Articles on Health & Fitness:

Talk About a Working Vacation – by Geoff Van Dyke
NY Times 3.4.07 Published in PLAY magazine

The sun is brilliant, the sky is deep blue, the temperature hovers near 100 degrees — and I am, almost literally, freezing. Six of us have just finished our first day at the Core Performance camp at Athletes’ Performance, an intensive one-week indoctrination into the health and fitness philosophy of the trainer-to-the-stars Mark Verstegen, and we are quickly — and painfully — learning about “regeneration,” one of the key elements of the program. After a day of warm-ups, “prehab” exercises (designed to prevent injuries), strength screening and cardiovascular testing, Joe Gomes, our coach, has us alternating between a hot tub and a 55-degree cold plunge, a process that helps facilitate muscle recovery. At the moment, we are submerged to our necks in the frigid water. Gomes, a 28-year-old Brit who heads up Athletes’ Performance’s education programs (and has helped train Navy Seal units and consulted for the Wimbledon tennis championships), stands on the edge of the cold plunge, stopwatch in hand. We curse, whimper and complain until, finally, one of my fellow campers, Lynn Forrest, a fit, tanned and retired 40-something from Connecticut, asks the question on all of our minds: “How much longer?”
Gomes looks at his watch and says, “Go to a happy place.”

We are, by most accounts, already at a place that should make us happy: Verstegen’s complex is a training center for world-class athletes. Not far from the cold plunge is a room with lockers for the baseball players Curt Schilling and Nomar Garciaparra and the golfer Tom Lehman. Garciaparra’s wife, the women’s World Cup soccer hero Mia Hamm, was once a regular. Verstegen also trained the German men’s World Cup team and serves as the director of performance for the N.F.L. Players Association. Occasionally, he opens the doors to everyday folks like me, allowing us to act like pros for a week. As a recreational triathlete, I’ve arrived with a knapsack full of troubles: mild, but chronic, lower back pain; a recent, nagging hip injury; a weak upper body; and plenty of questions about endurance, nutrition and cardio workout intensity. The other campers are here for slightly different reasons, but at the most basic level, our goals are the same: to learn how to train smart, eat right and prevent injuries.

The philosophy behind the program is what Verstegen calls an “integrated lifestyle system” that consists of mind-set, nutrition, movement and recovery. Most people focus solely on the movement component — that is, working out. But according to the Core idea, athletes who want to perform at the peak of their abilities, without injury, must combine these four elements. Verstegen says a non-elite athlete who adopts this system will, at the very least, diminish pain from nagging injuries, experience an increase in energy and look better. And for those who devote themselves to a particular sport, the program should significantly improve their game.
The week begins not in the gym but in a conference room outfitted with Aeron chairs, where we review the week’s itinerary, sign an agreement that says we are “willing to give maximum effort” and learn the basics of performance nutrition. Nutrition is such an integral part of Verstegen’s credo that the Athletes’ Performance complex has a full kitchen, run by Debbie Martell, a chef who has cooked at New York’s Union Square Cafe.

After orientation, we enter “Six Million Dollar Man” mode: the staff measures our body fat, screens us for muscular and stability imbalances, records our strengths in the bench and leg presses, and tests our VO2 peak (the amount of oxygen our bodies can process while exercising). As I run on the treadmill with a mask strapped to my face, a metabolic specialist, Paul Robbins, eyes a nearby computer monitor that graphs my rising heart rate. I half expect one of the trainers to say: “We will make Geoff better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.”

During the rest of the week, we fall into a comfortable routine. Breakfast is followed by “movement preparation”: an active warm-up that elongates and contracts muscles. We practice the movements over and over as Coach Gomes corrects our form: “Hips back, chest high, squeeze those glutes!” When a camper questions the high number of reps we’re doing, Gomes explains that it takes 500 repetitions to train your body to get a movement right. If you’ve been performing one wrong and need to “rewire” your brain and retrain your body, it can take 5,000. We promptly shut up
From movement prep, we transition to “elasticity” drills (which enhance explosive movements and agility) and then move to our strength workout. After a lunch break, we reconvene for prehab exercises before finishing our workout with a cardio session. Based in part on the results of our VO2 peak tests, Athletes’ Performance designs a custom cardio program for each of us. (My VO2 peak, by the way, is 52.2 ml/kg/min — milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. That helped give me a fitness score of “excellent”; the average VO2 peak for someone my age, 32, is in the mid-30s. Lance Armstrong would have scored in the 80s, which makes me wonder how “excellent” 52.2 really is.) The last part of our four-hour daily workout focuses on our customized programs: we shuttle between stationary bikes, treadmills and the torturous cardio machine known as the VersaClimber.

After two intense days, I already feel as though I’ve learned enough to justify the camp’s rather steep cost. (My biggest disappointment is that Verstegen himself is in Qatar for the week, assisting the national soccer federation.) Prehab exercises, which take only a few minutes, should help both my back and my hips. Gomes has suggested a weight program (low reps, high weights) that will increase my strength without adding bulk. And my VO2 peak test showed that the high-intensity cardio workouts I was doing weren’t quite intense enough; with proper tweaks, I should be able to push through the plateau that I’d reached in training.

But after two days, I’m also exhausted — which is where recovery fits in. Verstegen is fanatical about the importance of rest and recovery, and Wednesday and Saturday of our week are devoted to regeneration. “What you have to do is give people results based on difficult efforts,” he tells me by phone later, “and then help them understand that the recovery and regeneration is when the body actually adapts and improves.” Indeed, Tommy Contreras, 28, a manager at a Mexican-food business in California, has come to Athletes’ Performance because he can’t rest. He over-trained when prepping for a marathon, lifting weights and playing basketball almost incessantly, all without proper recovery. So instead of seeing improvement in his skill and fitness, he regressed and had a host of injuries.

So on Wednesday morning, Contreras joins us as we stretch and roll our tight, tired muscles over hard foam cylinders, a form of self-massage we can do at home while watching TV. Then, after we each get a one-hour deep-tissue massage, it’s back to the hot tub and cold plunge.

When I return home, I have exactly two months before my final triathlon of the summer season. The training program

I developed for myself called for a total of 10 or 11 hours of swimming, biking and running each week, but I want to incorporate what I’ve learned at the camp, so I select aspects that will benefit me most. At this point in the season, instead of static stretching, I start each workout with 10 minutes of movement prep; I do prehab exercises; I take regeneration days after particularly tough workouts; and I religiously down my 500-calorie protein shake after training sessions. I even whine my way through the occasional icy-cold shower. Over the next two months, I feel great: my hip and back no longer bother me, and my fitness continues to improve.

But the real test comes in competition. Going into the triathlon (0.6-mile swim, 22-mile bike, 6.6-mile run), I set a goal of finishing in 2 hours and 30 minutes — an ambitious time, but hardly unattainable. I feel strong on the swim and the bike, but by the time I get to the run — the part that makes me wish these were biathlons — it’s hot and humid and I fear I’ve pushed myself too far. “Trust your training,” I say to myself, android-like, until I cross the finish line. My time: 2:18:56.

WHERE TO GO TO GET FIT
Athletes’ Performance
The Core Performance camp convenes in May and September of this year ($2,110, airfare and lodging not included). Athletes’ Performance also offers options beyond the Core camp, all led by the complex’s staff. athletesperformance.com.

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