The You're-No-Celebrity Workout

Ignore the Shameless A-List Name-Dropping. Exercise Books by Trainers of the Stars, It Turns Out, Fit the Rest of Us Pretty Well

The trouble with books written by fitness trainers to the stars isn't that people read them. It's that they read them for the wrong reasons.

No book by an A-list Hollywood trainer can make you look like Halle Berry in a cat suit (or, for that matter, Christian Slater in boxers). And whatever they can deliver will take a lot longer than the improbably few weeks hyped on the cover.

But -- who'd have thought? -- the programs subject to these pumped-up claims offer some value for those of us who aren't celebrities at all, people I proudly think of as members of the "E-list," as in Everybody Else.

I know this only because, to spare you the embarrassment, cost and pain, I have spent the last couple of months reading these books and performing some of the workouts that appear in them.

First, let me say the books (see "Four Name-Droppers to Swat By," Page F5) can be wildly uneven and impractical. "The New York Body Plan" presents a nuttily difficult program that, if followed as written, would become a part-time job. Most other workouts don't realistically fit into their alleged time limits. Some of the photos show stuff being done in scary-bad form. (Don't yank your head up on those crunches!) Most include some sort of eating plan that dances around the sad, simple truth that you have to eat less garbage, replace it with healthier food and burn off more calories than you take in.

All that said, the A-listers' workout routines for the most part fit E-listers well, largely because we have at least some things in common with celebrities: We're really busy and don't want to spend much time working out but would like to see some results, oh, this calendar quarter. We want to have enough energy to enjoy our nightlife, even if it's nothing more tabloid-worthy than spraying the houseplants. We'd like to be trim and limber enough to do some of our own stunts, but we know we don't want to look like one of those body builders or weight lifters -- who, to tell you the truth, sort of gross us out.

Most A-list trainer books I've checked out embrace, to various degrees, the following concepts that serve civilians well. They also happen to represent some of the key trends that are currently blowing around the fitnosphere.

Circuit Training In circuit workouts, you perform a sequence of three to 10 different exercises with little or no rest in between, then repeat the circuit two or three times. (Curves, that ubiquitous chain of E-list fitness centers, employs a form of circuit training.) In standard strength training, by contrast, you do one set of an exercise, recover by flipping through an old copy of People, do a second set, recover while pacing around surreptitiously evaluating other patrons' gymwear, do a third set, and finally move on to the next exercise.

Circuit training is very time-efficient, delivering simultaneously the benefits of a cardio session with those of strength training. And by keeping you working without rest, it torches more calories than conventional weight work. In other words, circuit training is a good approach for people who do a lot of meetings, whether with agents or day care teachers.

Multi-Joint, Multi-Muscle Exercises Do a half-squat against a wall while curling a pair of dumbbells. Then press them overhead (see Exercise 3, below). That's a multi-joint exercise, and it'll work your thighs, shoulders, arms and gut. It will vaporize calories and make your heart do the rumba.

Sit on a bench and perform dumbbell curls with one arm. That's a single-joint exercise. It'll puff up your biceps. It accomplishes only this one thing (though, to be fair, it does that one thing -- encouraging growth of a targeted muscle -- very well).

Multi-joint, multi-muscle work boosts your heart rate, multiplying the cardio benefits of circuit training. It spreads the benefits around your body, so you don't look distended in some spots and puny in others. And, since life, being three-dimensional and all, is pretty much a multi-joint affair, these workouts can actually prepare your body to do stuff, not just look like it can do stuff. This is called functional exercise. Whether you need to haul bags of topsoil from your hatchback or do six takes of a scene where you drag a corpse from a burning shed, having strong legs, shoulders and belly muscles will do you more good than biceps that look like trussed capons.