Gary W. Addis
Member, Author’s Guild,
Private Eye Writers of America,
Mystery Writers of America

I’m willing to bet real money that either you, or someone you love, is searching for the perfect diet. During the sixties, fitness gurus raved about something called the low carbohydrate diet; pundits nowadays preach low fats and high carbs. And some of you, no doubt, still fervently believe that grapefruit juice mystically consumes calories. Sorry to burst your bubble, guys. When it comes to miracle diets, there ain’t no sich animal.

The horrible truth: all diets are counter-productive. Your body consists of billions of individual cells, and not one of them cares how you look in a bathing suit. Written into human DNA is the memory of countless famines. So when you curtail your caloric intake, even a little bit, your body responds by slowing your metabolic rate. In other words, when you eat less, your body simply makes do with less. The result, of course, is that you’ll have less energy, which in turn will lead you to fudge on the diet.

Here’s another unpleasant fact for you: a severe diet will transform your body into a cannibal. Your brain is active even when the rest of you is sleeping, and it can’t burn fat. It can, however, consume protein. When your blood-sugar level dips into the danger zone, and you refuse to sit down at the dinner table, your brain demands the ultimate sacrifice: here and there all over your body, muscle cells break loose and embark on a one-way journey to your liver, there to be converted to glucose. And an ounce of muscle tissue is worth more than all the diets ever invented.

Right about now you may be thinking I have a screw loose. Why, just last year you lost sixty pounds on Doctor So-and-So’s Kumquat Diet! And who hasn’t seen the new Oprah Winfree! All right, I’ll admit it. Strict dieting does work but only for the short haul. Ask Tommy Lasorda, ask my wife, ask any one of about sixty million Americans. Eventually, you’ll tire of kumquats and high-fiber milkshakes. Eventually, you’ll have to return to a normal life-style, and when you do, within a few short weeks you’ll have regained every pound you lost, and up to 30 percent more. Please, for your sake, take what I’ve said to heart. Dieting just makes you fatter.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that dieting is a no-no. Now I’ll outline the only thing that does work, short of surgery. (At this point, some of you long-haul drivers may think this article will be a waste of your time, because you’re never home. Just keep reading, please, and don’t ignore the side-bars. I’m an OTR trucker too; I haven’t forgotten your special needs.)

Forget those height/weight charts. Think bodyfat percentages. There is no ideal weight for your body. Depending on the ratio of lean tissue to fat, a six-footer may be obese at 150 pounds, or fit as a fiddle at 300. If you’re an average adult male between the ages of 25 and 45, weighing, say, 200 pounds, you’re carting around roughly 50 pounds of blubber. If you’re as thin as my father-in-law, you may be lugging as little as ten pounds of adipose tissue, but no one, not even Sylvester Stallone, is fat free. Three percent of your present weight consists of essential fat; it protects your nerve cells, spinal cord, brain and liver... without it, you die. The other fifteen percent, however, is a serious drain on your body’s resources.

In man and other vertebrates there are three types of muscle. I have no idea how the other two work, but, being a former competitive bodybuilder, I am quite familiar with skeletal muscle. Under a microscope skeletal muscle is seen to be striped, or striated. Striated muscle fiber comes in two forms: fast-twitch and slow-twitch. Fast-twitch muscle fibers contract rapidly and powerfully, but they exhaust quickly when working at maximum capacity. Slow-twitch muscle fibers, on the other hand, will hang in there for the long haul in a highly trained individual, they’ll contract and relax, contract and relax, for hours on end before succumbing to fatigue. The proportion of fast-twitch fiber to slow-twitch fiber in an individual is thought to be determined by genetics. In most people, the ratio is roughly 50/50, but a gifted few are born with more of one and less of the other. The quadriceps of record-breaking sprinters consist of 80 or even 90 percent fast-twitch fibers; such individuals would drop dead a quarter-mile into the Boston Marathon. Conversely, a world-class miler’s time in the 40-yard dash would be pathetic.

