Celebrity Fit Club

by Natasha Wolff | November 4, 2013 2:40 pm

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to maintain some of the fittest bodies in Hollywood, you’re not alone—and probably a lot like us. It often seems that no matter how much time, energy and money we invest into replicating Madonna’s toned arms or Rihanna’s washboard abs—ours never seem to look as fabulous as theirs.

So what happens when “real” women—those women being DuJour staffers Lindsay Silberman and Natasha Wolff—endure a week-long workout with two top celebrity trainers? Here, they’ve chronicled their experiences.

Nicole Winhoffer

The Trainer: Nicole Winhoffer[1]
Celebrity Clients: Madonna, Rachel Weisz
The Subject: Natasha
The Workout Details: Treadmill-based legs and ab exercises, cardio, alkaline diet

Day 1

I met Nicole at a group dance cardio class earlier this year and was impressed by our workout. She wasn’t some crazy bobble-head trainer who wants you to starve and work out for hours every day. She’s battled her weight and had her own body issues, so she gets it and has a healthy approach to diet and exercise. But I wasn’t prepared for my customized sessions.

Coming off a fried-food-and-wine-fueled European trip, the idea of having my ass kicked for five straight days in the early morning wasn’t appealing. Before I even meet Nicole for our first session at New York’s David Barton Gym[2], I was sent a detailed description of the diet I was to follow—an alkaline diet (“Being a working woman,” she says, “we are always on the go and have high levels of stress which can produce toxins in the body and keep your body acidic.”). This includes iced-cold water in the morning, cereal with unsweetened almond milk, lean proteins and steamed vegetables (easy on the olive oil) throughout the day, and as far as fruit goes, only melon. I was to avoid bread, dairy, sugar and alcohol—all the fun things.

Our workouts focused on the treadmill. We worked out on adjacent machines, experiencing it all together. The goal is to “wake up my abdominals” (women store fat in their abdominals more than men): a full-body workout including 30 minutes of cardio and a section of legs and abs (20 reps each), all done on or around the machine. Nothing, she tells me, is dumbed down. This is the same workout Madonna does daily for two hours!

Day 2

Today we did 45 minutes of a new cardio routine (which included a 15 percent incline) followed by 45 minutes of legs and abs to “burn more calories, utilize the element of performance and recruit more muscles to complete the movements.” My body responded quickly to the initial pain of Day One.

Day 3

Only an hour this morning. We kept adding on movements to our cardio routines on the treadmill in addition to increasing reps (now up to 30) of leg and abs exercises. I’m starting to catch on and learn the routines, and my body is remembering the movements.

Day 4

Back to an hour and a half and fighting a bad cold. Groan. Continued with 30-minute sections and 30 reps of each exercise (including squats, lounges, kick-backs, hip raises and everything in between). Initial soreness in quads and legs is wearing off!

Day 5

Our last day, we kill ourselves during a one and a half hour program, and I have to admit, it’s getting easier! I can slog through 30 reps of hip raises/kick-backs elevating myself high above the treadmill. I could see doing this daily (well, maybe), and I swear my butt is higher and tighter. Nicole notices my face and abs (a problem area for me) are looking slimmer.

Natasha and Nicole

While I don’t have the luxury of seeing the booked-solid trainer on a regular basis (Nicole’s almost never away from Madonna, plus she’s also in charge of the trainers at the singer’s Hard Candy Fitness[3] gyms), she sends me a video of her doing the treadmill workouts along with her favorite tunes, and I’ve managed to keep doing the routines at the gym on my own (although I’m sure I look crazy). She’s definitely given me the tools to continue on my righteous path and I even followed her diets for weeks afterward.

NEXT: Working Out with Rihanna’s Trainer[4]

Ary Nuñez

The Trainer: Ary Nuñez[5]
Celebrity Clients: Rihanna, Alicia Keys
The Subject: Lindsay
The Workout Details: Resistance training exercises using sand bells, medicine balls and the treadmill

DAY 1

“I’m so psyched to play with you! Hugs!”

It was the first email I received from Ary Nuñez, the woman who would be whipping me into “celebrity” shape for the next week. Call me a cynical New Yorker, but I began convincing myself that the friendly correspondence was akin to a “rapport-building” reverse psychology tactic. Nuñez is a Nike-sponsored athlete, a martial artist with black-belts in three disciplines and self-proclaimed Modern Day Ninja. “Hugs!” wasn’t exactly the sign-off I expected.

