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One night in 1978, a man knocked on the door of a Los Angeles health club after-hours and said he
wanted to hire someone to teach his wife how to lift weights. “She is going to run down the
beach in slow motion in a movie, and her arms and body have to be muscular and perfect,”
explained John Derek.
A year later, when Johnny Carson asked Bo Derek on national television how she became a
“10,” her answer practically created an industry.
“I worked out with a personal trainer at a place called the Nautilus Center,” she said.
Within a week, Nautilus had to install a dozen phone lines to field all the calls. Within a year,
there were 15 Nautilus Centers around Los Angeles—and as many competitors. The fitness-club era was on. Moreover, anyone with money wanted to hire one of those—now ubiquitous—personal trainers.
Elite sweat
Critical Mass is an unassuming little gym, 1,000 square feet tucked quietly and almost invisibly
upstairs from a Starbucks near the corner of San Vicente and 26th streets in L.A.’s upscale
Brentwood neighborhood. But don’t be fooled—its DNA springs directly from that old
disco-era Nautilus at ground zero of the fitness revolution. And, true to form, it remains on
the cutting edge of personal training today.
Co-owner Steven Kates, now 44, was 23 and the general manager of Nautilus when Bo made it famous,
and has ridden the wave ever since. First, he opened Matrix 1, L.A.’s original hot, sexy,
outrageously expensive workout joint (since dwarfed by Sports Club L.A.). Linda Evans, Ursula
Andress, and other top Hollywood actors pumped up there. Rob Parr (Madonna’s trainer), Johnny
G. (the founder of Spinning), and other soon-to-be famous personal
trainers got their start there. “Half the trainers in town started there,” says
well-known trainer and adventure racer Jim Garfield, another Matrix alum.
In the early 1990s, Kates started a new business with partner David Kelmenson, now 33. Noting the
emerging trend of corporate and home gyms, they became fitness design consultants to developers.
At the same time, they kept their day jobs and created a new concept in personal training: The
Personal Training Boutique—an elite studio devoted entirely to the needs of a relative handful of well-heeled West L.A. clients.
Celluloid motivation
Nobody just walks into Critical Mass, as you would with a regular gym. It’s by appointment
only, for two reasons. First, it’s small, with just seven aerobic machines and a few more
strength machines. If a dozen people popped in at once, it’d resemble a sweatshop—the kind that you find in third-world countries.
The second reason for the restricted entry involves two wide-screen Mitsubishi TVs hanging from
the ceiling and a wall, stocked with at least 200 videotapes and laser discs—movies, TV shows,
music videos, documentaries, and more. Interestingly, while this personal training boutique has
no personal trainers per se, Kelmenson provides a personal psychological push. One of his
talents is picking the proper video motivation for each client, based on his or her mood,
personality, and goal.
“Some people respond to envy, others to fear,” explains Kelmenson. “If you’re
lazy, you need ’bad’ motivation—scary, violent sci-fi movies like Alien,
Midnight Express, Jacob’s Ladder, the hillbilly rape scene from
Deliverance, or even a Charles Manson interview. It makes them work harder.” On the
other hand, he says that go-for-it, type A personalities respond better to competition and
“good” motivation, so he shows them clips of beautiful people—Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom
Cruise, Brad Pitt, runway tapes of Gucci models.
“We tap into their vanity. They think, ’I can look that good with a little more
effort.’”
Getting fit, fast
Few clients stay to watch an entire movie—or need to. “Thirty minutes of cardio is the key to staying fit; after that, the benefits fall off for everyone except serious athletes who do
triathlons, 10Ks, and marathons,” says Kelmenson. “If you end a session with 20
minutes of hard weights, push-ups, squats, and chin-ups, you’re in and out in under an
hour with a total-body workout. Even an hour is a lot of time for our clients.”
Kelmenson says that Hollywood executives, doctors, and lawyers work exceedingly long hours,
often on the cell phone at home by 7 a.m. and back from the office as late as 8 or 9 p.m.
“That leaves three to four hours for family and ’other.’ We get an hour,
max.”
Busy actors are no different. Regular Critical Mass clients such as Tori Spelling (Beverly
Hills 90210), Lisa Rinna, Josie Bissette (Melrose Place), and Anne Archer (Fatal
Attraction) have lifestyles similar to high-powered execs. Compounding their problems are
frequent periods of travel and location shooting that don’t include exercise. So they often
rush in hoping to get back in shape in one day, which used to lead to injuries.
Kelmenson says injuries have been reduced significantly in the last five years by one piece of
equipment: the Precor Elliptical Trainer, a no-impact cardio machine with an oval-shaped motion.
Tellingly, the Critical Mass aerobics room contains one bike, one treadmill, and five
Precors.
As this exercise machine seems easy, it makes life a lot simpler for people in the business of
keeping other people healthy. “The fact is that most people hate working out,” says
Kelmenson. “We never forget that, which is why we’re still
here.”
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