Exercise 20 Minutes, Twice A Day To Look Like This?
Ron Wiggins

 Rene Endara is 200 pounds of sculpted muscle bathed in the soft overhead lighting of the smile by Leonardo.

 “Good golly!” I thought on meeting him.  “This man lives in a gym and juggles anvils.”  Wrong.  The reigning Junior National Middleweight champion’s workouts last only 20 minutes.  He exercises twice a day.  He uses light weights.

“The muscles don’t care how much weight you lift, beams Endara, 33, a recent Los Angeles transplant.  “Why should I?”

What the Ecuadorian-born fitness trainer cares about most passionately is defeating the aging process for himself and his client.  Also, winning a gold medal in bodybuilding at the 2004 Olympics.  Also, becoming a fitness role model to Latin Americas.

“Who else do Hispanics have?” he laughs.  “Oscar de la Hoya and that’s about it.”

He preaches a reassuring message to those of us who would like to still be percolating into our 90s and beyond.

“The keys to active longevity are nutrition, hormone replacement therapy and resistance exercise training.  You only need a 20 minute resistance workout and 20 minutes on the treadmill or bicycle.”

What’s more, Endara insists, you can eat meat, throw out the vitamins and powders, and if you want a piece of chocolate cheesecake in the afternoon or a slice of pizza for lunch, then treat yourself.

“If you’ve been exercising, why not? You deserve it.”

As for the myth that sugar is the worst thing since arsenic in the water… yada, yada, yada… bad news: The myth is right.  The nasty thing about sugar, according to Endara, is that it puts your body on n insulin roller coaster.  Don’t be surprised if one day your pancreas packs it in and tells you to buy your insulin at the drug store.

“Diabetes is on the rise, and it’s not only the sugar, it’s the pastas, breads and rice that the body converts to sugar.”

It gets worse.  According to Endara, when you metabolize sugar, it tells your body to store fat when it would otherwise be burning it.  So what’s a body to do?  Endara believes that human animal does best on a “cave-man diet” of animal protein, vegetables fruits and nuts.  Grain and cereal products came into the human diet long after our bodies had committed the digestive processes to meats and vegetables, he says.

Endara doesn’t take food supplements, confident that all the vitamins, minerals and proteins his body will ever need are in meat, fruits and vegetables.

“When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is eat some protein, usually a piece of chicken, to get out of starvation mode, triggering the body to metabolize fat instead of storing it.”

Endara says his experience as competitive amateur bodybuilder – ranked in the top fine nationally – convinces him the body goes into famine mode between meals and stores fat when we ant it to be burning fat.

“When your stomach is empty, your body thinks it is starving.”

The answer is a snack.  “Eat a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts.  You should never go longer than three hours without something in your stomach.”

OK, enough of that.  We’ll all live to be a feisty 100 if we mind our peas and cucumbers.  How do we build muscles like Endara’s?  And don’t give us this guff about a trifling 20-minute workout when we can walk into any gym and see guys with half his muscles working like galley slaves.

“I’m lazy.  I’ve learned to bet the maximum benefit with the least amount of work.  The truth is, I work out 40 minutes a day and spend the rest of the day eating and sleeping.”

When Endara was growing up in a tough East Los Angeles neighborhood, he decided he wanted to excel at a sport.  He tried boxing, tennis, soccer, gymnastics – until he noticed that there were no Hispanic bodybuilders with the following of an Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He threw himself into bodybuilding like a lunatic, doing 1,000 push-ups a day, lifting home-made weights, milk cartons loaded with cement, and making barbells out of concrete blocks.  He practically lived in a gym, and got encouraging results.

But as Endara reached his 20s and studied muscle growth physiology, it came down to this:  Once a muscle cell is worked to failure, more exercise ids pointless.  How you get all the muscle cells in a group to failure is your business.  If light weights will do the job in 5 minutes, reasons Endara, why risk injury and waste time hoisting heavy weights?

“When people don’t believe my workouts are only 20 minutes, it is because they have not seen me work out.  My concentration is total.”

Endara exercises one group of muscles at a time.  If he isolates back and shoulders in the morning, he may work calves and thighs in the afternoon.  He starts with light weights and keeps adding weight until the muscle fails, immediately removing weight and making the muscle fail at each level until each and every fiber is closed down for repairs.

He does not repeat an exercise until all soreness is gone.

Don’t believe his claim that he is lazy.  Endara’s work ethic is Calvinism with whips:  “I do not rest for one second.  I can rest when I leave the gym.  When I work out, I am in another world.”

A world peopled with heroes: Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and his mothers.

“Everything I am, I owe to my mother.  She was there for me and my brothers and sisters when my father’s alcoholism left us to fend for ourselves.”

And can there be normalcy in a life devoted to ones body as a shop project?  Are these men and women, oiled and glistening under the posing lights, tanned, corded, and pumped to the point of exploding like microwaved grapes – are they entirely – well?

Endara himself wonders about the physique-game crowd in Los Angeles, and considers it a sign of mental health that he left a year ago, first to go Miami and then to Palm Beach, where several residents have taken him on as a personal trainer.

“I got tired dodging bullets in East L.A. I saw people killed.  I don’t know anybody from my neighborhood who is alive and not in prison.”

Endara’s physique got him a lot attention in California, where his career as a fitness trainer thrived, but he was in demand for advertising shoots and small movie parts.  Distractions, all of it, diverting him from his twin goals: to stand on the winner’s platform at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and accept a gold medal in the first every Olympic bodybuilding competition, as an American; and to champion the cause of healthy longevity for al Americans.

Endara figures he’ll do the nation an $8 billion favor by pointing out that unless your doctor notes a dietary deficiency, you get more nutrients than your body needs from food.

“I want to bring fitness to a level where it can be realized by everybody without all the mythology and hype.”

“People become so used to feeling horrible that they don’t realize how good they can feel.”

Not by spending money for pills, but by investing a little sweet equity.

“Sure, fitness is hard work, but it’s rewarding work.”

I have resolved to commit myself to Endara’s fitness program by degrees.

Starting today with the naps.

Routine of a champion

What do you have to do to get a world-class physique? Here’s a typical day in the life of Rene Endara.

4:30 a.m.: Wakes up and eats breakfast outside (cappuccino and eggs)

4:45: Remains outside for daily meditation

5:00: Showers and dresses

6-9: Trains three fitness clients

9:30: Arrives at Green’s pharmacy in Palm Beach for steak and tomato breakfast (employees know him so well that as soon as they see him, they start his order)

10:00: Works out for 20 minutes! Has a snack of fruit afterward

10:50: Eats chicken and salad

11:00: Calls “Mamita” (his mother) in L.A. to say good morning (its 8 a.m. there)

11:15: Sleeps! (Endara says this is when he grows because it’s when his body produces growth hormone)

12:45 p.m.: Eats chicken

1:00: Bike rides on the Lake Trail in Palm Beach with Weez (Weasel, the rat terrier), or catches a matinee

3:30: Eats steak or chicken with vegetables (asparagus is his favorite)

4:30-6:30: Trains two clients

6:40: Works out again for 20 minutes! Followed by fruit snack

7:30: Eats steak or chicken and salad

7:45: Cleans up the house (dishes, laundry, etc)

8:15: Showers

8:45: Meditation

9:00: Relaxes with Weez and TV (History channel is his favorite)

9:30: Goes to bed

Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday April 22