Personal trainer Martin McLoughlin fights the battle of the bulge.
By: Daniel Shearer
Gazing at the purple-and-yellow L.A. Fitness façade, an imposing structure topped with something that looks like a flying saucer, the act of smoking a cigarette feels somehow sacrilegious.
Getting in shape can be a daunting prospect. We all face hurdles self-inflicted, genetic or both not to mention the difficulties that accompany starting a routine and sticking with it.
Americans grow fatter by the minute. According to Eric Schlosser’s painstakingly researched indictment of the burger industry, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, about 44 million adults are obese. Further, an additional six million adults are "super-obese," meaning they’re more than 100 pounds overweight. Their plight isn’t made any easier by the lure of the Golden Arches off nearly every interstate exit, where the bun alone on a Big Mac delivers a whopping 200 calories only four calories less than the meat. Throw in special sauce, cheese, onions, lettuce and a mysterious "grill seasoning," and the grand total comes to 590 calories. Forget about the large fries and the soft drink; you don’t even want to know how many calories are in those. Let’s just say it would be fairly easy for the average person to rack up the majority of a full day’s calories in one sitting.
Today, I’m visiting a place where people burn off those excess calories, a 52,000-square-foot hardbody shrine in Langhorne, Pa. One of nearly 100 L.A. Fitness clubs nationwide, it’s conveniently located near Route 1 and Oxford Valley Road. I’ve come to meet someone who makes a living helping people reach their fitness goals.
I crush the butt and head inside.
It’s noon on a Wednesday, and the place is relatively quiet. Roughly 150 people are working out on a vast array of machines, but the number of visitors at this time is only a fraction of the crowd that shows up on Monday nights. That’s when the place gets slammed.
"Monday is by far the busiest day of the week," says head trainer Martin McLoughlin, a 32-year-old lifelong Levittown resident with short hair and an easy smile. He greets me with a brief-but-crushing handshake. Mr. McLoughlin isn’t huge, but his tattooed arms have impressive girth.
"People go out on the weekends, eat, drink, abuse themselves and figure they’ll come in Monday to work it all off," he says. "From 5 until 8 in the morning, you get the pre-work crowd. It’s full, but it’s nothing like it is from 5 to 8 o’clock at night. The amount of energy that’s in this place at that time is just amazing. Every piece of cardio equipment is taken up. The weight racks are almost empty. I betcha there’s better than 500 people in here."
As one of 15 personal trainers working the club at any given time, it’s Mr. McLoughlin’s job to keep the iron pumping. Most of the time, he sees 20 clients a day. Each of them pays a fee, $33 for a weekly half-hour session, in addition to their regular club dues.
"There are lots of different levels of personal trainers here," Mr. McLoughlin says. "Some of the trainers have been through four or five years of school, have college degrees in physical fitness or massage therapy. Some of the trainers took weekend courses.
"To train somebody, to bring them out on the floor and motivate them, is usually a trait that people have, or they don’t have. It’s not necessarily learned. The down side to it is that people can get very seriously injured if their trainer doesn’t understand biomechanics or sports medicine, nutrition theory. They need the whole background."
Mr. McLoughlin spent two years earning certification through the International Sports Science Association, which offers correspondence classes and seminars, but much of his learning came from spending time on gym floors. He began working as a personal trainer at L.A. Fitness in September and earned a promotion to head trainer about two months ago.
"I’ve been in gyms my whole life," he says. "My background was in landscape architecture, but I had a divorce a few years back and wound up making a career change.
"I was in this gym when it was just a small pre-sale facility across the road. Then when they opened here, I was outside the building, waiting for the doors to get unlocked on opening day. I got to know all the trainers here. They’re actually the ones who headed me toward certification."
CLIENTS VISIT PERSONAL TRAINERS for a variety of reasons. Some of them have suffered injuries and just don’t feel safe working out on their own. Others want a trainer to help them craft a body builder physique. A few people want someone to coach them into shape. But the vast majority of Mr. McLoughlin’s clients visit him to lose weight and lots of it.
"I think easily three-quarters of all my clients are in that category," he says. "And they are, seriously, all overweight in one way or another. We’re talking 50, 100 pounds here. When people go into personal training, a lot of them think they’re gonna train body builders, people who want to lift, go crazy, be huge and have a great time. It’s just not that way.
"You get maybe one or two of those people a day, if you’re seeing 20 people a day like me. A handful of people are recovering from injuries, and the rest of them are all overweight, whether it’s genetic, because of medications, or maybe they just can’t control their eating habits."
Mr. McLoughlin sees attempts to alter what people eat as "the biggest challenge to personal training." He spends most of the next hour discussing nutrition, with surprisingly little time devoted to exercise. A significant portion of his studies to earn certification as a personal trainer was devoted to nutrition.
