Get a Gold Medal Body

When the Olympics heat up this month, the spotlight will be on supersculpted,high-performance bodies. Build one for yourself with our insider’s training guide.

Call it the Oscars of the sporting scene: It’s time for the Olympic Games, as the world’s best athletes converge in the Land Down Under to vie for the gold, silver and bronze. And while you’re watching them run, kick and swim their way to glory, you may notice something else besides muscle power: to-die-for bodies. Can their workout secrets help you gain a better body, too?

Yes, if you jump on the biggest training trend: plyometrics explosive moves in which groups of muscles work together which athletes depend on to develop speed, power and coordination. We took the hottest Olympic sports and asked top coaches for their gold-medal moves. We are featuring the Triahlete's workout here but for the other sports, see the September issue of FITNESS. Now you can train like a winner and whip yourself into award-winning shape!

Maximize Your Fat Blast

For most of us, a little fat burning is never enough. We step, spin and punch our way through workout after workout to sweat off our bumps and bulges. So we decided to get technical and research the absolute best way to take a body from its resting state, when it burns about 1.25 calories per minute, to its fat-burning prime — smoking up to 12 calories per minute. The result: This four-step fat-burning formula, which combines 25 minutes of back-to-back weight moves without rest — a.k.a. supersets — with 30 minutes of aerobic intervals. All you need are 5- to 12-pound dumbbells and a bench. Warm up with light cardio for 10 minutes. Do three sets of 15 repetitions of each exercise within each superset. Vary the order of the strength exercises and the activity choice, as well as the intensity of the aerobic intervals. Do this workout three times a week to turn yourself into a fat-fighting machine! We're featuring Superset #1 here. See the March issue for the rest of the routine.

Fat-Proof Your Butt

Take the jiggle out of your wiggle with this super-firming move to target muscles in your butt.

You've squatted and lunged with the best of them, yet your butt still won't shape up. What gives? You've learned the first truth about the backside: It's stubborn! While some muscles respond quickly to exercise, the butt often—pardon the expression—lags behind, since it naturally carries more fat. The key to targeting the whole bunch of muscles (there are 10 to be exact) is to keep your leg moves varied. We asked Los Angeles-based trainer Keli Roberts to give us some butt-defying exercises, one of which is featured here, that hone in on all the muscles back there. Do our workout as featured in the July issue ofFITNESS at home or in the gym; all you need is a bench or step and a pair of light dumbbells. Do one to two sets of 10 to 15 reps for each move, three times a week. Add some cardio activity to your routine, and within six weeks, you'll be sitting pretty with a brand-new behind. Now, squeeze it!

How-to's of good health

In a recent issue of Lancet, I came across an interesting report about a flight attendant who went to a clinic complaining of persistent problems with diarrhea, which had been occurring for seven years. Other doctors had done many tests but had found no explanation other than that she had irritable bowel syndrome. The doctors at the clinic did another battery of tests and also found nothing wrong — until they took a detailed medical history from her. It turns out she was chewing 60 sticks of "sugar-free" gum containing a total of 75 grams of sorbitol every day. Sorbitol is a type of sugar that isn't digested, so it has no calories. But because it isn't absorbed, it gets carried out of the body with a lot of water — and that's what can cause diarrhea. In my book Modern Prevention I reported a similar case of a 47-year-old woman with a four-year history of gastrointestinal problems that others had attributed to a "nervous stomach." I would never have made the right diagnosis until she opened her purse and started sucking some mints. Five minutes later, she took two more. She told me she ate them all day. They, too, contained sorbitol. When she stopped using the mints, her diarrhea cleared up.

Sorbitol is one of those ingredients usually listed in fine print and present in many "sugar-free" products like chewing gum, candy, fruit juices, mints and canned fruit. Diabetics take it because it isn't absorbed like glucose. Doses of ten to 20 grams of sorbitol a day can cause gas, bloating, cramps and diarrhea. I checked the label on a well-known brand of mints and found that a single mint contained two grams! So eating even five or six mints a day could end up giving you problems.

Meating Out a Compromise

That night at dinner, I tried to use what I had learned. We ate Mexican. My friend had the chicken-and-cheese quesadilla; I had the wild-mushroom tamale. Mushrooms are high in NIACIN, good for reducing bad CHOLESTEROL, and CHROMIUM, good for preventing type II diabetes. I was being good, but that chicken quesadilla was also looking good. Damn good. That's when I called Audrey Cross for a second opinion.

