Less Diesel, More Fuel

So, how did Shaquille O’Neal lose all that weight?

Put his mind to it, mostly.

“He had a lot of self-motivation,” said Ryan Oliver, a personal trainer from Portland, Ore., who oversaw O’Neal’s workout regimen last summer in Orlando, Fla., implementing a program designed to meet the goals of the Miami Heat, which wanted a slimmer Shaq than the one it had acquired from the Lakers.

Lighter and leaner, O’Neal has helped the Heat to the top of the Eastern Conference this season, much to the chagrin of Jerry Buss.

Last week, the Laker owner said that he did not regret trading O’Neal in July but also noted, “I suspect if I had known that he would lose 60 pounds, I probably would have made a different decision.”

Actually, Oliver says, O’Neal dropped about 27 pounds over a three-month period ending in mid-September, two weeks before the start of training camp, after working with the trainer twice a day, five days a week, and altering his diet.

He weighed about 330 pounds, with less than 15% body fat.

O’Neal, once described as “fat” by former teammate Kobe Bryant, has said all it took to motivate him was a nudge from Heat President Pat Riley.

And the runner-up to Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns in the most-valuable-player voting has kept the weight off, noting that his legs and knees feel better because of it and vowing, “I’ll never put it back on.”

Oliver, who moved back to Portland in September, said he followed the Heat’s mandate in reshaping O’Neal: Shed pounds, build endurance.

“Just to keep him going, in a sense,” said Oliver, who works for 24 Hour Fitness, which plans to open several O’Neal-branded gyms in the Miami area. “Granted, he still kept his strength.... We just wanted the fat mass to come down.”

Their morning workouts, Oliver said, were spent on strength training, followed by about 40 minutes of cardiovascular work. In the evening: more cardio and core-stability training, “with medicine balls and so forth.” They worked out in a public facility, the trainer added, but nobody bothered them.

Oliver stressed to O’Neal that he should fit more meals into his schedule, pointing out that consuming smaller meals more frequently would make his body more efficient at burning food.

O’Neal, he said, was a willing and dedicated participant.

“The talk is that he’s in the best shape he’s been in in a very long time,” the trainer said. “That’s a good thing for me to hear, but he should be very proud of himself as well, doing what he’s doing in Miami right now.”

Though O’Neal said in a news release announcing his partnership with 24 Hour Fitness that he was “thrilled with the results” of the time he spent with Oliver last summer, he declined an interview request for this article. And the Heat, saying it was following the wishes of O’Neal’s management team, declined to make its strength coach, Bill Foran, available for an interview.

Riley, however, is known for being a stickler for fitness.

Two years ago, after the Lakers’ run of three consecutive championships was ended when they were eliminated by the San Antonio Spurs in the second round of the playoffs, O’Neal reportedly weighed 358 pounds and carried about 20% body fat. A month later, he hired a personal trainer. But after what he said was a rigorous summer of training, he arrived at training camp in October 2003 only 11 pounds lighter and with his body fat reduced only slightly.

He averaged a career-low 21.5 points in his last season with the Lakers, then was unable to string together high-energy games in the playoffs.

The Lakers traded him, and it was time to get serious for O’Neal, who will be eligible for a two-year, $58.3-million contract extension this summer.

“I’m older now,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on the eve of training camp last fall. “Everything has to be done right. When I was younger I was semi-serious about fitness. The older you get, the slower your metabolism.”

Detailing his daily fitness routine, O’Neal, 33, doubled the figures Oliver spelled out, saying he spent 30 minutes each morning on a StairMaster, 30 on a treadmill and 30 on an elliptical trainer, repeating the same cardio workout each night.

“I used to lift weights a lot,” he said. “I used to get really big. But muscle weighs more than fat, and people get nervous about that.”

Two months earlier, he had implied at an introductory news conference in Miami that he wasn’t planning to alter his diet. “If you put a guy in front of me who eats salad and cucumber and baked chicken all day,” he said, “I’ll kill him.”

But over the summer his eating habits seemed to change too.

When asked in September what he ate in a typical day, he told the Sun-Sentinel: four to six egg whites for breakfast, a chicken Caesar salad for lunch and baked chicken or fish for dinner. “Then for a fourth meal,” he added, “I have some fruit, apples and oranges and grapes. Then for a last meal, I try to end with a small steak. I don’t really eat a lot, maybe a four-ounce steak.”

He also said he had cut bread and soft drinks from his diet.