Muscle Fire

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A fourth round of New York’s toughest workouts.

I have written three installments of the Toughest Workout story over the last few years and the ongoing dilemma has been: What constitutes a tough workout? Once last summer, when my Achilles tendon was injured, to maintain fitness I did a 300 push-up workout. Not surprisingly, it was tough. But so are my Tuesday night track workouts, and so is playing two hours of pick-up basketball, going for a hilly four-hour trail run, and spending 30 minutes, no break, ripping your muscles with free weights and a pull-up bar. In the interest of fitness enlightenment, for this edition I specifically asked the trainers to show me not necessarily their toughest workout but rather what separates them from all the other so-called tough workouts out there.

Rafael Torres: Torres Fitness & Culture

646-239-0820, www.torresfitness.com, $165

Rafael Torres is the kind of person who always seems to be in a perpetual state of pleasantness; like his lips are forever turned upward in a soft grin. He sat me down at a table at Peak Performance, one of the many gyms where he trains his clients through his own business, and explained how over 10 years ago he injured his knee playing soccer and made little progress with months of traditional rehabilitation. Then he learned about Muscle Activation Techniques, which got him running within two weeks

Lying face-up on the stretching table, Torres twists and turns and pushes and pulls my limbs like I’m a clay action figure checking for muscle imbalances. He instructs me to put my left ankle on my right knee and, as he pushes downward on my knee, to note the range of motion. Pretty weak, I acknowledge. I relax and he applies pressure to a series of spots on my body. Then we repeat the exercise—suddenly I’m much more flexible. I’m dumbfounded. “Every muscular system in the body is connected, and I’m getting the muscles to fire,” he says. “When I first found about M.A.T. I thought it was some voodoo stuff.” One of only a few M.AT. specialists in New York City area, Torres uses these special techniques to help clients—from regular folks to celebrities to NBA players—recover from injuries, become fitter or simply lead a more comfortable lifestyle. For 20 minutes he keeps me on the table, discovering and correcting muscle imbalances.

Loose and gangly, I’m ready to train. Torres instructs me to, above all else, visualize my effort. For abs, I lean back to a 45-degree angle and tighten my stomach. He holds a finger in the middle of my back and my stomach and tells me to curl my torso around his fingers rather than do a traditional sit-up. For pull-ups, we warm up on the inertia-free Keiser machine with lat pull-downs (“picture yourself doing the pull-up), and when we get to the real thing, I’m conditioned for more reps and perfect form. For push-ups he attaches two huge black rubber bands to my elbows and to poles a five feet away, and has me think about bringing in my elbows to chest rather than pushing up. I’m spent after 15 reps. When I do bicep curls and tricep extensions he attaches a Thera Tube to the free weights and holds it at different angles, showing me every way to work the muscles. On the leg press I do the same motion working different muscles by pushing from the toes, the heels, and the butt.

Afterwards Torres shows me how to “trace” my meridian system, which channels energy throughout the body and to the muscles by literally moving one’s finger just above the skin. He explains these muscle firing techniques have worked amazingly with his clients, and how they can work for anyone who takes the time to learn them.

Heidi Tinter

212-945-1036, $125/session

On a Wednesday at sundown I met the multi-talented Heidi Tinter—competitive figure skater, downhill ski racer, fencer, actress, model—near a staircase in Battery Park, where, through her own business, she trains most of her clients. As I warmed up with stairs, stretches and lunges, she counted my reps, tweaked my form, complained about the mosquitoes being out to get her and waved around a sheet of lined paper, on which my workout was handwritten like a warning that the real pain was coming.

We started with three sets (no breaks) of A) 6 up-two/down-one stair climbs, B) 10 squat-thrust-jumps, C) 10 push-ups. Heidi complimented me (panting, quads burning) on a job well done, and took me to a bench for abs—or, as she happily called it, a “lower body break.” With our backs to the Hudson River, she took me through one of the most intense ab exercises I’ve ever done. Lying on my back, I raised both legs at a 90-degree angle (of course my angle was smaller as I’m horribly inflexible), put one hand behind my head, put the other arm straight up, and then contracted the straight arm and the opposite leg at once, touching hand to toe like scissors. “The more you twist, the harder it is.” I can attest to this. Try three sets of 15, both sides.

With a resume that includes Olympic and professional athletes, Heidi calls upon her multiple certifications, years of training experience and own athletic experience. A former nationallyranked NYU fencer (as high as #32), she understands how to push the body without overstepping boundaries. “I never want my clients to vomit,” she says. She mixes a looping recovery jog and 10 sprints over a short, humped wooden bridge with more abs and squat variations attacking the core, butt, and hamstrings—my neglected runner muscles—all while explaining the hows and whys of each exercise with cheerful precision. We wrapped up with tricep pushdowns and a neat twist on side planks (extend the free arm to the sky, then reach below your torso and touch your back). Heidi has been called upon as a fitness expert plenty of times and this workout proved why.