Aggressive lunacy masquerades as chic cutting-edge
17 August 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
“Workout!” The latest TV Fitness Reality Show
Aggressive lunacy masquerades as chic cutting-edge
Whenever I think fitness-themed reality TV cannot possibly sink lower or become any lamer, I am proven wrong. Who would have thought the cruelty of “Biggest Loser” or the idiocy of “Celebrity Fit Club” could possibly be topped? Yet we now are presented with a new contender for the frivolity title: Workout! (On Bravo, Tuesday night at 9 pm EST) The shows protagonist, Jackie, claims to possess a 3% body fat percentile. She doesn’t come close – try 13%. She professes to have “97% Attitude” (chutzpah.) Trust me she doesn’t. She is a gawky, giraffe-limbed woman with a muscle-less, albeit lean, physique. In one ad she perches spider-like atop a man doing a pushup. At the end of the ad she strides boldly forward towards the camera, flings her arms wide while wearing a skintight outfit as if to say “HEY! TAKE A LOOK AT THIS! WILL YA!” The weird part is there is nothing there. This 39-year old couldn’t take 12th place in the easiest class of any local bodybuilding competition held at the local high school in the cafeteria. Mysteriously Jackie is a fitness superstar, an unfathomably successful in-your-face Queen of Mean. She lives in a million dollar home and works her “magic” at a trendy Hollywood muscle emporium called Skysport & Spa. Jackie preposterously portrays herself and her modest gym as “the finest fitness facility in the city staffed with the top fitness trainers in LA.” Her pronouncements, so profoundly arrogant and at the same time aggressive and challenging in tone and timbre, roll off her tongue with astonishing ease. Her claims have no basis in reality.
One would hope she was being purposefully outrageous in the same way a highly paid professional wrestler rants into the microphone during a Smack Down interview. One gets the strong impression that Jackie actually believes her bravado claims. In the through-the-looking-glass world of commercial fitness, a parallel universe exists wherein glitz, flash, fast footwork, fluff and filler are easily and repeatedly mistaken for substantive, tangible, measurable results. But I put too somber a point on this unintentionally humorous show: Workout! is sublimely funny, a regular fitness Fawlty Towers with Jackie as Basil Fawlty. The Skygym resembles any weight room in any local-yokel racquet and health club found anywhere across the United States. Nothing special. Neanderthal powerlifters (of whom, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit to being a tribal member) would call Skysport a “Fern Spa.” Unimaginable, unintentional laugh-out-loud lows are repeatedly achieved by Jackie and her squad of sycophant minions. Antics abound as Jackie and her touchy-feely trainers interact with the dazed-and-confused clients, the girlfriend who bites and leaves marks, the eternal after-hour booze consumption, the limos, the never-ending litany of pompous fitness platitudes and fuzzy fitness philosophies screamed with a harshness reminiscent of Stalin-era political commissars …it all combines to create unintentional slap-stick of the highest order. To put a finer point on it: clients are under-trained in the weight room with ineffectual soft-ball routines and over-trained in cardio with mindless ‘boot camp’ enduros. All clients are starved to within an inch of their lives.
I thought the Nazi prison guard female trainer on The Biggest Loser was the benchmark for incompetent sadists masquerading as competent personal trainers. Jackie makes a determined run for the “Queen of Mean” title. What can you say about a woman so obviously ignorant yet incongruously successful? As Oscar Wilde once quipped, “she speaks with the easy assurance of the blissfully ignorant.” The setting is Beverly Hills; specifically a clean well-lit private training studio perched atop a 12-story office building. High jinks ensue. Jackie continually refers to her squad of adolescent-acting sycophant trainers as “the best in Los Angles.” Again, this is mystifying as none of the group appears to have any muscle. Nor are they particularly lean. Jackie’s muscle manifesto consists of mindlessly beating the piss out of any client unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her motto should be, “Do as I say not as I do.” It would be nice to see her participate in the mindless boot camp regimen she loves to dish out (“I’m going to break them down. I am going to see who really want this.”) Wants what? She never joins in fully or participates in any of the pain-train she dishes out. She barks fitness platitudes interspersed with ridiculous exhortations. Run them until they fall down or throw up. How easy is that? I could have Reilly the 5-year old neighborhood kid sit on a little plastic yellow chair and put adults through the most grueling “Mother-May-I” boot camp imaginable: “Mother says do 100 jumps on your left leg. Mother says jump in the air and touch the sky 50 times! Mother says do 100 pushups!” Jackie’s Boot Camp (“It’s the wave of the future!”) is endless motion mistaken for effective training.
