Iron Princess (Iron Palace Book 2) Read online

  “And do not refer to it as a ‘diet’ ”. He makes air quotes again to emphasize the word. “Think of it as an acronym, like SCUBA, which stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Okay? The word ‘diet’ stands for ‘Dreary, Ill-advised, Emaciating, and Temporary.’ Okay? I detest that word.”

  “Dreary, Ill-advised, Emaciating, and Temporary,” I say, trying to memorize it.

  “Right. It’s the word used by people who are uninformed and overly-idealistic when they want to get in shape but don’t take the time to shift their mindset in the way that is required to also create a shift in their lifestyle that will result in immediate improvement as well as lasting results. They simply want to eat pizza and beer and doughnuts and ice cream and hamburgers and cookies and venti caramel macchiatos and P-B-and-J Jamba Juices, which are loaded with calories. Then they want to go on a crash diet for two weeks, lose 40 pounds of fat, and wake up with a six-pack.”

  Kellan takes a long drink from his shaker cup of pre-workout drink, which we both have. It’s water mixed with Kellan’s own proprietary formula that contains L-arginine to aid with blood flow, creatine monohydrate to increase strength and muscle hydration and phosphate replenishment in the ATP molecules broken apart during exercise, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember off the top of my head without reading the label on the jug. I do know that this is the P.M. formula to be used at night because it has no caffeine or other stimulants, whereas Kellan’s daytime formula has caffeine.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Kellan continues. “Everyone you see walking around with a six pack is either a genetic mutant who is naturally predisposed to a low body-fat percentage, or they have busted their ass for many months and likely even years to get it. And even the mutants have to work at it.”

  “What about the ‘emaciating’ component of the DIET acronym?”

  “Diets are usually an extreme reduction in calories, and often nutrients. A mango diet. A cauliflower soup diet. A steamed kale diet. Those are all ridiculous. The human body cannot grow under those conditions. It can’t even maintain itself. So you wind up emaciated. Your body will use some body-fat for energy but it is also going to use muscle for energy. You wind up a skinny fat person, a person who appears thin but has relatively low lean body mass, which is muscle, and relatively high body-fat. Taken to the extreme, their body cannibalizes itself. It uses all the fat and the muscle. That’s what happens to runway models who are anorexic. They look like skin and bones. No muscle. It’s incredibly unhealthy. It can be fatal.”

  Once we’ve warmed up thoroughly, especially since it’s leg day, and I feel lots of blood in my leg muscles, we walk to the far corner of the big box gym, where the squat racks are.

  As usual, there’s no one over here. Kellan says it’s pathetic. Meanwhile, the area in front of the mirror where the small dumbbells are is packed. It’s always packed. Usually it’s full of guys doing bicep curls, trying to make their arms bigger. Kellan explains that while this is understandable, it’s also wrong. The back of the arm, the tricep, is a bigger muscle group, it has three heads whereas the bicep has two. Hence the names. So guys who want big arms need to focus on the bicep and the tricep. But the shoulders and biceps are the vanity muscles that get the most attention. So that’s what the wannabes usually focus on.

  Similarly, the inner and outer thigh machines are always in use by women trying to do something about their hips and thighs. Kellan says if they would skip those machines in favor of hip thrusts, squats, lunges, leg press, hack squats, hamstring curls, leg extension, and standing and seated calf raises, and cut back on their carb intake, they would find their legs shaping up and leaning out in a matter of weeks and months, depending on their initial body composition.

  Kellan says the conventional wisdom is that you cannot “spot reduce.” In other words, if you want a six pack, you can do a million sit-ups or a million crunches and you’ll have strong abdominal muscles but they’ll still be shrouded by a layer of body-fat that can only be removed via consistent training and consistent nutrition.

  I can attest to this personally, because I’ve spent more than one lonely workout session using the inner-and outer-thigh machines. But since he’s taught me how to squat and how to use the other leg machines, my legs have hurt more, but also responded more, in two weeks than they have in the past two years. I never got sore using the inner-and outer-thigh machines. But each time Kellan and I conclude a leg day, my legs feel like rubber as we walk out to the parking lot. The next day, I can barely sit on the toilet. I can barely go up and down the stairs. I can barely get in and out of my car.

