photo by Sally McCay
Finding fitness
The cover lines of the magazine racks proclaim the latest miracle diet or fool-proof workout. Late-night infomercials tout the genius of that breakthrough exercise machine-easy payments of just $29.99. Not so fast. Before you trust your abs and their rock-hard aspirations to just anyone, VQ offers insights from an array of UVM alumni and faculty who are finding new ways to fitness and helping others along the path.
Golden years
Sorry, older marathoners, but you guys aren’t so special. Aging, after all, should teach you something about endurance across 26.2 miles. But to grow older and grow faster for a 100-meter dash, that’s running against the grain.
In the early 1990s, Barbara Jordan G’88 eagerly awaited her fifty-fifth birthday, a milestone that would make her eligible for the Senior Olympics. Competing in the high jump at her first Senior Games, held at Louisiana State University in 1993, Jordan was down to her last attempt when she leapt, landed in the foam pit, and looked up to see the bar still in place. “It was like something in a movie, slow motion,” she says. That jump, that moment, and the gold medal it earned are still sharp in Jordan’s memory. “I was hooked,” she says.
Jordan has gone on to collect six golds, eleven silvers, and six bronze medals at the Senior Olympics over the past fourteen years. She’s set world age group records for women in the 300-meter hurdles and pentathlon, won numerous national championships, and competed from Spain to Australia to Hawaii. Listing her specialties—sprints, hurdles, and jumps—Jordan says, “I don’t think I have any slow-twitch muscle fibers.”
Though she earned her undergraduate degree in physical education at Springfield College and has always been active, Jordan got her first glimpse of the senior track and field circuit when she worked with a UVM study led by Dr. Richard Tonino that examined aging, insulin, and exercise. The senior athletes in the study trained under the guidance of Bill Nedde, former UVM track and field coach. Jordan met the athletes when she filled in as trainer one year during Nedde’s sabbatical. “They were having such a great time that I decided when I get old enough, that’s what I’m going to do,” Jordan says.
She’s a familiar face at UVM’s fieldhouse, where her workouts might span two hours on the track and another hour in the weight room. Jordan puts just as much time into helping fellow seniors stay active—teaching classes
at Wake Robin retirement community in Shelburne, the Winooski Senior Center, and through a long-popular UVM class in fitness and aging that continually draws repeat customers. If this turbo-grandmother has one key message for her students, it’s this: With consistent work, everybody can improve upon their own individual standards.
Eventually the hand of time is going to slow even the fastest among us, but for a competitor like Jordan there’s always another birthday ahead and a shot at some world records that look “vulnerable.” Sharing the mindset of a senior Olympian, Jordan says, “The next age group is a whole new life. Just wait until I’m seventy-five.”
Picking cherries
“I can’t explain our product in ten words or fewer,” says John Davey ’86. For an entrepreneur, such complexity can be both blessing and curse. His Cherrypharm product is a juice of many uses—effective in soothing the soreness of athletes after a hard weight workout or the chronic pain of arthritis patients, and it may even help induce sleep. Good news: It has a potentially broad market. Bad news: In a marketplace that likes simple messages, many are eager to label it a “sports drink” and be done.
Davey’s belief in the potential of cherry juice began with his own experience. A varsity tennis player during his UVM days, he made a go at the pro ranks after graduation but was slowed by a chronic back injury. Davey was back home in his native Michigan in 2003 when a friend suggested the local remedy, tart Montmorency cherries, for his back pain. He ate some; they eased his discomfort.
Several years before, the events of 9/11, in which Davey lost many friends in the attacks on the World Trade Center, had brought the “life is short” truism brutally close to home. He began to consider leaving his career in Wall Street banking to try his hand at entrepreneurship. The prospects of marketing a tart cherry juice started him thinking, and by September 2004, Davey was ready for the next step. He launched Cherrypharm, fueled by the motivation to become his own boss, travel less, and spend more time with his family.
The Cherrypharm enterprise has also led Davey back to UVM in many ways. In testing his product’s effectiveness, Davey enlisted Declan Connolly, professor and director of the University’s Human Performance Lab, to conduct a study looking at the juice’s effectiveness in post-exercise recovery. The research was later published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in August 2006, where it drew considerable media attention from the Wall Street Journal to the LA Times to the AARP Bulletin.
UVM athletic teams, including the men’s hockey squad, have been among Cherrypharm’s most loyal drinkers, and five Catamount teams will use the juice this year. The New York Rangers have also quaffed the stuff by the case. The critical next step for the young company, Davey says, is to make the product easier for consumers to find.
One thing Davey won’t be doing is making his product any easier or cheaper to produce. Some in the beverage industry have counseled him to essentially water down the juice and market it with three of those simple words—“healthy lifestyle drink.” Davey’s not buying it. Cherrypharm’s founder emphasizes he’s committed to the power of tart cherries and making a product that truly delivers it.