Jackie tells boot camp participants that the medicine is good for them and will transform their pathetic physiques. All that’s missing is for participants to yell in unison, “THANK YOU SIR – MAY I HAVE ANOTHER!” She mistakes inducing fatigue and pain for triggering transformation. Her smug assertions are ludicrous; as if repeatedly stating something makes it so. By any measurable benchmark, Jackie and her team are weak as kittens, technically-ignorant, psychologically-challenged and factually wrong at every turn. It’s the “Emperor has no clothes” come to life. Empress Jackie struts down the boulevard proclaiming loudly and for all to hear that she and her minute minions are the grand maestros of the art and science of physical renovation. Her grandiose posturing groundless, her methodology mistakes effort for success; she is the antithesis of training smart. Smart, for Jackie, appears to be an irresolvable contradiction in terms. All of Jackie’s squad of incompetents masquerading as personal trainers feels the need to touch their clients as they train. Apparently the “PT Touch” infuses clients with extra power and strength. There appears to be a touching correlation: the better looking the client, the more the touching occurs. The Sky Spa might be “the finest facility in the city” if the city were say in Kampala, Uganda or Bear Claw, Yukon. Being located in a city generally considered the epi-center of worldwide body worship makes Jackie’s claim akin to a 12-year old 100-pound high school cheerleader proclaiming she could whip the piss out of a 240-pound, 10-year Navy SEAL with two tours of Iraq under his belt.
Jackie is demonstrably lame as a personal trainer. Her technical instruction is riddled with flaws, akin to watching a 10-year-old child attempt to play Mozart’s Requiem on a violin in front of the school assembly. Now imagine if after butchering the piece the 10-year old strode to the front of the embarrassed (for her) audience and said, “There you go you pack of morons! The greatest interpretation of Mozart ever heard!” Jackie unconsciously personifies Karl Marx’s declaration that “Audacity is 99% of the battle.” If you are feeling dreary and need a dose of laughter to cut through the quiet desperation of day to day life, I would suggest watching Jackie and her fraud-squad of simplistic sycophants. What better tonic than uproarious laughter to counteract life’s pain? Watch as goofy, immature girls are presented as expert personal trainers and then turned loose to teach ignorant clients that are charged $100 plus an hour. Watch another PT “The Peeler” (nicknamed for his ability to peel off fat) speak with a comedic southern drawl appropriate for a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie loudly proclaim that his physical transformational abilities approximate that of a master sculpture. “These hands are like Michelangelo’s’!” he dramatically intones, offering up for camera inspection the hands touched by God. It is highly doubtful Peeler could name a single work the 14th century master produced. It is also highly likely you could stand atop the roof of The Sky Spa and throw a medium size rock in any direction and hit another facility that had at least someone capable of bench pressing 300 or possessing less than 10% body fat. No one has either at Jackie’s Sky Spa.
I have a suggestion for the Bravo TV programmers: if they want a real fitness reality show with some substance and guts have personal trainers compete against each other using untrained individuals for 30 days. Let’s see who can generate real results for regular people using regulated amounts of training and only foods available at the local grocery store. No supplements of any type. Limit the total amount of training to say 4-6 hours per week and use real people living real lives working real jobs with real responsibilities. Let’s see who can obtain the best results (success defined as muscle mass increases and body fat decreases) on a level playing field. Bring on the yoga instructors and Pilates proponents, bring on the Jackie’s and the Biggest Loser prison guard PT’s – let’s get some head-to-head fitness combat going to highlight what works and what doesn’t – Let’s expose lurking charlatans and identify effective trainers and effective methods. The ultimate winner would be the confused public.
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