles. The main reason I moved out West was because of the weather. But equally as important, I felt like I had a few tricks up my sleeve when it came to fitness. I figured Hollywood could use it. My biggest idea was to promote child fitness. In 1991, I was taking some big meetings with the likes of Disney and Nickelodeon. You know what? They listened. They all liked my ideas. They had me write proposals. Once they saw what I was proposing, I was laughed out of the building. They didn’t want anyone to tell their audience to go outside. They wanted kids sitting in front of a television. They also didn’t like the idea of telling kids not to eat sugar. The products they sold on Saturday morning cartoons were heavy in sugar. I tried my best to push these ideas. Nobody seemed to care about children and obesity at the time. I saw what was coming. I was in southern Louisiana before, and those kids were fat. We weren’t calling it an “epidemic” yet. I told you that to tell you this. If you read the previous blog, Pussification of a Nation 3 (Am I the only one who loves that title? I guess you’d have to know me to understand) you know I was pretty pissed off about Calabasas High School. I saw two P.E. teachers not exactly earning their pay. It was as if they could care less about these kids. My nephew Mike read the blog. He’s a contributor to this site. He told me about kids he heard about doing the same thing in Louisiana. We always hear about how there’s not enough money for schools. Does anyone even administer the President’s Challenge anymore? When I was in school you had P.E. every day. And you needed a damn good excuse from a doctor to miss any of the days. It wasn’t easy. Sweat was always involved. You got a good workout. Once a year we took the President’s Challenge. And we practiced for it weeks in advance. What happened to those days? It seems like the President always had a council on physical fitness. But is it taken seriously? In the early 1990s, Arnold Schwartzenegger was the chairman. Was that just a springboard for his political career? His governorship ended recently, leaving California in worse shape than he found it. Wasn’t he supposed to be the savior? Now I’m learning that Drew Brees, the NFL quarterback, is a chair on the President’s Council. He’s a great football player. He took a city that was hurting and won a Super Bowl. Great job. But does he really have time? You know who would be great for this position? Me. But you know, they’re not asking someone who’s a trainer, the one guy who cares. Maybe I use the word “fuck” too much. But you know what? It’s just a word. Get over it. I think we should start a campaign to get me, America’s Trainer, to get kids sweating in schools again.

I don’t often mention my clients by name, especially on my blog. I’m even more tight-lipped if they happen to be celebrities. There’s a myriad of reasons not to let people know you are surrounded by celebrities. For one, you would get hounded with requests. Things like, “Would you mind asking so-and-so if they would want to do our charity event?” The biggest problem I have is my mom would start asking for autographs from different clients. In this rare instance, I’ll mention a workout with one celebrity, Genie Francis. For those who may be too young to remember what Genie is famous for, she was and still is the most popular soap opera star ever. Her character, Laura on General Hospital, drew more attention on her television marriage to Luke than the whole “Who shot J.R.” thing from Dallas.

Remember those days when people watched television? But I digress. One of my favorite workouts with Genie is when we take a mile-long walk to the Calabasas High School track. Then Genie will walk, jog or run two miles at the track. We follow it with the same one-mile walk to her house where we do some stretching and weightlifting. Calabasas is a fairly wealthy community. The local high school is well-funded. The track is as nice as any collegiate track. The infield of the track has a beautiful artificial turf football/soccer field. Several members of the community enjoy the facility, probably more than the kids who go to the school. I told you that to tell you this. Often when Genie and I are at the track, a P.E. class will show up. Sometimes two different classes are there at the same time. I know this because there are two teachers, one male and one female. I’ve always noticed something peculiar about these teachers and the class. I never really paid attention until last Friday. As Genie and I jogged our two miles around the track, I kept an eye on the infield, where the kids were. I took note of it because the teachers were taking a leisurely walk around the track. The female teacher had a whistle on a string that she was twirling around her finger as she walked with the male teacher. Not once did either of the teachers pay attention to any of the students whatsoever. This gave me reason to see what the students were up to. I observed two groups of kids sitting in a circle. I guess you could say there were two different cliques. They were laughing and joking. The boys were flirting with the girls, and the girls were flirting back. There was some activity. Five kids were hanging around one of the soccer goals. The five were dribbling the ball and trying to pass each other to score goals. It was three boys and two girls. They weren’t really working on soccer skills. They were mostly flirting and having a good time. The whole thing enraged me. I wanted to grab the two teachers by the neck and ask them what they were getting paid to do. You hear a lot these days about art and P.E. classes getting cut out of schools because of funding. Calabasas High School is fine with funds. These people aren’t doing their jobs. I know teachers complain about not getting paid enough. But that’s bullshit. No one forced anyone to take that jobs. I grew up in a family of teachers. Yeah, they don’t get paid a lot. But they get paid after they retire until the day they die. Plus they only work about half the year, when you do the math. These two teachers couldn’t be bothered to do anything that day. I mentioned to Genie on the way back to her house, “You know, when I was a kid, we had P.E. five days a week. And we would sweat every day.” Every four to six weeks we were introduced to a new sport. I wondered out loud to my friend, “Could these kids handle five minutes of what we did on a daily basis?” She replied they probably couldn’t.