A study led by Professor Declan Connolly, director of UVM’s Human Performance Lab, found strength loss due to exercise-induced muscle damage was 22 percent
in subjects drinking a red liquid placebo twice a day—but just 4 percent for those drinking tart cherry juice. For more on this study: cherrypharm.com.
photo by Mariana Becker
TRI DUO
Yes, triathletes swim; they bike; they run. But they also transition—gasping, anaerobic costume changes of sorts—and swiftly move on.
A finely honed transition is an athletic discipline of its own and can save a triathlete seconds. But there are bigger picture transitions going on in those races, whether it’s the fabled Hawaii Ironman or your humble hometown tri. The multi-sport events are often a proving ground for life shifts—sedentary to active, fat to fit—with that finish line as prime motivator. Helping clients successfully navigate these transitions is at the heart of the work of Trismarter.com, a triathlon coaching/sports nutrition service started by Walter DeNino ’98 and Marcus Garand ’98.
The future business partners first connected in UVM nutrition classes, where their friendship was built upon a mutual passion for endurance sports and a shared tendency to approach study sessions like a grueling set of hill repeats. “We really attacked the whole learning process,” Garand says. He credits Professor Robert Tyzbir and his classes in sports nutrition as key influences. “It was a launching pad for us in many ways,” Garand says. “I look back and see it as the foundation for where we are now.”
The friends went their own ways after graduation. Garand worked in the nutrition field, where he is lead out-patient dietician at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. DeNino continued his career as an elite triathlete and pursued graduate school and obesity research in New York City.
Separately, DeNino and Garand started down similar roads. Building off a simple ad on Craig’s List, DeNino began a New York City triathlon coaching business, a way to keep a foot in the sport after he’d retired from competition. Garand moonlighted with nutritional consulting for endurance athletes, an endeavor that took an unexpected turn when he helped Bruce Springsteen buff up his diet before a concert tour.
As DeNino looked to expand the nutritional consulting aspect of his fledgling business, he gave Garand a call. Soon, the old study partners were business partners, working overtime to achieve. Displaying multi-tasking skills befitting guys invested in triathlon, DeNino juggles Trismarter.com with the demands of being back at UVM as a medical student; Garand continues with his “day job” at the hospital and balances evenings with Trismarter.com work and family life with his wife, Heidi, and 18-month-old daughter, Taylor.
On a break from med school classes one day last spring, Denino talks about the triathlon’s virtues as a path to fitness. The cross-training keeps boredom at bay, holds down the overuse injuries, builds a symmetrical physique. Then there’s the mystique. “There’s this sexiness to being an Ironman,” DeNino says. “Most of our clients, even if they don’t tell us outright that they want to do the Ironman, we know they want to go there.”
During his competitive days, DeNino made his greatest advances when he worked systematically, scientifically, and under the objective eye of a coach. The discipline and insight that a coach can bring is at the core of Trismarter.com’s approach, which pairs clients with one-on-one training guidance and nutritional counseling.
From that initial Craig’s List ad, Trismarter.com continues to spiral out through the long arm of the Internet and now draws clients from throughout the country. It’s not easy fitting a growing business into their lives, but Garand says it’s in their natures: “Walter and I are the kind of guys who if you show us a brick wall and tell us we can’t go through it, you’re telling the wrong two guys.”
For more information: Trismarter.com
Can Bruce eat peanut butter?
The Boss was wearing down. Bruce Springsteen, legendary for his live performances—three-hour, fist-pumping rock-n-roll revivals—was starting to show his age. Concerned about Bruce’s weight loss and fatigue at the end of his previous tour, Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, urged him to make some changes before the E-Street Band began “The Rising Tour.”
Here’s where Marcus Garand ’98 comes in. Through a serendipitous “friend-of-a-friend” chain, Springsteen’s trainer connected with Garand, who was doing some nutritional advising for endurance athletes. So it came that Garand introduced The Boss to the way of Gardenburgers and Kashi cereals and would field phone queries from the icon’s “people.” “Can Bruce eat peanut butter? Can Bruce have a cookie after dinner?”
Springsteen’s biggest fueling problem, one familiar to many athletes, he was simply dehydrated. Since Bruce was going natural with his nutrition, Garand concocted a homemade Gatorade (2 tablespoons of sugar, 32 ounces of bottled water, pinch of salt—extra pinch for warm weather, freshly squeezed orange or lemon to taste). When Springsteen performed on “The Today Show,” his people alerted Garand that the moonshine Gatorade would be in the “black bottle.” He tuned in, only to see his secret recipe get squirted on the crowd.
