Get Down and Give Me 50!
Fitness boot camps can whip you into fine fighting form

By Anne Mullens

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My nose is just a centimetre or two from the cool, damp grass. Fatigue burns through my pectoral muscles. I can hardly squeeze out the strength to push myself up one more time. Others around me—mostly women ages 30 to 50—groan.

“Come on!” yells trainer Kim Ricci, founder of Victoria’s Life Force Systems. “One more! You can do it!”

I push up one more time, my biceps quivering like Jell-O. Ricci sings out again: “One more!” We moan anew and somehow manage another, even if we have to drop to our knees for a “lady’s” push-up to do it.

This is the agony that is fitness boot camp—and I love it.

Am I nuts? Probably. But three times a week, rain or shine, I can be found in a Victoria park, sweating with 20 or more like-minded recruits, while a trainer barks directions at us.

Fitness boot camps are styled on the military version that for generations has whipped flabby recruits into taut fighting machines in six to 12 weeks. “The boot-camp trend started in the United States about a decade ago as a male-oriented workout run by retired drill sergeants to get men fit very fast,” says Sam Hirschberg, director of business development at the California-based International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA), a leading North American teaching institution and certification agency for health professionals, aerobic instructors and fitness trainers. “But women saw the results and wanted to join in, too.”

I’m no GI Jane wannabe, but two decades of workouts have taught me a thing or two about my fitness needs: I’m a wimp, and I’m apt to give up when the going gets tough, unless someone is urging me on. I get bored with the same routines week after week. I prefer the great outdoors to the stale air of a gym. I like to see results fast, but I need someone to show me how to get them. And I need the camaraderie of others with whom to whine. Boot camp meets all those needs.

Luckily for people like me, boot camps are springing up all over, including a number of franchises in urban centres across the country. Among Toronto’s offerings is Bridal Bootcamp, whose 12-week program makes women buff and trim for that special walk down the aisle.

Programs have a similar structure, with thrice-weekly sessions of 60 to 90 minutes, held out-of-doors if possible. The sessions are fast-paced and rely on a mix of cardio and a variety of muscle-building exercises.

One of Canada’s most militarylike programs is offered by Cat Smiley, whom the ISSA named Canadian Trainer of the Year in 2004 and 2005. Owner and operator of The Original Boot Camp, Smiley’s sessions are notorious for their difficulty and for the punishment dished out to the group—extra repetitions or push-ups in a cold stream bed—if anyone arrives late.

“I don’t say please and thank you,” says Smiley, a New Zealand native who relishes her tough-girl image. “The biggest challenge of any intensive physical activity is mental—your mind wants to quit, but your body can do more. I don’t let the mind quit.” The approach works: People join up repeatedly, session after session.

My friend Jane Frazee, a Whistler real-estate agent, is one of them. “At first I thought it was too hard, too cold, too early,” says Frazee. “But the results were amazing. I never thought I would be at my fittest in my late 40s.”

That kind of workout seemed too tough for me, but when another friend began proudly sporting sculpted biceps, courtesy of Kim Ricci’s less martial boot camps, and urged me to join, I swallowed my fear and signed up for an eight-week program. To my relief the group, mostly women, represented all ages, all fitness levels and all body shapes and sizes. The trainers were tough but motivating and knew how to adapt the moves to fit each person’s needs. But if you talked or goofed around—or forgot your food diary—it was push-ups for everybody.

“Boot camp is designed to take you from your present fitness level and make you fitter both physically and mentally,” says Ricci, who earned a degree in kinesiology and gerontology at Simon Fraser University and became certified as a personal trainer before starting her own company. “The great thing about boot camp is that someone who has been running marathons can work out beside someone who has been sitting on the couch for ten years, and both get a workout that challenges them.”

As with other good boot camps, Ricci’s combines the fitness regimen with a nutritional program that focuses on consuming plenty of water, fruits and vegetables along with small amounts of lean protein in five small meals a day. Alcohol is out. Refined carbohydrates are held to a minimum.

Does it work? At the end of eight weeks, my resting heart rate had decreased from 72 to 60, I could run ten kilometres (after not running for 15 years) and I’d more than doubled the number of push-ups and sit-ups I could do in one minute. And while I hadn’t been trying to lose weight, I lost seven pounds and more than nine inches, including two from my waist.

My results pale in comparison, however, to those of other participants. Jim Cameron, a 55-year-old Victoria resident, joined Ricci’s boot camp in September 2005 after his doctor told him that he was overweight and that his blood pressure and cholesterol were high.

Cameron followed Ricci’s fitness and nutritional script religiously and over eight months lost 25 pounds, brought his blood pressure back into the healthy range without drugs and normalized his blood cholesterol. “My doctor was amazed, and friends would come over and say, ‘My God, what have you been doing?’ I changed so fast,” says Cameron. His wife Doreen, 51, joined the program and lost 35 pounds. And, unlike dieting where food is restricted, the intense workout coupled with lots of wholesome foods meant they ate more yet still lost weight.

The story of Michelle Koski, 39, is even more impressive. The five-foot-ten Victoria sales manager topped 220 pounds when her son was born in the fall of 2005. Over the course of nine months of boot camps, she went from a size 16 to a size 3 and now weighs 135 pounds. “I’d always been chunky, but now, for the first time in my life, I have muscle definition and I am fit,” says Koski. Best of all, she increased her mental and emotional strength, too. “Once you’ve been through boot camp,” she says, “you gain the confidence that you can handle almost anything life throws at you.”