  And I love it.

  For the first time in my life, I can actually feel my muscles. I know they’re there. This encourages me to continue working hard and especially to stick to my nutrition plan, which is always the hardest part. It’s fairly easy to get to the gym for an hour or so, three or four (or more!) days per week.

  It’s far, far more difficult to stay on the nutrition plan. Ice cream and cookies and cake and potato chips and cherry pie a la mode and hamburgers and onion rings and cheesecake are all around us. Lurking. Calling out to us… Eat me. Eat me. Don’t worry, it’ll be okay. Just one little bite. You know you want to. Please eat me.

  A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

  Especially if all you do is 30 minutes of inner-and outer-thigh machine after 30 minutes of cardio.

  Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds is playing as Kellan and I attack another set of squats.

  While we’re pausing to rest in between sets, Kellan says, “You always always always do your resistance training before cardio. Remember it as 1, 2, 3, 4. One, warm up to get the blood flowing to protect your joints. Two, lift weights and use machines for resistance training with enough load to task your central nervous system, which is what will trigger growth. Three, once you have used the energy, called glycogen, the actual fuel in your muscles, in order to work out, then, and only then, should you go and do cardio. Step 4 is a cool-down, slow walking and some stretching.

  “Now,” Kellan continues, “you’re probably wondering why weights before cardio and what the glycogen stuff is all about. See, when you eat, your body takes that food and breaks it down into 3 macronutrients: carbs, protein, and fat. The carbs are used for energy, both in the muscles and the brain, and they are stored in muscle tissue and in the liver as glycogen. Protein is used to grow your hair, repair tissue, make new skin cells, new brain cells, new cells all over your body. Fat gets stored as fat for a time in the future when there’s no food. It’s like money in the bank. Unless it’s a medium-chain triglyceride like coconut, in which case it’s used as energy right away. By doing resistance training first, your body uses the glycogen I just mentioned to fuel the lifting. Once the glycogen is depleted, your body is inclined to begin using fat for energy. So you use the energy to work the muscles and break them down a little so the body will build them back up bigger and stronger. Then you go do cardio, to burn fat. If you do cardio first, you use some of that glycogen to do cardio which means when you do your resistance training, there’s less glycogen to use as energy. You’re more tired. Which is counterproductive. So always do weights first, cardio second.”

  “What if you don’t have time to do both?”

  “If you’re short on time and have to pick only one, choose resistance training over cardio every time. If you want to do cardio, lift weights faster. But you have to give yourself a 10-minute cool-down. If you lift weights intensely and then just stop and go get in your car, you won’t feel well. You may even puke. Trust me, I’ve done it.”

  “Won’t I get too muscular from lifting weights?”

  “Are you juicing?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you taking anabolic steroids or androgens or growth hormone? Also known as juicing. Or gear. Or being on a run. These days everyone calls them P-E-D’s, performance enhancing drugs.”

  “No, of course not.”

&nbs
p; “Then you have nothing to fear. Your body will attain whatever its genetic potential is if, and only if, you do the work. All the big, veiny women with deep voices and square jaws are juicing. That’s why the drugs are called ‘androgens’, because the root word is ‘andro’, meaning ‘male’. That absolutely positively cannot and will not happen to any woman just from lifting weights. It’s impossible. Nevertheless, women all over the country, and all over the world, have a misconception because they’ve seen professional female bodybuilders who compete. For those women, it’s their job, their profession, their livelihood, and at the elite levels, drugs are indeed used; it’s simply a fact. The human body can’t get that big without them.”

  It’s good news that I won’t get that big.