But Springsteen downed the drink religiously on tour, which led to a surreal visit for Garand to the rocker’s Rumson, New Jersey home. It was a dream moment for a nutritionist, when Bruce ambled across the room, shook Garand’s hand and said, “Thanks, it made a world of difference.”
photo by Sally McCay
Lessons from the lab
“Wayne Gretzky sweat here,” a plaque might read in the humble confines of the Human Performance Laboratory in Patrick Gym’s basement. This is where Professor Declan Connolly puts athletes such as The Great One to the test to help them attain peak performance and to create deeper understanding of questions in exercise science. Connolly, a UVM faculty member in physical education and exercise science since 1996, directs the research efforts of the lab. He has published extensively, both in academic journals and through the popular media, and his leadership in the field includes recent service as president of the New England American College of Sports Medicine. Connolly has also worked as an exercise physiologist at the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, and consulted on strength and conditioning with the New York Jets, New York Rangers, and soccer’s Tottenham Hotspurs. His own athletic endeavors include three national road cycling championship in his native Ireland during his late teens and years of rugby and Gaelic football. More recently, Connolly competed in an Ironman triathlon this summer, a feat all the more impressive because of the fact he and his wife, Shannon Burke ’98, former Catamount basketball player, have four kids—ages five, four, three, and one. VQ sat down with Connolly to get an exercise physiologist’s view on working out when the goal isn’t necessarily peak performance, but simply staying in shape and holding aging’s effects at bay. In his Belfast brogue, Connolly shared some workout wisdom for the “average Joe.”
Go slow, go long, lose weight
“I would say that the average person who exercises, exercises too hard for too short a period of time. In other words, they lack the specificity for the adaptation that they want. I just directed Continuing Education’s Women’s Fitness Institute last week. Most of these women were looking to lose weight. I said, “How many people have this scenario? You go to the gym four or five times a week. You do forty-five minutes or you do thirty minutes or whatever, you huff and you puff and you get a good sweat going and you get your heart rate up, but you’re not losing any weight. Hands go up. That’s me, they say.
If losing weight is your goal, you should go long as possible—sixty minutes, ninety minutes, two hours at a comfortable intensity where you can have a conversation. With the Women’s Fitness Institute last week, I gave them all heart rate monitors and we showed each of them where their particular zone was, then I sent them for a three-mile walk. And I said, do not let that monitor get above this number. When they all came back, they couldn’t believe that was how easy the intensity was to optimize fat loss.”
Don’t fear the iron
“If you were to say to me, you could only exercise aerobically or you could only lift weights, which would you do? I would lift weights. I think we’ve done a big disservice to the population by advocating too much on the cardiovascular end of things, especially for women.
Your mother’s challenges are not that she can’t run three miles in thirty minutes; it’s that she can’t carry her groceries in from the car. She can’t push the lawnmower. She can’t get the cap off a jar of pickles. That’s a functional strength issue. When people end up in nursing homes or assisted living, it’s not aerobic fitness, it’s strength that’s holding them back. You can always slow down, but a gallon of milk weighs nine pounds. That’s the end of the story.
It doesn’t matter how old you are, the muscle will always respond. You will always get stronger. There are some studies where they’ve taken ninety year olds and put them on a training program, three times a week. They’ve gotten five percent stronger with every lifting session. Healthy muscle will always, always respond.”
Budget workouts wisely
“You’ve got to sift through all the information that’s out there. I write for a lot of these magazines. (My wife jokes that any given week she goes to the grocery store there will be a magazine with an article by me in it.) On the other side, we keep coming up with these exercise tidbits to the point that if you were to do everything that we advocate, it would take you five hours a day to exercise. But the average person only has an hour. To simplify—three of those hours a week you should do something cardio and the others you should lift.”
Planning is under way for UVM’s third Women’s Fitness Institute, which will take place next July. The program is tailored to women who want to learn more about fitness and work toward establishing exercise and nutrition habits that will stick. For more information, contact Jane Kirby, 802-656-3895, or jane.kirby@uvm.edu.
photo by Sally McCay
A guide through the gym’s jungle
Emily Miles ’07 is a kind young woman. But, with some prompting, she admits to witnessing acts in UVM’s Gucciardi Fitness Center that make her wince. The halfway bicep curl, for instance. Or that person who starts a new workout regimen by stepping onto a cardio machine, amping it up to max speed, and nearly getting hurled into the back wall. Hurtful for anyone to watch, especially difficult for a recent grad with a bachelor’s degree in exercise sports science.
During her time as an undergrad, Miles put her knowledge to work as a personal trainer in UVM’s fitness center, helping UVM students, faculty, staff, and alumni face their fears of the gym, avoid the foibles of the newbie, or maybe just get in better shape. A varsity softball player at UVM, Miles self-designed her major and coupled it with a minor in nutrition. But more students promise to follow a similar academic path as the University recently created a bachelor’s degree program in exercise and movement science through the College of Nursing and Health Sciences.
Miles emphasizes that one of the keys to being a personal trainer is meeting clients where they are and working together to define goals. The trainer’s role may be as simple as teaching someone how to use the weight machines in an hour-long session or complex as a years-long relationship—designing and refining workouts, continually stoking motivation. “There’s a lot of trash in magazines, gimmicks,” Miles says. “A personal trainer has the educational background and can show you how to train safely, properly, effectively, how to put it all together.”
We’ve already learned what Miles doesn’t like to see in the gym. Happier sights? For one, older folks doing strength training—it’s essential, she says. Her personal favorite strength workout is “super-sets,” which alternately work antagonistic muscles (for instance, quads v. hamstrings) in a time-effective circuit.
(for UVM staff)