"I think you can eat meat," she said, "just in smaller quantities. Populations where people get 60 to 70 percent of their calories from complex carbohydrates and 10 to 15 percent from fat and 10 to 15 percent from protein are very healthy. I tell people to think of meat as a condiment, not the focus of the meal." In America, meat as condiment means Bac*Os, but in other parts of the world, like China, it accurately describes their diet of mostly vegetables, rice and a little bit of meat. On a hunch, I asked Barnard when girls in China tend to reach puberty. "Around seventeen," he answered. And breast cancer? "Rare," he said.

That did it. For my grandfather's generation, it is probably too late to undo the damage caused by a lifetime of eggs for breakfast and steak for dinner. For my grandfather himself, it's definitely too late — he died of colon cancer when I was a senior in college. (Colon cancer has been linked to a diet high in fat and low in the dietary fiber found in fruits and vegetables, what he used to contemptuously call "rabbit food.") But it's not too late for me. After all, I am a 31-year-old grown-up woman. My mom isn't cooking me hamburgers for lunch anymore. I live in an era of unprecedented nutritional diversity — grocery stores now carry as many as 30,000 items. There's simply no excuse not to start eating more healthily. I may still wake up at 40 with a malignant lump in my breast or at 50 with heart trouble, but if I do, at least I'll know that I did everything within my power to stay healthy.

Eating with the Grain

Barnard makes no bones (so to speak) about his anti-meat bias. "We are not really meant to be carnivores," he said, scanning the menu before settling on vegetarian pad-thai. "If we were, we'd be able to make VITAMIN C in our own bodies, like dogs and cats can. Instead, we have fingers for plucking fruits and vegetables that are high in vitamin C. We don't have the extremely keen eyesight that typical carnivores have, and we're not very fast like lions or any of the felines."

"What about chicken?" I asked. "I bet I could catch one of them."

"Chicken doesn't really work," he said. "It's a little like switching to a filtered cigarette instead of quitting smoking. It doesn't make a lot of difference if the meat was attached to a cow's bone, a fish's bone or a chicken's bone. It's all an animal's muscle — PROTEIN with fat mixed in. There's no DIETARY FIBER or complex CARBOHYDRATES or vitamin C in there. The leanest beef is 29 percent fat; the leanest chicken is 20 to 23 percent fat, and that's without the skin. Compare that to beans, which are four percent fat, and rice, which is one percent fat."

If you think a pill can make up for any deficiency in your diet, forget it. "DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS aren't the answer," Barnard said. "Our bodies are designed to extract VITAMINS and MINERALS from foods, not pills. A tablet may contain a lot of, say, BETA-CAROTENE, but it may be missing hundreds of other CAROTENOIDS that might be even more significant."

It all seemed pretty simple. The healthiest diet is one that contains a lot of plant foods — vegetables, whole grains, legumes and fruit. Choose these over things like burgers and chips, and you end up with a full supply of NUTRIENTS, plus dietary fiber to ward off colon cancer. Eat this way and there will also be less room left for the more calorie-dense foods like meat. But when I tried to contemplate Barnard's steakless, fishless, chickenless world — the world without Noah and his ark — it was bleak. I found it hard to believe nature would want that for us. If we're not meant to eat cheeseburgers, why do we crave them?

"It's true," Barnard sighed, "people mainly crave the foods that did not originally exist in our diet. All I can say is that cravings are the worst possible indicator of what your body actually needs. What do we crave? Alcohol, tobacco, opiates and fatty, salty foods. Why? I don't know. Some people theorize that it's a survival instinct left over from when we went through cycles of famine."

A Question of "What?" Not "How Much?"

Better advice for maintaining health and losing weight, says Neal Barnard, M.D., the author of Eat Right, Live Longer (Crown), is to forget about how much you are eating and concentrate on what you are eating. Barnard is sort of the Ralph Nader of broccoli, a zealot who spends his days bothering regulatory committees, publishing papers and sending press releases about the connection between diet and disease. He grew up in North Dakota, the son of a family in the livestock business. But while he was in medical school, after one particularly gruesome autopsy of a heart-attack victim whose arteries had been strangled by plaque, Barnard decided to stop eating meat.

"Cardiovascular disease," he says, "is the number-one killer disease in America, but it is not an inevitable part of aging. When they did autopsies of soldiers during the Korean war, they found that atherosclerosis had already begun in the Americans — even though they were young and fit — but there was none in the Asians. There's no question it was diet related." After reading Barnard's book, I asked him out for lunch to a Thai restaurant near his spartan offices in Washington, D.C.