Healthy campers

A small orange slice of the sun is just peeking through a wall of mist-grayed trees surrounding Perkins Road Park and drawing long dark shadows out from Olympia Stadium as junkyard tires drag and bound like ploughs through the wet grass. It is 6 a.m., and the next 60 minutes are going to be rough.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings like this see members of 30-year-old fitness trainer John McSweet’s boot camp executing deadlifts and heaving power cleans with sandbags or taking turns pushing his old station wagon while the others jog close behind.

“I just put it in neutral and encourage them—you know, light a fire under their butt,” McSweet says. “And doing intervals of these types of universal human movements—squatting, pushing, pulling—works way better than steady state running.”

January always rings in a flood of often-fleeting exercise resolutions, but through his company, Artisan Fitness, McSweet is one of a new crop of young professional trainers in the city working almost exclusively with small classes that offer a combination of personal training and group accountability. Trending nationally, this strategy benefits both trainers and their devotees financially, and has a lot of ordinary Baton Rougeans with unrealized health goals getting out of the gym and into fitness boot camps.

One of McSweet’s clients lost 70 pounds last year, though the Connecticut native says that result is not typical. “Most of my clients won’t lose a ton of weight,” McSweet says. “They’ll lose body fat but put on lean muscle at the same time.”

Sure clients want to be healthy and have more energy, but McSweet has a predominant thesis on people’s fitness and weight-loss goals. No matter what they say, there truly is only one thing they are after. McSweet calls it LGN.

People, he says, want to “look good naked.”

“I wanted to marginalize turning 40,” says Parker Ewing, vice president of Ewing Aquatech and a client of McSweet’s since last March. “Now, it was tough. In the beginning I was sore. But I wanted to be sore. If it had been easy, it would not have been as attractive to me.”

Ewing had tried working with a personal trainer before, but that didn’t stick. He likes the camaraderie of his boot-camp friends. “You rag on each other, and you enjoy getting to know each other,” he says. “It makes it more fun to the point that you’re disappointed if they don’t show up one morning.”

After studying furniture design at Savannah College of Art and Design, McSweet migrated to New Orleans for freelance work in the field. In the fall of 2005 Hurricane Katrina moved McSweet to Baton Rouge, where—after some prodding from friends who would catch him reading human physiology books for kicks—he enrolled at LSU to study nutrition. McSweet launched Artisan Fitness in 2008 to balance intense physical exercise with a sensible diet regimen that lowers the intake of fat, oil and processed foods. One of his favorite sayings: You cannot out-train a bad diet.

Last September, after nine months of fighting fire ants and dodging dog piles, McSweet’s group moved from Perkins Road Park into Neely’s TaeKwonDo facility on Staring Lane. They still do outdoor exercises, now in the parking lot, including the always-popular station wagon push.

“I could take my business to a bigger city like Houston, but there it’s as if people are just living to work,” McSweet says. “Baton Rouge has this really unique culture where people like living life. I want to train those kinds of people.”

Louisiana consistently ranks among the fattest states in the nation based on adult obesity rates, another reason for our city’s proliferation of personal trainers and, now, the increasingly popular boot camps.

“Most of our clients are looking for a dynamic way to lose those first few pounds,” says 30-year-old Mandy Leach, director of Exerfit Family Fitness on Bluebonnet Boulevard. An Olympic swimmer for her native Zimbabwe at the 2000 Sydney Games, Leach conducts four month-long boot camp programs for adults of all ages and fitness levels throughout the year at Exerfit’s expansive indoor facility. Leach believes the group atmosphere fosters accountability.

“For most people, exercise is something they do if they have time,” she says. “So procrastination and motivation are huge hurdles to overcome.”

A former U.S. Marine, Team U.S.A. soccer player and high-school coach, Baton Rouge native Denver Benton began offering boot camp classes three years ago with his Fit Bride programs that help women slim down before their weddings. Now his regular boot camp brings in 25 to 50 exercisers depending on the season. Spring and summer are by far the busiest.

“Personal training one-on-one is really rewarding, but my background is coaching, so I really like working with groups,” Benton says. “For a lot of people, spending $60, $70 an hour for a personal trainer is unrealistic, but they will pay $100 or $200 for six weeks or eight weeks of group work where the trainer holds them accountable and they get a good workout in—as opposed to a gym where you might be paying less, but you’re less likely to go and less likely to know what to do when you are there.”

Benton likes taking his group climbing at the Rock House in Lafayette and is planning another kayaking trip to Colorado this summer.

“I want it to be about more than working out,” Benton says. “I want them to have fun. Because it’s more about leading an active lifestyle than just taking one class.”

McSweet agrees, and though he would never want Artisan Fitness to sound exclusive, he likes training only those willing to work hard and enjoy it while they do. Fortunately for him and the other cutting-edge trainers in the city, more Baton Rougeans are starting to look at alternatives to traditional exercise.

“It’s the atmosphere that people want,” McSweet says. “You can’t go to a gym and push a car.”

For more information on these boot camps, visit artisanfitness.com, denverbenton.com, and exerfitbr.com.