Dean Lorey provided another guest blog today. – Vinnie

I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate working out. First of all, it’s difficult. You know what sucks about lifting weights? They’re heavy. Who would want to lift such ridiculous, heavy things? And then the cardio… Jesus… wouldn’t you rather just sit in a comfortable bed and watch an episode of DIRTY JOBS? I hired Vinnie as a trainer a bunch of years ago and I fought him every step of the way. And guess what — I won! I didn’t get any healthier! So… he stopped training me… and we became friends… and then, years later, I had some heart problems and I decided I needed to finally do something about it. I’d tried a lot of diets and hated them. I lost a bunch of weight on the Atkins diet, but couldn’t sustain it. Who can eat like that? Frankly, all diets ended up not working for me because they all seemed to be based on denying you stuff — and I don’t want to be denied stuff, particularly if it tastes good. And food tastes good. Especially if you fry it. But there were these heart problems. And then I saw this thing where President Clinton lost a ton of weight by becoming a vegetarian. And I was sure that wasn’t for me, because I HATED anything vegetarian. Here’s why: those fucking vegetarians lie. They tell you that this weirdly seasoned mushroom tastes just like a T-bone steak and this mashed up patty of grains tastes just like a hamburger and this fried tofu tastes exactly like chicken. Guess what? It doesn’t! But… Clinton lost a bunch of weight by eating that way and I thought I might give it a shot. And here’s what I learned. First of all, you have to stop thinking that vegetables taste like meat. They don’t. But, oddly enough, they can taste really good if you stop trying to think of them like something they’re not. Vegetable stir fry, pasta, soups — tons of good stuff. Second, I realized that you don’t have to be a creepy sprouts-growing-out-of-your-asshole vegetarian to eat MOSTLY vegetarian. So I hit on the idea of eating one meal a day with chicken or fish and the other two meals vegetarian. That seemed doable. Usually, breakfast was some form of cereal anyway, so that was one meal down. Which meant I only needed to come up with one other vegetarian meal that I could stomach. As it turned out, there were a bunch of meals that I could more than stomach. And once I changed my thinking, I found a ton of dishes that I actually preferred to meals with meat. And then, to complicate things even further, I did something really stupid — I decided to do this crazy experiment during the period of time that everyone puts on weight… between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I wish I could tell you why. Some perverse masochistic instinct. My thinking was “if I can lose weight when NO ONE loses weight, than the rest of the year will be cake… which I should try not to eat too much of.” So I did it. And I’m still doing it, which I guess means that that’s just the way I eat now. And here’s what I discovered. First of all, it’s the only diet I’ve ever been able to stick to, because it’s not a diet. I eat pretty much everything I did before, I just have some rules about how much and how often. If you don’t have meat in every meal, you start to strip away calories along with cholesterol. Now, if I’m out to dinner in a nice restaurant and I want a steak, I’ll have it. But only occasionally. The idea that nothing is off limits as long as I’m sensible about it made everything possible. And, yes, I know that Weight Watchers is sort of the same idea. And I know it’s helped a lot of people and I’m glad for all of you. But I just couldn’t stomach counting points or whatever it is you do (sorry, Vinnie). My brain’s just not wired that way. So this weird new way of eating actually ended up helping me. Maybe if you’ve been hunting around (like I was) for something different, it can help you, too. I don’t know. I’m down to a weight I haven’t seen in a decade. It’s not my college weight, but I was bone thin in college and I’m not sure I want to get that skinny. My blood pressure is 120 over 70. Can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve seen numbers like that. Cholesterol: 122. Look… I don’t know if this will work for you. I don’t even know if it will work for ME in the long haul. But I do know this… it’s the first thing I’ve ever done that has really clicked and made sense. By the way, I also take a nice walk with my wife every day. The cardio probably helps. The company helps as well. Good luck.

I’m very honored to have a guest blogger today. I wonder if this is how Arianna Huffington started the Huffington Post. I’ve had guest writers before. Of course there’s Andy, who does an incredible job with recipes. The most famous professional writer before Dean was my nephew Mike, who writes in Louisiana. But having the likes of Dean Lorey, who’s known in television and film and is a best selling author, is truly humbling. Are we becoming the Huffington Post? – Vinnie

Jesus. I had no idea Vinnie was going to call me out on his fucking blog and say I “sucked as a client.” But I guess I did. I hated working out. Still do. I never thought I was in terrible shape, but I’ll tell you a quick story. Vinnie was going through a horrendous medical crisis and there was a real chance that he might die. He can tell you about that some time if he wants. Maybe he already has, I don’t know. So we were walking during one training session and I suggested that, after he died, Daniel Day Lewis should play him in the movie version of his life. Daniel Day Lewis — great actor, great looking guy, and don’t tell me how insensitive this suggestion was to a sick guy because… eh, you’d just have to know Vinnie to understand. It turns out that Vinnie didn’t like that idea because he thought it should be someone “better looking.”

