21 Return of the Prodigal Client

After 9 years of slow motion, high intensity, strength training at InForm Fitness in Manhattan, client Hence Orme decided to change up his workout and leave InForm Fitness.  After a year and a half away Hence decided to come back.

Why did Hence leave Inform Fitness in the first place, what type of exercise program did he do, and why did he come back.?

Join InForm Fitness founder, Adam Zickerman and Hence’s trainer Mike Rogers for their interview with The Prodigal InForm Fitness Client.

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you to give this workout a try, please visit www.InformFitness.com.  InForm Fitness has locations located in Manhattan, Port Washington, Denville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg, and Resten.  

If you aren’t currently near an InForm Fitness grab a copy of Adam’s book, Power of 10, The Once a Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution, click this link to visit Amazon: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen  Adam breaks down the three pillars necessary to achieve maximum benefits of this workout along with simple to follow exercises you can do at home or in a gym near you. 

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to [email protected].  You can also call the show with a comment or question.  The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. 

The transcription for Episode 21 - Return of the Prodigal Client is below:

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Adam: Well Hence, welcome to our show. I’m very excited to have you here.

Hence: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Adam: The reason that I’m excited to have Hence here is because he is a client that started here many years ago —Hence: 2006.

Adam: 2006, was here for many years. He’s experimented his whole life with exercise, and then he took a hiatus and he started experimenting with some more things after here, and now he has come back. Then Mike said to me, guess what Adam, Hence is back and I said oh great, and Mike started to tell me what you’ve been doing Hence, and then what led you to come back. I was like wait, wait, don’t tell me yet, let’s get this fresh on our podcast, because I think a lot of our listeners would appreciate to hear about your journey. How you came full circle so to speak.

Mike: I was enormously excited when Hence came back — I think it was about three months ago. He started in 2006, in September, and ten years, we’re enormously proud to have clients have been here for that long, and I just looked on the system, 351 sessions you’ve done with us over that time.

Hence: Is that right, wow.

Mike: That’s an incredible thing, and once a week, it’s actually — it averages, over the eight and a half years, it’s about forty-one sessions per year, which is… that’s pretty good, it takes into account vacations, time away for business trips or something like that, but yeah, it’s been really exciting.

Adam: Let’s start the beginning, like what brought you here in the first place, back in 2006.

Hence: Sure, I think to start off with, Adam is right that I’ve been interested in exercise and fitness and health for a very long time, and have been training since I was a teenager, mostly weight lifting and running, and along the way, have done a fair amount of reading and research, and going back to 2006, at that point in time, I was doing a lot of running. Or at least a lot of running for me, somewhere in the range of 25-35 miles a week, and I had ramped up to that level pretty quickly, and what I was finding was that, at the age of, I guess at that time 42, 41 actually, a lot of little things were starting to break down. Nothing major, but the running was starting to take a toll, and I was starting to notice, for example, that I was having trouble walking the stairs up out of the subway. It was starting to bug me, so my family and I were on vacation in San Diego, so I was out of New York, I was out of the routine, and I could get a little time to think. At the time, I happened to just be leafing through the local San Diego magazine, and they profiled some local trainers. One of whom focused on high-intensity training, and I called her up and just said tell me about what you do and can I come train, and she did, but said I’m sorry, I can’t train you while you’re here, where do you live? So I told her that my family and I lived in New York City, and she practically jumped through the phone at me and said oh wow, well Adam Zickerman is the one that I follow. You should read his book and you should go talk to him. 

Adam: I forgot that story.

Mike: I looked it up on the sheet, I was like oh San Diego.

Hence: It was a really random occurrence, so I read the book, it made sense, and at this point I really started to say to myself look, I’ve been pushing running for me, in my context, fairly aggressively, and it’s having some negative results that I didn’t anticipate and I certainly don’t want. At the end of the day, I don’t want to run so much I can’t walk.

Mike: Did you have a goal in mind when you decided to start running aggressively, 35, 40 miles a week? Were you going to do a marathon or something?

Hence: I was never really thinking about doing a marathon, I was thinking about being able to run maybe a fast 10k or maybe a half marathon.

Mike: Did you feel like you had to lose weight at the time, or you wanted to lose weight at the time?

Hence: No, not particularly, that wasn’t really in the parameters at that point, but the negative effects were really starting to pile up and so I said alright, I’m going to do something different. I’m going to go cold turkey, I’m going to stop running. I talked with Adam, we had a great conversation, what he said made a ton of sense and so I made a big leap, a big experimental leap and said alright. I’m done with running for now, and I’m just going to train once a week at 

InForm. The results were fantastic.

Adam: I remember you telling me that you just gave up running cold turkey.

Mike: I remember it too.

Hence: I did, and I like running, I’m not somebody for whom running was — or even is a chore, I still like it, but I had to balance that versus the wear and tear that I was accruing. So I stopped, and started training once a week, very high intensity. It required something completely different of me which is to be highly focused for a short period of time and with really no possibility of oh okay, if I don’t give a hundred percent, I’m going to train in another couple days anyway so it really doesn’t matter. I really had to focus, and over the next several months, all my running aches and pains went away, which is fairly predictable. If I just stopped running, I’m sure a lot of those aches and pains and issues would have resolved themselves, but I did get stronger…

Mike: Did it make sense to you immediately that the idea of a once a week workout was going to be effective, or did you actually have to take a leap of faith into that?

Hence: There was definitely a leap of faith. I had done enough reading, not just Adam’s book, but some other authors, to have the seed planted that maybe we all have been taught about high frequency exercise is really not the whole story. There’s a lot of damage that can be built up over time that is understated from higher ...