LITTLE ROCK — Felon Fitness
How to Get a Hard Body Without Doing Hard Time, by Trey Teufel and William S. Kroger (Adams Media paperback, October 2011), 214 pages, $15.95.
Tell me they didn’t consult incarcerated felons as experts on health and fitness. Ah, but they did.
Why would someone do such an insensitive thing? Because someone has not been the victim of a crime? Because someone thought it would be funny? Because someone feels sorry for criminals?
In the author blurbs on the final page, we learn that William Kroger is a 50-year-old lawyer who noticed that his clients come out of prison more fit than they go in.
In the book’s introduction, he and trainer Trey Teufel note that California prisoners do not have access to exercise equipment and their daily schedules also do not allow much time for exercise.
So, the authors contend, the fact that these men improve their physical condition during years of incarceration proves “without a shadow of a doubt that the only piece of equipment you need to get in shape is your body itself. No shakes. No supplements. No gym fees. No home equipment. ... No personal trainers. No fancy clothes. No smoothies. No pills.”
That’s good common sense. Do they make the point without glorifying criminals? If you define “glorifying” as quoting prisoners by name and giving each man his own chapter, well, they do glorify these criminals.
Beginning on Page 137, the authors report the self described workouts of nine men, naming them and providing their prison offender ID numbers. All but two of the names do appear in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation inmate-search database; one prisoner’s name appears there, but the number the book provides is one digit off; the other is not in the database.
Do they report what crimes these men committed? No, and that information wasn’t available through the state website.
Also, the authors provide only spotty “vital statistics” - data that suggest the condition these strong bodies were in “before” and “after.” We know how old most of them are and (in some cases but not all) how much they weighed before they went to prison, but not how tall they are, how fast they can run 40 yards, what their cholesterol and blood pressure numbers are ...
Furthermore, the authors critique some of their routines, suggesting they’re making mistakes.
Why describe actual people when you can’t actually describe them? Good question.
Like other exercise “cookbooks,” most of the pages are filled with big black-and-white photos and verbal descriptions of familiar exercises. To further the theme, the three models are tattooed Americans, one of whom is a former inmate.
The authors describe how to make a “prison dumbbell” using stacks of magazines and string, and they talk up the versatility of old buckets and cans of vegetables as weightlifting aids. But then they advise readers to use regular dumbbells.
The authors don’t give the exercises cutesy names in keeping with their theme, except in one case: What they call “Chainbreakers” looks like elbow pullback/shoulderblade squeezes.
So it’s yet another well-padded novelty fitness book? Beyond a reasonable doubt.
ActiveStyle, Pages 29 on 10/24/2011