Hi everyone,

I just read an article about Michelle Pfeiffer and what she's been doing to stay in shape. W Magazine recently featured her trainers and describes their approach to fitness and diet. I was pretty surprised by their take on cardio:

Here's the link for more... http://fitsugar.com/409030

What do you all think?

Sounds a bit wacky.

Here's a link to the full article.. it's an Adobe PDF file

http://thehappybody.com/press/0607-W...appyBody30.pdf

The no cardio thing is kinda crap. Maybe if you're already at 15-20 percent body fat it's not as key as muscle training, but come on... How many of their readers are already there?

Besides I think cardio fitness has made me feel great even at 266. My resting heart rate is 60. I breathe deeper and slower now. I feel like my lungs hold more air and somehow it makes me more relaxed.

I won't even comment on the wacky diet.

I think to survive as a trainer among the Hollywood crowd you need a gimick - something to set you apart from the trainer next door and the one next door to that one. This is their gimick. I think just about any program you design could work for somebody out there. The trick is finding one you can stick with.

I love my cardio. Neither Michelle Pfeiffer nor anyone else can take it away from me. It feels good, it burns calories, it challenges me and it gives me an endorphin rush. In no way does my cardio routine make me feel like a prisoner.

"Anxiety burns muscle tissue"

18 trademarked moves (oh puhleeze, you can only move the human body in so many ways - the structure of the joints limits this, so how the @#"% can you trademark a move?)

Severely restricted food intake...

I could go on!

Bearing in mind the guy is a Polish ex-weightlifter you should expect a narrowness of focus and purity and extremity of workout.... but to actually expound it and ignore the long term health implications is staggering!

But as CC says - you need a gimmick to survive in LaLa Land!

You know, there's a grain of truth in some of the things these folks are saying, like that functional fitness is important, or that weight bearing exercise builds muscles, or that flexibility is important, or that balance in life is important to overall health and that meditation might be a way for some folks to achieve that.

But much of the rest of it just sounds like some slavish little cult. More than the gimmicky-ness of it, that's what creeps me out. Like applying that arbitrary 10%/13% body fat guideline (and that's all it is, some arbitrary number they chose for no other reason than that they liked it) for people who are not elite athletes. If you're only supposed to do their 30 min. per day workout, it seems to me that the key to achieving that body fat level is severe calorie restriction, not the workout.