"Nutrition is everything," he says. "Lifting weights is easy, but you can’t grow muscle from it. You just can’t do it."
Each client visits a personal trainer with different goals. At their first session, they fill out a form with questions used to gauge activity levels. They’re also asked to provide medical information that the trainer uses to tailor individual workouts to avoid injuries.
Of all the people who visit L.A. Fitness, Mr. McLoughlin estimates about 25 percent use personal trainers. While no single rule applies to everyone, he offers the same basic guidelines to each of his clients. First on his list: frequent meals.
"You can never skip a meal," he says. "Breakfast, lunch and dinner are the staples, and you have to have them, no matter what. But that just isn’t enough. Your body, as it functions, needs to have a balanced meal protein, carbohydrates and fat about every three hours. Otherwise, every hour you wait in between, your metabolism is dropping."
At that point, he says, even if someone is eating well and making good choices, the body starts storing nutrients as body fat.
"More frequent meals lead to higher metabolism, higher energy," he says. "It makes you feel better and you store less body fat along the way."
For average men and women who want to attain basic fitness, Mr. McLoughlin recommends a daily intake of 1,500 calories, coupled with a mixture of cardiovascular exercise and weight training. This isn’t always an easy goal; most of us eat that many calories in one meal, usually at dinner, followed by a period of inactivity that puts pounds on waistlines.
"Once you figure out how many calories you need to eat, then you can figure out how to break them down," he says. "If you can get your portion size so that breakfast and lunch are both running around 300-350 calories, that’s a great meal.
"For breakfast, that’s a big bowl of cereal, maybe two cups of Cheerios with a whole banana sliced in it and two cups of whole milk. You’re still not getting 300 calories in there, so you should work something else in. Fruit, a granola bar. As you move through the day, your portion size needs to come into more reasonable view."
Although variety is important, a good lunch could consist of a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat bread, followed by a 100-150 calorie snack a few hours later, perhaps a piece of fruit, some yogurt, cottage cheese or a handful of plain popcorn, nuts or a granola bar. This helps to keep metabolism in a good range for weight loss.
"Bread is one of the biggest enemies of anybody I talk to," he says, "but it depends on what kind of bread you’re eating. One hundred percent whole wheat is the way to go, because there’s no starch in it. Just like in pasta, your body turns starch into sugar, which gets converted into body fat, whether you’re burning it or not. Every time you eat a bowl of regular pasta, every time you eat that hoagie on a big ol’ white roll, you can guarantee you’re storing body fat somewhere."
Because of its low starch content, Mr. McLoughlin says people can eat whole wheat bread with little guilt, as long as they exercise later.
"Tuna fish is the food of champions," he says. "Most people are gonna get about half the protein they need in a whole day out of one can of tuna fish, and they’re gonna get enough carbohydrates to burn through half a day’s worth of living out of the two pieces of bread it’s on. Salmon is great, salads with chicken, yogurts, cottage cheeses, fruit, that’s all good. As long as your energy output is still higher than if you just sat around all day, you burn that right off."
Another misconception Mr. McLoughlin works to dispel is that fat isn’t good for you. Many of his clients believe that if they eat fat, they’re storing fat. In reality, the body converts fat into hormones.
"Every major metabolic growth hormone testosterone, estrogen, adrenaline is brought from fat," he says. "People who go on those low-fat starvation diets, you can ask them. They’ll not be sleeping right, their moods will be swingy, joints will be aching, they’re not feeling like they have energy, and that’s all because the fat’s not there.
"Fat is not the enemy. Even a person who is trying to get very lean could seriously still have 60 grams of fat a day, which could come from five to six glasses of whole milk or from eating two or three slices of pizza. If you’re still making the right choices throughout the day without the cheese steak for lunch or a bagel smothered in cream cheese things like mayonnaise and American cheese, regular and non-fat yogurts, they don’t have the impact anymore."
Sugar is the real enemy.
"Except for natural sugar from fruit, your body just can’t process added sugar," he says. "Your body sees that as the biggest, most potent carbohydrate imaginable and will store it, every single time."
For dinner, proteins take center stage, consumed in a ratio that changes through the day. Breakfast calories should come from 75 percent carbohydrates and 25 percent protein for a quick energy boost. At lunch, that ratio should hover around 50/50. By dinner, it should reverse completely, hovering around 300 calories for the last meal of the day.
"Working all day, your muscles need more protein to rebuild and condition," he says. "So you start increasing protein and lowering carbs. By the time you get to dinner, you’re at 75 percent protein, only 25 percent carbohydrates. To get 300 calories out of chicken, you’d have to eat two, giant 6-ounce chicken breasts. The volume of food is actually going to be the same, if not greater. You’re just going to switch the varieties of food on the plate."