But training regimens are easily designed to serve specific needs. Endurance training conditions slow-twitch fibers to be more energy efficient; strength training teaches fast-twitch fibers to contract faster and with better coordination of effort.

Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda have made 'aerobics' a household word. According to my American Heritage Dictionary, to train aerobically is to perform work in the presence of oxygen. Jogging eighty times around your rig is an aerobic exercise; trying to lift your mother-in-law over your head is anaerobic (as is fleeing for your life after you turn her loose).

To produce explosive power and/or speed, every fast-twitch fiber within a muscle must contract simultaneously. -the all or none principle - and without benefit of oxygen. To fuel these anaerobic contractions, God designed the human organism to store polysaccharides, in the form of glycogen, within the muscle fibers themselves. During the conversion of glycogen to energy in the absence of oxygen, a process labeled glycolysis, molecules of ATP are formed, which in turn bond chemically with the muscle proteins actin and myosin. When these two proteins slide into one another, the muscle fiber contracts. During glycolysis, lactic acid is formed due to the incomplete combustion of glycogen. Lactic acid buildup within a working muscle, therefore, is the culprit which causes the rapid failure of fast twitch muscle fiber.

Aerobic contractions, on the other hand, occur at a far slower pace... slow-twitch fibers work independently of one another. While a few slow-twitch muscle fibers are contracting, its buddies are slurping energy and oxygen from the bloodstream. Because the energy source is fully consumed, the only waste products produced by aerobic exercise are water, which is quickly reabsorbed, and carbon dioxide, which is exhaled by the lungs.

Confused? Maybe it will help if you think of aerobic exercise as a mound of glowing charcoal - a slow burn that leaves nothing but powdered ashes behind, and associate anaerobic exercise with a sudden whoosh of flame that singes the hair on your arm without blistering your skin.

No doubt about it, prolonged aerobic exercise is good for both your heart and your lungs. And it is also pretty good at burning fat. At low to moderate efforts, your body will begin to burn equal proportions of fats and carbohydrates after about twenty minutes. Obviously, then, the longer you continue an exercise, the more fat you’ll burn off. And that is all I’m going to say about aerobics. Though good for what ails you, every form of aerobic training will bore you to tears. Besides, being a truck driver, I doubt you have either the time, the energy, or the inclination to jog five miles before breakfast.

People who should have known better used to believe all sorts of stuff about weightlifting and weightlifters. Nowadays, millions of folks just like you enjoy "pumping iron." People are not flocking to gyms merely because lifting weights feels so good, however. As I’ve already admitted, low-level aerobic exercise burns calories at a prodigious rate, and it strengthens your cardio-respiratory system, but those are its only benefits. Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, resistance training accomplishes those tasks, too (albeit to a lesser extent). Anaerobic conditioning also thickens your bones and increases your strength, both of which help protect you from debilitating illnesses and injuries. Additionally, lifting weights regularly and intensely is the only way to increase your muscle mass. You probably knew that already. You’ve all seen those big, ugly bodies on the covers of physical fitness magazines. Relax, ladies. Weightlifting alone cannot transform a woman into a female Arnold Schwarzenegger

Allow me to repeat myself: Muscle tissue burns calories. Muscle cells are a body’s natural flab fighters. Any increase in muscle size or thickness results in a lateral increase in basal metabolism. Simply stated, when you increase your muscle mass, you can increase your daily caloric intake.

Should you invest in a "home gym," or sign the register of a fitness center? You may be shy at first around more knowledgeable, better-built people, but lifting weights by yourself, like jogging or mowing the lawn, can be really, really boring. Do yourself a favor and join a gym from the get-go, preferably a facility frequented by competitive bodybuilders and powerlifters. Physical fitness buffs are friendly folk. Surrounding yourself with handsome, powerful bodies will inspire you to your own best efforts, and, whenever you need a word of advice, it’ll be as close as the next barbell.