  Kellan says, “The last thing you need to worry about is getting too muscular. It’s sort of the height of arrogance, or perhaps ignorance, for a woman who’s 30 or 40 pounds overweight to cast judgement on a woman who has dedicated her life to building her body and has achieved something that only one tenth of one percent of human beings will ever do, which is to compete at that level. And while it is sort of an odd sport in that regard, it’s also one of the most difficult. It requires years of hard work, rigorous training, and a level of self-discipline most people could never have.

  “It’s more appropriate to worry about being obese than to worry about being too muscular. Yet everyone seems perfectly fine with the obesity epidemic. Wouldn’t it be better if we had a fitness epidemic? Your set.”

  Kellan spots me on each set of squats as we work up in weight. When I attempt 185 pounds, I fail. I go halfway down, stall, and drop the weight onto the support bars. It clangs and makes a lot of noise. Everyone looks.

  Kellan says to ignore them. He asks me what happened.

  I tell him I don’t know. Especially since I did this weight all by myself last week while he was in North Carolina for his guest posing at a fit expo.

  He asks me how much sleep I’ve had in the past four days.

  Not much. We’ve been up until at least 3:00 a.m. every night, making love and pretty much 3boinking our brains out. It was our first time. So I guess we went a little bonkers.

  “Nutrition and sleeping habits play a big role in our strength,” Kellan says, “which directly influences our workouts. The other factor is time between workouts. Perhaps your legs need a few more days to recover.”

  We pull the plates off the bar and return them to the rack for someone else to use (Kellan is absolutely adamant about people racking their weights and cleaning up after themselves in the gym, this one or any other). We then move on to hamstring curls.

  I love this exercise.

  Most people, men and women, have almost zero hamstring development. But I’ve seen a few people who had great hamstrings, and I’ve always wanted mine to look great. They really accentuate a nice round butt.

  I also love watching Kellan do it. His behind and legs are amazing. I want to bite them.

  After we exhaust our legs with hamstring curls, we do five sets of leg extension to work the front of our thighs. This burns. A lot. Each time I stand up from the machine, I can barely walk. My legs burn so bad (but so good!). Kellan reiterates that that pain is the reason most people don’t train their legs enough.

  We finish our workout by lunging back and forth across the width of the entire gym while holding E-Z-Curl bars on our shoulders. Kellan grabs the big fat 150. I wimp out and grab the 50.

  He matches me lunge for lunge across the gym. His legs are longer, though. But I count 27 lunges per leg each way.

  On our third and final set, I do my best to ignore all the guys looking at Kellan, wishing they could look like him, and then looking at me, wondering why he’s with me. I do my best to ignore the women looking at Kellan, wishing they could be with him, and then looking at me, wondering, again, why he’s with me.

  Most likely they all think he’s a trainer and I’m paying to be with him.

  Ha ha, joke’s on them!

  Kellan and I both reach failure halfway through our return trip. We both fall on the floor, letting the weight drop.

  My inclination is to feel humiliated because I failed. But Kellan is laughing, particularly when he staggers back to his feet, grabs the weight, hefts it back onto his shoulders, and resumes lunging. After two lunges, he looks over his shoulder at me expectantly.

  I get up, grab my bar, put it on my shoulders, and resume lunging. Kellan waits for me to catch up. I love it that he always waits for me so we can do it together.

  We both fail a few more times on the home stretch, but we manage not to fall down.

  When at last we reach the end, Kellan drops his weight, grabs mine, and racks them both.

  He tells me not to feel awkward about everyone watching us. We’re inspiring them.

  If they choose to be inspired.

  If they don’t, we’re entertaining them.

  Either way, we’re the ones enjoying the greatest benefit. He goes on to explain that failing the way we did is a good thing because it’s that level of exhaustion of the muscle fibers that will stimulate the central nervous system to trigger muscle growth.

  Hypertrophy.

  We’ll do that same routine a few more times until it’s too easy. That’s when we will increase the intensity by adding more weight, thus stimulating the central nervous system to again trigger hypertrophy.

  This is called progressive overload.

  It’s the secret to getting in shape, looking good, feeling good, and being healthy.

  “And having an ass so fine, guys will want to eat a mile of my doo-doo just to see where it came from?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Kellan replies. “No one but me is going to be eating your ass. But yes.”

