Winning Combination
Christine VanDeVelde continues her three-part series on losing weight, changing her diet, and learning to love exercise.

I grew up before the wave of organized sports for girls. The Midwest had never heard of soccer. Volleyball was a game that Gidget played on TV. Horses were ridden bareback in farm fields. And the Girls Athletic Association at my high school offered a long season of bowling. No kidding.

As a result, I never gained the experience of having a coach. I had never had a relationship with a person whose job it was to help me achieve a goal, hold me accountable, give me insight, or motivate me. That is until I met Jerzy Gregorek, the "man with the plan," and his wife and partner Aniela. By now, you've surely heard of "that guy in Woodside," who is training everyone from movie stars and soccer moms trying to lose weight to elite athletes and venture capitalists with bad backs.

As I noted in January's column, the Gregoreks' home in Woodside was the last stop for me on the road to losing weight. And one of the reasons it will stay the last stop is because Jerzy and Aniela excel at doing what all great coaches do -- they bring out the best in people. They understand intimately the roles of motivation, focus, and execution in pursuit of a goal. Intelligent, disciplined, and terrific judges of character, they are not above employing the time-honored "good cop/bad cop" strategy -- Jerzy's tactical genius is delivered with swagger and demands, then tempered by Aniela's spirituality and gift for empathy.

And as with the best coaches, teaching is one of their greatest strengths. But the Gregoreks are more than teachers -- they are gurus. That term literally means "teacher" in Sanskrit, but it implies something more than mere instruction or mentoring. Gurus are seen as "a way to self-realization." Their authority is derived from their life experience -- and this alone would qualify the Gregoreks.

Born in Stargard, Poland, in 1954, Jerzy Gregorek took up weightlifting at the age of 13, choosing the objectivity and independence of the sport over boxing and wrestling. Every week, he boarded a train for a forty-minute ride to work out with the nearest weightlifting team and his mentor and coach Andrzej Kowalczyk. By the age of 23, Jerzy was ranked as a first-class Olympic weightlifter. Aniela grew up in Wroclaw, Poland, where she was a sprinter. But soon after they met at a May Day Parade in 1975, Aniela took up weightlifting. Jerzy's passion for the sport was contagious even then. Three years later, they married.

In 1980, Jerzy was studying at the Fire Protection Institute in Warsaw. At that time, in the Lenin Shipyards, Lech Walesa had formed Solidarity, an anti-communist trade union federation. When the communist government tried to destroy the union, declaring martial law and ordering the firefighters to be used as paramilitary forces against Solidarity demonstrators, Jerzy led a student strike. But the police put down the strike and Jerzy was forced into the underground, where he worked for three years before seeking political asylum in Sweden. Eventually Aniela was able to bribe her way out of Poland and join her husband in Stockholm.

From the age of 15, Jerzy says, he had regarded the United States as his "spiritual home" and he and Aniela were now determined to come here. In 1986, they arrived in Manhattan. After a brief stop in Detroit, they landed in Los Angeles, where they were told there was no work for Olympic weightlifting coaches. Advised to seek jobs as personal trainers, they both soon had a full roster of clients from Los Angeles' west side and in 1996 they also founded an Olympic weightlifting competition team. Meanwhile, they continued to compete as individuals -- Jerzy currently holds four World Weightlifting Championships and Aniela five. In 2002, the head coach for strength and conditioning at UCLA asked them to found both men's and women's weightlifting teams at the university. Today, they continue as head coaches for those teams.

Through the years of training hundreds of people with diverse backgrounds, experience, abilities and body types, Jerzy and Aniela detected a pattern. All of their clients wanted to regain what the Gregoreks call "the factors of youth" -- flexibility, strength, speed, leanness, and posture. Traditional weightlifting addressed all of these factors, but required more time and skill than most of their clients possessed. So Jerzy and Aniela began developing a workout that would make these goals achievable. They also began developing a diet and working with their clients and using themselves as living laboratories, they ultimately learned precisely, to the ounce, how to eat to achieve their goals. They dubbed their program "The Happy Body," reflecting the balance the program brought to their clients' lives and hearkening back to a piece of advice Jerzy received from his childhood coach and never forgot. "If you keep your body happy," Kowalczyk told him, "it means you wake up in the morning and look forward to the day, eager to do everything."

In 2003, when Aniela became pregnant, they thought northern California would be a better place to raise a child and moved to Woodside, bringing "The Happy Body" with them. Since arriving, their coaching has changed a lot of people's lives, including mine. Like many others, I have had a lot of false teachers in my life when it comes to losing weight and getting in shape. But now I have two great coaches -- gurus who have provided me with guidance, a vision of success, and a continuing conversation about human nature, poetry and the proper form for squats.

Copyright 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 Christine VanDeVelde. All rights reserved.