There are almost as many weightlifting routines as there are weightlifters. While true that some Mr. America contestants spend twenty hours per week in a gym, others accomplish their daily goal in the time it takes some fellows to wash their hands. Before I became a truck driver I competed successfully in both bodybuilding and powerlifting. Between 1978 and 1987 I accumulated fifty gleaming trophies, and I never trained longer than thirty minutes at a clip. As former Mr. Universe Mike Mentzer puts it,
"You either train hard, or you train long...you can’t do both."
So don’t let anyone tell you that you’ll have to live in a gym to achieve noticeable results.

In a side-bar you’ll find an easy-to-follow bodybuilding program. While no form of exercise will make you the bully of the beach overnight, this deceptively simple routine can accomplish a miracle - if you follow it faithfully. Here’s the format: 5 x 6-8 = 5 sets of six to eight repetitions. Most of the exercises are "super-setted" (alternated) with an exercise for an opposing muscle group.

Like many of you, I’m never home. Despite the best intentions in the world, I haven’t stepped inside a full-fledged gym in four years. So I’ve had to develop a truer understanding of the word “improvise.”

The air-seat and steering wheel of almost any eighteen-wheeler makes a dandy gym. You can, for instance, pump your seat up, grasp the steering wheel with one hand and work the hell out of that bicep; if you turn your palm downward and lower the seat a bit, you can perform tricep push-downs. Those fancy $1,500 pneumatic home gyms work on the same principle, except in this case the air valve of the driver’s seat, coupled with your bodyweight, provides the variable resistance. But don’t just take my word for it. Try it. Using nothing more elaborate than your imagination, a steering wheel and a seat, you can invent dozens of exercises, one or more for practically every muscle in your body.

There are other things you can do. Got a few bungy cords lying around? Drill some holes in two short poles, string a cord or two between them, and you’ve got yourself a set of “chest” cables (by the way, chest extensions do nothing for your chest; they work your back, your shoulders, and, to a lesser extent, your triceps). The key word, then, is IMPROVISATION. Be an inventor, invent yourself an entirely new life-style.

Here’s something I almost forgot to mention. Though they are a precious few, you may occasionally come across a truckstop that has an Exercise Room. Off the top of my head, I remember one in South Carolina, one in Illinois, one in Nevada, and one in New Mexico. Frequent these lovely establishments every chance you get, utilize their facilities to the fullest, and to thank Management, spend a little money. If you can’t find a truckstop “gym” on your route, fill out a comment card wherever you do stop, plead with its manager to invest in the health of his patrons. Point out that a multi-station gym can be purchased for under $500.

I think I mentioned that I haven’t visited a YMCA in years, but my arms still measure a rock-hard 17”, my bodyfat percentage is still below ten percent. Just because you’re a truck driver is no excuse for letting yourself go.

As we age, we humans have a tendency to become ever more sedentary, and we truck drivers are already more sedentary than most. Make no mistake about it, if you aren’t growing, you’re slowly dying. There is no middle ground. If for some reason you don’t want to try resistance training, for God’s sake try something. Your life may depend on it.SIDE-BARS

A Quarter-Pounder with cheese contains approximately 525 calories. Here’s how long an average-sized man will have to exercise to burn it off.

Basketball______________________50 minutes
Running (7-minute miles)___________35 minutes
Playing gin rummy________________4 hours 36 minutes
Lifting weights (very highintensity level)
______________________________51 minutes 
Tennis_________________________62 minutes 
Hiking in San Francisco____________56 minutes 
Wood-chopping (non-stop)_________39 minutes
Shopping with a wife______________1 hour, 56 minutes
Cooking_______________________2 hours, 22 minutes
Playing a trombone_______________2 hours, 33 minutes
Golf__________________________98 minutes
Cross-country skiing (in deep snow)
  ____________________________37 minutes

Swimming_____________________47 minutes
Brisk walking___________________84 minutes
Driving a truck__________________3 hours, 36 minutes
Writing this article________________3 hours, 58 minutes
Lying in the bunk (watching TV)
_____________________________5 hours, 4 minutes

Until he became a truck driver in 1987, Gary Addis was a competitive bodybuilder. During nine years of competition, he won several prestigious titles, including Masters Mr. Georgia, Mr. Southeastern America (1985), and the Over40 Mr. South America (1986).