  We cool down with 10 minutes on the treadmill. Kellan says this is to work out the cortisol, which is a stress hormone. You never go to the gym, lift, get all worked up, and then just leave. Every time he’s done that, he’s either puked in the parking lot or very nearly puked in the car driving home.

  “In conclusion,” Kellan says, “you’re not going to ‘diet’ ever again. Because why?”

  I recall the acronym he taught me. “Because it’s dreary, ill-advised, emaciating, and temporary.”

  “Exactly. Very good.”

  “Why is it temporary?”

  “Because people diet, lose weight, get all happy, go off the diet, and gain the weight back. Hence the yo-yo. In addition to not dieting ever again, you’re also not going to simply ‘lose weight’ ever again. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because ‘weight’ is an amorphous term. So you step on a scale and the number is smaller than it was a month ago. Is that good? We are inclined to think so. But what if you lost ten pounds and seven of them were muscle and three of them were fat? That’s really bad. That’s what happens when you diet. From now on, you’re not ‘dieting’, you’re shifting your body composition. The goal is to build muscle and reduce fat. That is always the goal. To build muscle, we bulk. To reduce fat, we cut. So you’re either bulking or cutting. You’re on a bulk or you’re on a cut. Most people need to cut. Unless they’re super-duper skinny with little muscle mass and single-digit body-fat percentage, in which case they can bulk. But usually, when you hear the term ‘bulking up’, it means eating everything in sight and working out really hard to get bigger and stronger. It’s the kind of thing football players do. But you and I are not training to be football players. So we have to be more exact with our program. Bodybuilders call it a ‘dirty bulk’ because it involves eating lots of junk food as opposed to staying on a nutrition plan consisting of ‘clean’ food. A dirty bulk will build muscle but it will also add a lot of fat. You then have to cut for five or six months to take the fat off, as opposed to the more typical 12-week cut. It’s better to eat clean, train hard, do your cardio to burn the fat, and be consistent and patient. And honest with yourself about the effort you’re putting in. Because if you start eating Twinkies an
d Doritos, you’re only cheating yourself. Over time, you will learn your body. You will discover what works for you. Some people can eat lots of carbs and lose fat and get lean and look awesome. Other people have to go very low-carb to get that way. So it takes time and a bit of experimentation to figure it out. But don’t worry, you’re making stellar progress.”

  Progress is good. Especially when it’s of the stellar variety.

  Once the workout is complete, and our legs are noodles, we go out to the parking lot and laugh as we both moan and groan and gasp getting into the car. We decided to bring the black Corvette Stingray tonight. It’s not as low as the Lamborghinis, but it’s low.

  I note with satisfaction just as we’re exiting the gym that there are two women doing lunges with an EZ-Curl bar on their shoulders.

  Maybe I did inspire someone.

  WE DRIVE TO Mel’s Diner, our favorite spot for our post-workout meal.

  It’s a vintage 50’s café with black-and-white checkerboard floors and lots of dazzling red and blue neon lights and movie posters on the walls, and even a big hotrod coming out of the wall. And they’re always playing oldies, which seems like such happy music. “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King is playing, which is a beautiful song. It’s a love song. It always reminds me of the movie of the same name, which was of course adapted by Rob Reiner from the Stephen King novella “The Body” out of Different Seasons, a book I own and adore. The song always makes me wonder what it would be like if River Phoenix were still alive.

  We sit side by side in a big red booth and Kellan orders omelets and oatmeal for both of us. After doing legs, he says, it’s good to eat carbs. That way, you replenish the glycogen needed by the muscles without “spilling over”, which means eating so many grams of carbohydrate that the muscles fill up, the liver fills up, and the remainder “spills over” into the fat cells, which is of course the opposite of what we want.

  Usually when we come here, or go anywhere for that matter, people are constantly recognizing Kellan, and tonight is no different. The waiters and waitresses all stop by to say hi. Other diners stop and shake Kellan’s hand and ask for a selfie with him.