BUILDING BODIES : THE OLD AND THE NEW : House Calls by Trainers Have Become a Trend for the High-Profile Clientele
Close to midnight, a late-model American auto stopped in front of a house in a secluded residential neighborhood. The headlights and the engine went off, returning the area to darkness and silence. A large, muscular man named Gino Scala unfolded himself from the front seat, stepped out of the car and began climbing the stairs with a thin, black briefcase clutched in his hand.
A nosy neighbor might have drawn the wrong conclusions. This wasn’t a visit by a friendly drug dealer, a hard-working magazine salesman or a mob hit man. Scala was there for a workout, not a rub out.
As a personal fitness trainer whose motto is “have dumbbells, will travel,” Scala is on call 24 hours a day. Actor Simon McCorkindale likes to schedule him after shooting finishes on “Falcon Crest” at 5 in the morning. Like a lot of celebrities and high-profile people in this town, McCorkindale prefers to avoid the chrome glare and curious stares at health clubs for private workouts in his own home.
For those who can afford their services, personal trainers are the trend in fitness, an alternative to health clubs. Scala charges $500 a month for individuals, $750 a month for couples. Yearly memberships at health clubs, by comparison, range from as little as $100 to as much as $500.
Personal trainers say people are turning to them because mass-market health clubs often are overcrowded, poorly supervised, have uninformed instructors and even dangerous activities.
“Fitness is a way of life,” said Mark Harigian, one of an estimated 100 personal trainers in Southern California. “It’s not a fad anymore. To get beyond a certain point in fitness, you have to go to a specialist. It’s that way with everything these days. I can add and subtract, but I don’t do my own taxes.”
Unlike Scala, Harigian, 28, usually doesn’t make house calls unless a client has his own gym, as do such clients as actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and his wife. “But there are still distractions at home,” Harigian said. “I find it best to take a person out of his environment and get him in my environment.”
Harigian’s environment is the private high-tech gym he operates in Universal City, charging from $50 to $75 a visit. When singer Sheila E. comes in for a workout, she doesn’t have to worry about guys leering at her in between reps. Nobody is in the gym but her. When she is finished, she can shower in her own locker room and relax in her own sauna. Harigian says he is always available, night or day, for his clients.
The exclusiveness, however, is not what appeals to most of Harigian’s clients. John Stewart, 41, an associate vice president at Coldwell Banker, belongs to two health clubs but prefers to work out under the constant and expert supervision of Harigian, who has a bachelor’s degree in exercise physiology from Arizona State.
“At the clubs, after you pay your initiation fee, they don’t care about you,” said Stewart while running on a motorized treadmill machine. “Some guy gives you a program but he’s not there the next time, and the guy who is doesn’t know what you’re supposed to do. If you rely on them to get you properly trained, you’re fooling yourself.”
Harigian came over, adjusted the treadmill, made a few pointers and acted as cheerleader to keep Stewart motivated. Stewart began running faster, his T-shirt blotting up the sweat.
“You don’t work as hard by yourself,” Stewart said. “Mark is also there to make me do exercises correctly, and he’ll get that extra push out of me.”
When Harigian signs up a client, he immediately has him checked out by his staff chiropractor, Timothy Collins, who does an analysis of the person’s posture, muscle structure and diet, then recommends what areas should be worked on first.
In his private practice, Collins sees many back problems in people who do aerobics and lift weights. “I’d say 50% of the injuries are due to a lack of understanding on how the body works,” he said.
After Collins finishes his examinations and clears the client for workouts, Harigian determines the client’s fitness goals and tailors the program specifically for him. Harigian also does muscle and flexibility testing and finds the client’s target heart rate.
When Stewart finished his session and left the gym, Harigian began working with Margi Gould, a 21-year-old professional dancer. Gould had belonged to a health club but said she quit after an instructor mistakenly gave her exercises to build up her thighs, the last place a dancer needs bulk.
Harigian was teaching Gould the basics of weight training, emphasizing the importance of form. She was reclining on a white-metal Nautilus machine, one of 10 in the gym, and her image was being reflected in the wrap-around mirrors that line the four walls. The exercise was designed for her chest.
As she began, Harigian hovered over her, making sure her lower back was flat on the bench, that her chest was high, her hands open and her breathing correct. “If you don’t do the exercise the right way,” he told her, “you might as well not do it at all.” He would continue to follow her from machine to machine, coaching, encouraging, praising. Before her next workout, he’ll update her program.
Harigian has been a personal trainer for five years, boasting that he’s never even needed a listed phone number. Harigian, a tennis player whose career was ended by bad knees, started out in 1981 as a personal trainer at Matrix One, a private club in Westwood. After establishing a clientele, he moved on to another club, which promptly went out of business. After his next two clubs closed their doors, too, he decided to open his own gym.
“If I can commit a person to work out three times a week for three months, he’ll start to see exactly what he wants to see,” Harigian said. “After that, he can train by himself, needing only periodic re-evaluation and updating. I don’t want people to think that this has to be a never-ending program.”
Harigian is also involved in trying to establish a certification board for personal trainers. “We hope to develop a set of standards,” he said. “There are too many people out there with no credentials.”
Scala is all for certification, too, but wonders how anybody is going to define “personal trainer.” Although his objectives are the same as Harigian’s, Scala has different methods. If a client wants to improve his cardiovascular system, for instance, Scala will jog or bicycle or swim with him. If the client wants to build muscle, Scala will take him to a club and supervise the workouts.
“But I still like working with a client in his home,” Scala said, “and you’d be surprised how many people don’t like leaving theirs. You really don’t need heavy weights to work out. Those five-pound weights I carry around in that briefcase can get your chest and shoulders fit. And there are a lot of things you can do with an ordinary chair.”
Scala works with his fiancee, Lindie Solis, who sometimes helps train clients and sets up diets if they want to lose weight. A captain of the Cal State Northridge football team in 1984, Scala, 22, took kinesiology classes at CSUN and majored in business, although he did not graduate with his class this spring.
A linebacker, Scala suffered such injuries as a torn hamstring and broken leg during his football career but, he said, “It turned out to be a great thing because it got me interested in training.”
Soft-spoken and boyish, Scala has been training professionally for about a year. He said he’s known for his enthusiasm, knowledge and manner. “I have to know when to talk sweet to some ladies, harsh to others,” he said.
With that, he packed up his weights, snapped the briefcase closed and slipped off into the night.