He and his wife presently drive for Viking Freight Systems of San Jose, CA.

A Waste Of Time

Vibrating belts
Electric muscle stimulators
Sauna suits
Roller beds
Inflated shorts

A Word Of Caution

On-the-job injuries cost American firms billions of dollars a year in compensation, increases in health care costs, and lost productivity. Is it any wonder, then, that many fleets require their drivers and dock workers to wear some sort of backsupport? If your employer has joined the crowd, I urge you to tighten the lifting belt only while you are actually lifting with your back.

Skeletal muscles are lazy; if it doesn’t have to work, it won’t. If a muscle thinks it is no longer needed, it will simply disappear.

A Few Pointers

Muscles never push, they can only pull. The chest, for instance, pulls your arms, and whatever they’re supporting, forward; the latissimus dorsi of the back pulls your arms downward and to the rear.

Always work to failure. The repetition that accomplishes the most is the one you had to strain to complete. After completing a rep, never allow the weight to drop like a rock. A repetition consists of two distinct phases: concentric and eccentric. Research suggests that the eccentric, or negative portion of a repetition provides the greatest benefit. So don’t waste it; resist the fall of that weight every inch of the way.

Don’t be afraid to try new things. If a different angle, or wider, or closer grip seems to work the intended muscle better, don’t allow anyone to tell you you’re “doing it wrong.

Listen to your body. It’ll tell you in a hurry what portion of what muscle is receiving the bulk of the work in a given exercise. If your arms are tiring quicker when you’re supposed to be working your back, you’re concentrating on the weight, not the movement.

Though it’s okay to “cheat” on some exercises, it’s very bad on others. Here again, listen to your body. “Cheating” should be used to add resistance to an exercise, never to lessen it. You can, for example, “swing” a dumbbell a tiny bit to get past the sticking point of a bicep curl, but never, ever, squirm or contort your body while bench pressing (it may harm your lower back).

Concentrate fully on the muscle being worked; keep the rest of your body as relaxed as possible. When you’re exercising chest, back or shoulders, think of your arms as lifeless hooks, and vice-versa.

A SAMPLE BODYBUILDING ROUTINE

Mondays and Thursdays: Chest And Back

Bench Press alternated with Lat Machine Pulldowns..............5 X 6-8

Tuesdays and Fridays: Arms and Shoulders

Biceps Curls alternated with Triceps Pushdowns.................5 X 6-8

Dumbbell (or Cable) Shoulder Raises.............................6 X 8-12

The deltoid has three heads: a front, a lateral, and a rear; perform two sets for each head. To work the lateral head, grasp a dumbbell in each hand and lift them straight out to your sides; to hit the rear deltoid, do the same exercise, but while bent sharply at the waist.

Dumbbell or Cable Shrugs for the trapezius.....................2 X 6

The trapezius runs from the neck to the deltoid. Being mostly fast-twitch fiber, it requires little work.

Wednesdays and Saturdays: Legs and Abdomen

Leg Raises alternated with Leg Curls for the hamstring........5 X 6-12

Dumbbell lunges for the buttocks & thighs.....................3 X 15

Abdominal raises supersetted with “crunches”..................3 X 20

Notice I said crunches, not sit-ups. In a sit-up, you curl your body at the hip, which primarily works the hip flexors; in a crunch, your belly-button is the fulcrum.

Addis/Getting Fit