FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL by Vinnie Tortorich, Dean Lorey Page A

it.
    When it comes to exercise, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it .
    Is one hour a day, three days a week enough time to see results? Sure is. Give me that and I can show you definite improvement. But you want to know what will give you even better results?
    One hour a day, four days a week.
    And guess what will give you even better results than that?
    One hour a day, five days a week.
    And it doesn’t even have to be an hour a day. You could do a couple hours a day a couple times a week. You get out of it what you put into it. As I tell my clients, lean muscle mass ain’t cheap and you can’t buy it with money.
    Exercise is a great leveler. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t just buy your way into a great body. You have to do the work. Lady Gaga has to grind her way through a workout just like the rest of us. I find that comforting. It’s one of the few things in life where we’re all on a level playing field.
    But what about steroids, you ask? Aren’t they a great short cut? Won’t they make me bigger, stronger and give me that lean muscle mass?
    Of course they will.
    But there’s a trade-off. A big one.
    There are many kinds of steroids out there and, if used properly under a doctor’s supervision, and at the right dosage, they’re enormously helpful and can save lives. Often, they’re employed to put lean muscle mass on patients who are wasting away. Guess who noticed that particular effect and said to themselves “I wonder …?”
    Yeah. Bodybuilders … along with other athletes and coaches.
    Instead of taking a carefully prescribed dose to treat an actual illness, these bodybuilders started injecting themselves with massive quantities of the stuff. Ten, twenty, even thirty times larger than the amounts used in medicine. And guess what they were delighted to discover?
    It worked!
    Still does. If you slam yourself with a ton of steroids, pump iron and eat protein, you are going to put on tons of muscle, guaranteed. The steroids artificially increase your testosterone, which is instrumental in causing the growth of lean muscle mass.
    At a price.
    Like the fabled blues players who wanted to be the best musicians in the world by going to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil, those athletes were making their own deal with the devil. Testosterone in such absurd quantities wreaks havoc with your endocrine system, which can have a bunch of terrible side effects.
    Guys, do you like having zits and hair sprout across your entire body, while your ball sack shrinks to the size of a peanut? Not that a giant ball sack is the height of beauty.
    Ladies, do you like having a penis-sized clitoris, along with a voice deeper than James Earl Jones? In fact, in the early eighties, the coach of an Olympic female volleyball team from one of the Eastern Bloc countries was asked why the voices of the women on his team were so manly. His reply, “We came to win, not sing.”
    And those are only some of the cosmetic side effects.
    Let’s not even talk about the real danger—the damage to your kidneys, liver and other vital organs. You can die from abusing these medications.
    To summarize, here’s the good news. Steroids work!
    Here’s the bad news. They will make your balls shrink, your clitoris grow and may end up killing you!
    As I like to tell my clients:
    Steroids can turn you into a great looking corpse .
    So now that we’ve agreed to pass on the steroids, let’s talk about what you can accomplish in a gym in an hour a day, three days a week, which, as your trainer, I think is a reasonable amount to ask you to do. Some days you might want to spend the whole hour doing cardio—elliptical, treadmill, the spinner (otherwise known as the stationary bike.) Other days, you might want to split it up and work in some weights.
    The bottom line is, on an hour a day, three day a week workout, the most important thing you can do is vary your routine.
    Let’s talk weights. What exercises can