Introducing the Koos Kombuis fitness plan!

I never thought that I would have anything in common with Springbok rugby captain John Smit — apart from our crappy hairstyles, that is — until I read in this morning’s paper that, over the Christmas season, John has lost seven kilograms.

Surprise, surprise! I did even better than that! Over the last nine and a half weeks, I have lost 7.7 kilograms! That is 0.7 better than Mr Smit!

Indeed, the last nine and a half weeks of my life have been a life-changing, astonishing, fantastic period of growth — or should I say shrinking? — and spiritual insight. Is anyone interested to hear about my little voyage of discovery?

During this period, I have developed a personalised diet and health regime, sourced from the internet and adjusted to meet my individual needs. I call this “The Koos Kombuis Nine and a Half Weeks Pinotage Fitness Plan”. Like the movie of the same title, it involves a certain amount of S&M — not sexual sadomasochism, unfortunately, but another kind of masochism, the masochism of Salads and Muesli.

As you recall — those of you who had read my previous blog post — it all started with that fax I received on my birthday, the one in which my insurance company warned me about my cholesterol count. I started dieting that day. Not in order to lose weight — all such efforts in the past had been futile — but simply to get my cholesterol count down a bit. My wife got on the internet, sourced some recipes, and promptly got down to the nitty-gritty of feeding me bird seeds, rabbit food and vegetables with odd-sounding names instead of my usual fare of pizzas and steak.

Now I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that, in nine and a half weeks, I had actually lost 7.7 kilograms (have I mentioned this before?). Though most people don’t notice the difference yet, I can certainly feel the difference, 7.7 kg is roughly the weight of two five-litre boxes of wine. Try carrying two five-litre boxes of wine with you everywhere you go — up the stairs, in the swimming pool, while walking the dog — and you will get an idea what a relief it is to me NOT to have to do it. When I look in the mirror and the light is at a certain angle, I can see the faint first traces of evidence of something I had not had in decades — cheek bones. I love having cheek bones again! I thought they’d disappeared somewhere. They were just hidden away beneath all that excess fat!

The bad news is the fact that, coupled with this phenomenally successful eating programme, I am now being forced to attend the gym regularly, at least three times a week. This is the fitness part of my fitness plan. It was thrust on me by circumstances beyond my control. I never intended my simple diet to go beyond the mundane act of munching carrots and raisins into the metaphysical realm of weight-lifting and wrestling with machines, but I had no choice. And, at last, I am beginning to see the benefits of that, too, but at a price (the price not being money, in my case — lucky for me, I’m being sponsored — but time and sheer effort).

I always used to love going to the gym. I went, on average, about twice a month. Then I would hang around in the cafeteria a bit, check out some pretty girls, and finally get my ample body onto a running machine, one of those with the built-in TV sets, where you can adjust the angle, watch your own pulse rate, and generally just amble along at a leisurely pace. Apart from occasionally trying to break my own record time over the mile — fourteen minutes (only three and a half times longer than Roger Bannister’s famous world record!), I just enjoyed sweating a bit. I had no long-term goals. I did not mess around with weights, and I stayed away from the circuit and the sauna as far as possible. I considered these parts of the gym nothing more than high-tech chat rooms, and I’m too old for chat rooms.

Alas! All that has changed now. All because of my previous blog entry.

You see, when I wrote about my diet, I also mentioned the fact that I was a member of Virgin Active. To my astonishment, the market research people at Virgin Active read my blog, and, the next thing I knew, I received an e-mail from their head office, offering me, for free, a series of twelve sessions with one of their in-house “personal trainers”.

Within a week, I was introduced to a muscular young man by the name of André, who took measurements of every facet of my body, counted my heartbeat, and stood around with a pen and clipboard while I had to do a certain number of push-ups.

That, of course, was the first hurdle we had to overcome. I don’t do push-ups. I have never done push-ups. I don’t know how to do push-ups. And, even if I try, I can’t manage to do even one push-up. I can go down on myself, but I can’t get up again. Physiologically, I am not built for push-ups. My stomach touches the ground even before I properly bend my arms, and, once my stomach has touched the ground, it refuses to get up again. Next thing I know, I start flailing around with my arms around my head like a beached seal in the Cape Town Waterfront. The poor, hapless André had the unenviable task of filling in, on his little form, at the space allotted for “Number of push-ups per minute” the round figure of zero. Push-up-wise, I am perhaps the worst trainee he had ever had.

Obviously, we had to work around the fact that I couldn’t do a single push-up, and concentrate on other area’s that also needed concentrating on. As you may imagine, there were lots.

My gym sessions are very different now. I sweat much more than ever before. I am acquainted with many machines I had often seen from a distance and wondered what they were for. There are machines that simulate walking drunkenly on staircases, machines that simulate walking drunkenly on board the deck of a ship in stormy seas, machines that simulate rowing a canoe drunkenly against the tide in a strong blizzard, machines that simulate pulling oneself drunkenly up Table Mountain with pulleys, etc, etc. Most of it is very scary. All of it is utterly exhausting. My personal trainer has forced me out of my comfort zone into some other place that is very new and very terrifying to me, and, contrary to my previously held prejudices, it is not a chat room at all.

I’m not sure how much longer I will survive. By the end of these twelve free sessions, I will either be dead, or I’ll be running the Comrades.

Then again, if Rocco de Villiers could change himself from a piano-playing nerd to a muscleman in just one year, I suppose anything is possible, isn’t it?

