Could Will Pavia survive a session at the Dogpound?
I am holding dumbbells. “Just to here,” says a lady named Molly, placing her palm a few inches above the bar.
I’d love to oblige. The trouble is, I can’t move my arms. I can’t imagine lifting them ever again. I’ll probably keep them at my sides from now on.
“Just one,” Molly says.
What would Taylor Swift do, I wonder, not for the first time today. She would not give up. In no particular order, she would write a Grammy-winning album about it, and she would lift that bar.
We are in a gym called the Dogpound, where Swift trained for her Eras tour. It is on the ground floor of a wedge-shaped building in Lower Manhattan, New York City, with tinted windows that look out to a road leading to the Holland Tunnel.
“I’ll show you around,” one of the managers says when I arrive, but it doesn’t take long. There’s the entrance, where he sits behind a small desk; there’s a corridor bracketed on one side by a row of lockers; and on the other, by small cupboard-like offices for the staff, who are pictured in a cluster of Polaroids taped to one whitewashed wall. They look like suspects in a police investigation.
The gym itself has a boxing ring, a punchbag, various squat racks, pull-up bars and other instruments of torture. There’s no sauna, no massage parlour, no wall of T-shirts and branded merch, no coffee bar selling protein bars and pond-green juice drinks. There aren’t even any showers.
Yet this is the place where Manhattan’s elite now train: the actors, the supermodels, the Wall Street bros. And one globe-striding colossus of a pop star.
The A-list have five-star lives, but when it comes to working out there’s a trend for slightly more rough-and-ready gyms. James McAvoy has trained at North London BoxingClub, an unassuming studio at the end of the Piccadilly Line. The personal trainer Dalton Wong, whose clients include Elizabeth Debicki and Kit Harington, holds his tough sessions at a modest house in west London.
Maybe the celebrities reason that bells and whistles will distract from the serious task of sculpting muscle. Swift knew that her tour — arriving in the UK in June — would be “harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot”, as she told Time magazine in December.
Though perhaps she never trained with Molly. I look at her. Her full name is Molly Ertel. She is 28 and a former model who became a fitness trainer six years ago. She is tall, with long dark hair and all in black except for her fingernails, which are purple.
Did you train Taylor Swift? I ask. Molly grins and shakes her head at me for asking the question. She will neither confirm nor deny it.
Swift’s New York place is nearby and she began training here about six months before the first concert. Every day she would run on a treadmill while singing the entire set list, “fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs”. I imagined Dogpound members squatting and heaving while Swift gave them a series of a cappella performances from the running machine. But I’m not sure Dogpound has a running machine. It appears that Swift did the running and singing at home before repairing to the gym for a customised strength, conditioning and weights programme. So now I’m getting a taster of it.
“What are you preparing for?” Molly asks.
Just imagine that I have to dance and sing on stage for three hours, four to six times a week, I say.
“In boot heels?” she asks.
Absolutely. Possibly a leotard as well. Do to me what you would do to Taylor, I say.
We start with stretching exercises, in which I stand with one leg forward and dip until the knee of my trailing leg almost touches the mat, while holding weights that look like tiny, flat-bottomed handbags made of lead. One hamstring doesn’t like it and lets me know. I tweaked it a few weeks ago.
“Have you seen a doctor?” Molly asks. I’m 44, I say.
“Hey!” Molly says. “Don’t say that. You go see a doctor. They tell you what’s wrong. You tell us. We work out what we can do to help.”
She means about the hamstring. Not about being 44. There’s very little anyone can do about that.
The unique selling point of Dogpound is the personalised training. You can’t just wander in and pump iron; you need a trainer. “It’s super-tailored,” says Molly, whose specialism is strength and conditioning.
At the top of the cluster of Polaroids on the wall is one of a handsome, swarthy chap with tattoos on his neck and arms. This is Kirk Myers, 45, Dogpound’s founder. Myers is from Missouri and his story, related on the gym’s website, is that he struggled with obesity as a child and suffered heart failure aged 21. This prompted a fitness kick, then a sense that he was destined to help “others transform their own bodies and lives”. In 2011 he brought this mission to New York, where an early client was the actor Hugh Jackman, whom Myers was training for an X-Men film.
“He started bringing his dog to the workouts,” Myers says. “Then he invited his friends and they started bringing their dogs to the session. Soon the crew became known as the Dogpound.” When Myers got his own space in 2016, he called it Dogpound.
Back to Taylor’s workout. I’m doing some strange push-ups at this point, where I have to rock backwards between each one, bending my legs without my knees touching the ground.
“You got three more in you?” she asks. “Exhale as you push up. The greatest effort should be where the exhale is. There it is,” she adds, as I push up with one more groaning exhalation.
“That was perfect,” she says, as if she is really blown away by my push-ups. “I loved it.”
At one point she asks me to kick out one leg as I lie on my side on the floor, stretching it upwards as far as it will go. It does not got very far.
“That’s our range of motion,” she says, her face expressionless. “Amazing.”
Molly is always like this. She is a ray of sunshine in human form. This is the basic posture of Dogpound, this relentless optimism. The night before my session, I get an email saying how much they are looking forward to my arrival. “You are going to crush it!” it says.
We do an exercise that involves leaning forward with the end of a cable just above your head and straightening your arms. After I’ve done this three or four times, Molly claims that she can see one of my triceps.
“There it is!” she cries. “You can see it! There it is!”
I’m not sure I believe her. Does it actually exist? I say. “It does!” she shouts. “It exists! It’s right there. You can see it!”
It’s certainly true that I can feel aches now, in muscles that I did not know I had.
“Send me a photo,” she says, “the next time you do this.”
Molly, I say. I’m never doing this again.
“What!” she exclaims, sounding scandalised. “Oh my gosh!”
I wonder how I will get home, struggling down a flight of steps at the subway station, all these new muscles complaining.
Before I am freed, we are going to do “21s”, Molly says, which involve a barbell and biceps curls, lifting the bar or lowering it.
“Up to my hand,” Molly says, placing it a few inches above the bar. “The surprise on your face!”
Oh my God, I say, after a few more. “I know!” Molly says. “It’s so much fun!”
I do two more — as Molly yells, “I believe in you!” — before my arms give up on the whole affair, like the faithless ex-boyfriend in a Swift song. Sorry, I say to Molly.
But somehow, she manages to cast this as another tremendous success.
“That was amazing,” she says. “The whole point is failure. So you did it right.”
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London
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