We meet at The Out Hotel[6], where Nuñez trains private clients when she’s in New York. I sit down on a mat and she straps my ankles together with a band, then instructs me to straddle my legs on either side of the mat, fighting the resistance. She puts a heavy sand bell in each of my hands and demonstrates: lay back with the sand bells reaching overhead, crunch to an upright seated position while holding the sand bells in the air the entire time, then back down. 32 reps of a sit-up on steroids.

Over the next hour we did 32 reps of several other exercises, sand bells in hand—squats, one-handed push-ups, planks, leg lifts. The best part about her method? She encourages me take short breaks whenever I can’t muster the strength for another rep. “When your body tells you it needs to stop, then you have to listen,” she explains.

A few hours later the fatigue from the first session wears off, I emailed Ary to tell her that I’ve never felt more energized at 2 p.m. “Ninja Lindsay!” she responds. “You are a real pleasure! I love our work! I’m psyched for tomorrow!” I no longer question the sincerity of her email.

DAY 2

The second day of training starts out similar to the first—ankles tied, sand bells in hand, 32 reps. It’s easier now that I know the drill. We then shift to squats with a medicine ball. Ary distracts me by asking about my job, my family, my boyfriend, my diet, my current fitness regime.

“On a good week, I’ll make it to the gym four times—on a bad week I won’t work out at all,” I confess. She talks about the importance of having balance in life. Ordinarily I’d roll my eyes at this sort of thing, but my arms and legs are quivering in pain, I’m feeling extremely vulnerable, and her delivery is so genuine that I actually take what she says to heart.

We finished on the treadmill, where, at an intense incline, she flipped around and walked backward, taking wide deep lunges. I followed her lead, less gracefully.

DAY 3

My body is sore to the point of being numb, and today I’m working with Ary twice. She trained me in the morning and then invited me to a pop-up class she was teaching for three weeks at PedalNYC[7], a studio on the Upper West Side. The class, called NinjaKnights, was described to me as “a fusion of Ary’s signature Martial Arts fitness moves, football-inspired sports-specific training drills, functional and explosive movement.” I didn’t feel remotely capable of any movement, let alone “explosive movement.” For the first 25 minutes, we performed exercises using the sand bells. For the second half, the playlist shifted to upbeat remixes—music by both Rihanna and Alicia Keys were prominently featured—and the routine took on a dance-meets-kickboxing hybrid.

DAY 4

Rest. Carbs. Wine. Balance, right?

DAY 5

Nuñez started the session by having me lay flat on the mat, with a medicine ball between my knees. She wanted 32 leg raises, but I got to 10 and my back started twitching in pain. “Take a break! Take a break! It’s OK!” she assured me. I put the ball down and tell her that before we met, I assumed all “celebrity trainers” were harsh drill-sergeant types who whipped their clients into shape through intimidation and barking orders and ask why she doesn’t operate that way. “I personally don’t respond well to that, so I just don’t do it. I’d rather engage with my client than yell at them.”

After I completed a treacherous series of 32 counts, we transition to the treadmill. Bent down in a plank position with hands secured on either side of the treadmill’s belt, she places her feet onto the moving belt for a “treadmill mountain climber”—or “torture” as I came to call it. When we settle onto the floor to stretch, she tells me she can already see more defined muscle tone in my arms.

DAY 6

Lindsay and Ary

I should have relished the chance to unwind after a harrowing week, but I woke up with an urge to get to my gym and test out Ary’s moves on my own. I headed straight for the treadmill—a machine I would ordinarily avoid like the plague—and warmed up for a few minutes before bending down, planked over the machine in preparation for “treadmill mountain climbers.” Obviously, I looked like a complete idiot. But I couldn’t be bothered by bemused onlookers. I was too busy working toward Rihanna’s signature booty.

MORE:

Do Express Fitness Retreats Work?[8]
We Compare 5 Three-Day Juice Cleanses[9]
CrossFit: The Wall Street Workout[10]

Source URL: https://dujour.com/beauty/working-out-with-madonna-and-rihanna-trainers/