I have learned one thing while going through this baptism of sweat and pain. If you want something done, ask an expert. Don’t try and do it yourself.

The low cholesterol diet that my wife got from the web (and that I later personalised by adding the Pinotage bit), for instance. It was worked out by diet experts. The training I’m receiving at Virgin Active is, in fact, a specialist training course designed, and proven over time, by fitness specialists.

Life works like that. The skills we need to survive in this modern age require the input of people who have focused on a single area of expertise. That’s why we pay them for their services (or would have paid them unless we got sponsored). Because they can do stuff that we can’t do.

When I needed photographs to be taken for a poster we need for this year’s KKNK festival, for instance (this paragraph is rather boring, you don’t have to read it all), I asked my wife to take a few shots of me with my Blackberry. “No,” she said. “Let’s hire a professional photographer.” “What? Pay someone just to push a little shutter knob?” “Yes,” she said. We did that; we found, on the web, someone with the name of Tertius Meintjies, who is a part-time actor and full-time photographer — and the results were much better than the results we would have achieved on my Blackberry.

Allow me to bore you with yet another personal anecdote (this paragraph is also optional). All my life, I’d wanted to be a columnist. I suspected, years ago, as I was making CDs and going through the motions of being a rock star, that, deep down in me, there was a columnist just waiting to be born. For the last few decades, I have watched, with various degree of envy and awe, my favourite columnists at work; all through my tortuous friendship, back in the turbulent eighties, with Elaine Durbach, right through to the fabulous era of Darrel Bristow-Bovey and David Bullard — Lord, how I miss those two men of genius, in spite of their over-publicised flaws! — up to this heady present age of Khaya Dlanga, Chris McEvoy, Justice Malala, Chris Roper, John Trovato, Karen Bliksem and Dana Snyman. I admire and try and emulate these writers! Though I have my own columns — apart from a biweekly slot at Rapport which I’ve had for a few years, I recently got an opportunity to hone my skills at Channel 24 — I suspect I might never be as good as any of them. But it’s fun trying. And it’s a job I feel at home in. I might have finally found my own little area of expertise. And I’m grateful for it!

And this set me thinking (now you can start reading again, as the next few paragraphs contain important spiritual insights). How many mistakes are made nowadays because people neglect this simple truth, the truth that, in most cases — with a few notable exceptions — experts are better at getting something done than novices?

It’s especially true in economics and politics. We often read about the lamentable inability of the ANC to make the switch from a political protest movement to an effective government. But those are two completely different jobs! Being a politician is not about actually getting things done, it’s all about kissing babies and delivering speeches. Even Obama was better at that facet than the actual nitty-gritty of governing, as (to be perfectly honest) was Nelson Mandela. Once you get your perimeters set down straight, it’s easy to see that Jacob Zuma is, in fact, a very good politician. The only reason why he is a terrible president is because the present job description of a president is all wrong. Zuma is very good at saying “everyone in South Africa should have jobs”. Of course, having said that, he cannot deliver on his promise. His job, as president, is just to say it — to say it properly, in a heart-warming way, in a sincere way, in such a way that people feel they understand exactly what he means. Saying things like that is his area of expertise. He is a talker, a public figure, the face of his party. Someone else should actually have the task of making the things he says come true in reality. Trevor Manuel was such a person. We need more Trevor Manuels in the ANC. And they should actually have a practical job description, not just hang around by the coffee machine in the corner of the office, as Trevor Manuel currently seems to be doing.

Same thing with Cosatu. Vavi is a very good trade union leader, one of the best. He is honest, he has the common touch, and he inspires trust. Being a trade union leader, however, does not qualify him to shape economic policy. Economics clearly is not his field of expertise. Every time Vavi makes statements about the economy, he bites off more than he can chew. Vavi’s ideas about the economy are naÏve and downright embarrassing. It’s like me trying to perform a song with B minor in it. Or do a single push-up in Virgin Active.

Well, those were my thoughts for the day. In short: (i) dieting and fitness can be fun. (ii) President Zuma is an excellent politician. And (iii) we need an entirely different team of men and women to run our government, people of expertise and skills appointed through an impartial process and employed by men like Zuma.

Handing out tenders to insufficiently capable friends and cronies simply isn’t enough. Everyone should do what they’re really good at, the things they excel at, the area of expertise they have proven themselves in. It’s sheer madness to try and run something as huge as an entire country any other way.

A last thought. Of course, as I’ve mentioned, there are exceptions to this “experts-know-best” rule. I might touch on one or two of those in my next blog entry, just for the fun of it. But first, I’ve got to dash, because my Virgin Active personal trainer André is waiting for me at the gym with his muscles, his clipboard and his sadistic grin …

PS: Here is a simplified version of Koos’s diet that goes with his Nine and a Half Weeks Pinotage Fitness Plan. Breakfast: Muesli with yoghurt or Jungle Oats.Tea-time: One banana or any fruit.Lunch: Two ProVita’s with humus, or a tuna salad with lettuce, tomato and chopped raw veggies.Afternoon tea-time: Another fruit or one ProVita.Dinner: White meat (skinless) or fish (no prawns or lobster, unfortunately) with stir-fry or roasted veggies, and a glass or two of Pinotage red wine (Note by Koos: Pinotage red wine contains the mystery substance resveratrol, which actually lowers blood sugar levels and helps prevent heart disease).Late-night snack: Two tots of quality brandy, without ice or Coca-Cola, at room temperature (another note by Koos: this serves no purpose, but it’s a great relaxant).

Cheers!