Steering away form large quantities of potatoes or starchy vegetables, fish, chicken, turkey, even red meat once or twice a week, will provide healthy fuel for good workouts.
"The beauty of it is that your body can’t store an ounce of protein calories," he says. "It just can’t do it. Then, the other dinner portions, if it has to be pasta vegetables would be better they’re the size of your fist. That’s it.
"Greens are great. That almost wouldn’t even count as calories, even if it was as big as a house. Go to the Olive Garden, get their all-you-can-eat salad, as long as there’s no cheese on it and no croutons. Yeah, I know. It’s an Italian place. That’s tough. Those are the things you gotta watch, though, and you have to be the boss. You have to say, ‘Please don’t bring the bread to my table.’ A little bit of cheese is OK, but don’t go crazy."
FOLLOWING HIS FORMIDABLE LECTURE about the importance of healthy eating, Mr. McLoughlin is ready to talk about exercise. L.A. Fitness has two large aerobic workout rooms, one of them with a row of punching bags, a basketball court, a four-lane lap pool, five racquetball courts, two squash courts and an arsenal of exercise equipment.
"Good cardio is key," he says. "We start people out on treadmills. If they get bored, we move them onto recumbent and stationary bikes. Each one burns a little more calories. People will get to where they feel great for 45 minutes on a treadmill, then when they try a new piece of equipment they can’t go for 10 minutes. Then they’re frustrated. It helps to have some reassurance, but that’s how your body feels the level of change."
Positioned near a bank of television sets, the elliptical cross-training machines are one of the club’s most popular cardio activities. These deliver a low-impact exercise, similar in motion to jogging.
"It’s almost like cross-county skiing," he says. "Your feet never leave the pads. Your arms can actually assist your legs, if they get tired. People look at those, they say, ‘Oh, I love that.’ Within five minutes, they’re dying."
That’s where finding a target heart rate becomes imperative. Many of Mr. McLoughlin’s clients come to him thinking that harder workouts mean better exercise. This isn’t true at all. If heart rates soar above the ideal workout zone for a given body weight, the body can actually bypass fat altogether and start consuming muscle.
"Most people just think they have to get on a bike to get skinny," he says. "That’s a big myth. We try to show people how to keep their heart rate at certain levels, where they can burn body fat for long periods of time and never really get their bodies to the point where they feel like they’re going to fail."
Trainers set small goals for clients, losing 10 pounds at a time, rather than concentrating on a larger goal that may seem unattainable.
"If you’re coming in three times a week, we might split your body into three groups," he says. "On Monday, we might do the legs; on Wednesday it’s chest and biceps; on Fridays, we might do shoulders, back and triceps. If people start to feel bored, we’ll tell them to take a yoga class, play racquetball or go swimming. They’re great change-of-pace workouts. You just can’t rely on them for cardio training because it’s tough to get the most consistent workout."
Water intake is supremely important. This helps to attain maximum metabolism, allowing the liver and kidneys to flush out waste from the blood and maintain a healthy immune system. Otherwise, the body wastes energy removing toxins from the blood. Caffeine is another obstacle. For every cup of coffee, Mr. McLoughlin recommends drinking two cups of water to restore balance.
"Pure water is one of the main ingredients to making it work," he says. "People hate it. They want to mix something in their water to make it taste better, but unless it goes in as water alone, your body is gonna treat it as a different substance."
GOOD FITNESS REQUIRES navigating a mountain of information, one of the reasons it helps to have a personal trainer in your corner. Coupled with dietary changes, a comprehensive workout three times a week will put most people on the road to success.
"If at some point we find the program’s not working, we’ll tweak it a bit," Mr. McLoughlin says. "Change the diet, alter the cardio workout. What we try to teach most often is that you have to change your lifestyle.
"This is America, man. People want things as fast as possible. These point systems (such as Weight Watchers) to count calories, people end up saving points for dinner, then their metabolism is all screwed up on one meal a day and they’re getting fatter all the time. We can teach you how to do it safely, properly. It may take a month, maybe a year. It may never happen. It’s all up to you."
L.A. Fitness is located at 7 Cabot Blvd., near the intersection of Oxford Valley Road and Route 1, Langhorne, Pa. Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 5 a.m.-midnight; Fri. 5 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Spring into Shape membership special: $35 monthly dues, plus a $169 one-time registration fee. Unlimited visits. Offer runs through April. $20 guest fee for non-members. Two-week guest passes available on the Web: www.lafitness.com. Free guest passes only available on-line.
Personal trainers: 30-minute weekly sessions cost $33, with a one-month commitment, plus regular dues; three 30-minute weekly sessions cost $27 per visit, with a one-month commitment, plus regular dues. For information, call (215) 943-9500.