On a weekend in the Catskills celebrating my birthday, I had an unwelcome revelation: I, the former college athlete with a healthy ego, was in the worst physical shape of my life. I played tennis with my back to the net, vainly chasing after gimmes. Out on the links I drove the fairways time and time again—three holes away. The badminton match Sunday evening proved a shuttlecock could cause bodily harm.
How could this be? Had marriage softened me? I couldn't blame my wife—she trounced me at tennis, too. Long hours at the office and endless travel had robbed me of the 90 minutes a day I used to spend at the gym four times a week. Working out had been sacked by working.
It was only fitting, then, that my boss—perhaps out of pity—told me about high intensity training (HIT), a form of strength building that contends it's not the volume of one's workouts that matters but the ferocity. "It's amazing," he said, explaining that, along with weekly squash matches for cardio, he trains only once a week for less than 30 minutes. Impossible, I thought.
HIT was developed in the 1970s by an eccentric inventor named Arthur Jones, who created the Nautilus exercise machines and is rumored to always travel with a .357 Magnum. Reading the rapturous praise of Jones's devotees made me think of Alvy Singer's line: "I can't get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics." But my boss insisted that in just a couple of months he'd already noticed the sleeves of his suits fitting more snugly. Desperate, I arranged to meet with Jim Clarry, his trainer and a HIT specialist.
Jim, who works at Ultimate Training Center in New York, is not your typical no-neck gym rat. He's soft-spoken and intelligent and may be the only trainer I've ever met without a buzz cut—a preppy 38-year-old father of two as equipped to talk about meiosis and mitosis as crunches and curls. Ultimate Training is not your typical gym, either: It's a trainer-only facility, so there are never pools of people jockeying for the same dumbbell. You pay per session, and the fee (around $90) ensures that you'll show up and get your money's worth. But the thing that really sets it apart is the Midtown businessmen who come to train in their suits, doffing only their jackets and ties, and the exquisitely kept wives working out in dresses, kicking aside their heels and going barefoot. In shorts and a T-shirt at my first session, I feel like an imposter—it's the only time I've ever felt underdressed to lift weights. But when your workout is shorter than the wait for a treadmill at most gyms, why bother changing clothes?