As I tried to puzzle through that horseshit, Vinnie suggested that he had a good actor who could play me as his buddy in the film — Paul Giamatti. “Fuck you,” I said. “You reject Daniel Day Lewis and I get stuck with fucking Paul Giamatti.”

Great actor, yeah, but still… But I guess he was right. I was pretty out of shape. And I stayed that way for a lot of years, even after Vinnie stopped training me. By the way, in the blog he says he “quit training” me. I remember it as I stopped paying him and he stopped coming to my house, but whatever. Somehow we became friends. I’m not sure how that happened. I hated looking at him, all skinny and healthy. It just made me feel stupid. But I liked the guy. So sue me. So… years pass… somehow he doesn’t die from his ailment (again, he can tell you about that)… and a couple things happen that make me want to make some changes in my own life. First, I have some heart problems. MRI’s that have doctors shaking their heads sadly and angiograms filled with dicey news will wake you up in a hurry. Second, I see a picture of Bill Clinton. He looks thin — almost creepy thin. Now, to be honest, even though I’ve grown to really like him, I didn’t vote for him as president. Why? Two words: Tipper Gore. Al Gore was his VP and Tipper was his wife and I absolutely couldn’t stand this piece of shit when I was a kid. She was in the news constantly wanting to censor EVERYTHING. Music, movies — Tipper was of the opinion that she was the moral compass of the nation and everyone else should just do whatever the fuck she said. Well, I hated everything she stood for as a kid and I hated it even more as an almost grown man and so I didn’t vote for Clinton for that reason. Sound judgement? Eh, who cares. He still won and I ended up thinking, in retrospect, that he was a great president. So when I saw him all thin like that, I thought “either this guy has really found a great diet or he’s about to die.” I investigated. He’d had a bunch of heart problems himself — surgeries and so forth — and he decided he needed to make a change in his eating habits. So he did some research and finally decided that the answer to his problems was… vegetarianism. Jesus Christ. No one, and I mean NO ONE, hated the concept of vegetarianism more than me. I can give you a lot of reasons why, and I probably will at some point, but I couldn’t deny that it worked for him. And if it worked for him, then maybe it could work for… Anyway, I’d finish this whole stupid blog thing but Vinnie has a strict word count on them and he also has this sick fixation on keeping them all to one big bloated ridiculous paragraph — I have no idea why — so I think I’m at the end of what I can say right now. But, if he lets me, I’ll continue this some time soon to explain how my non-vegetarianism helped me lose a bunch of weight and get healthy. And I’ll also mention what the holidays, specifically Thanksgiving through Christmas, had to do with it all. I don’t know if “America’s Trainer” will give me another shot at a blog spot, but he publicly said that I “sucked as a client” so I figure he owes me. That fucking guy…

I love my job. Why? I get to work with people. I generally like all of my clients. If I don’t like them, I get rid of them. I figure life is too short. Every now and then a client becomes a good friend. That was the case with my buddy Dean Lorey. You see, Dean sucked as a client. He had good intentions. He wants to be in good shape and work out. He just hates working out. For that reason, I quit training him. Somehow we’ve kept our friendship going. Dean and I have something else in common…we’re both isolated by our work. In my case, outside of my clients, I don’t meet many people. I have closer relationships with the people at the guard gates in the communities I work in than almost anywhere else. Dean is a very successful writer and producer. By the way, let me give him a plug.

He wrote a trilogy of books a couple of years ago called Nightmare Academy. Dean, like me, is isolated by work. For that reason, we created guy’s night out. About once a month we go to the same seafood restaurant, sit on the bar side, order drinks, have oysters and a meal. Dean and I are the only two constants. Other people flow in and out. Comedian John Mendoza will usually stop by. It’s always fun to have him. Jonathan Frakes from the Star Trek movies will stop in too sometimes. And there’s my buddy Mehran. I love guys night. If I had my way, we’d do it once a week. I told you that to tell you this. Last weekend Serena and I met Dean and his wife Elizabeth for dinner. I hadn’t seen my buddy since before the holidays. Just too much had been going on. I noticed he was visibly thinner. Then upon closer inspection, his wife was also thinner. During dinner I brought it up. “Dean, is it just me or did you and Elizabeth lose a ton of weight?” I asked. He said thanks for noticing. They had lost a few pounds. It turns out, they made an effort to not gain weight during the holidays, but to lose weight. What a concept, I thought. They started the new year not having to battle back to where they were before. I asked Dean if he would guest blog for the site. With a big smile, he said he’d love to. So expect that blog soon.