Purposeful Primitive Online

Article by Santana Hana

A rare photo of the camera-shy Bad Mama Jama Santana Hana

The Personal Trainer

Transforming the human body is my business. I’ve transformed every type of body imaginable…old, young, fat, skinny, male, female, athletic, pathetic, elite, out-of-shape, business types, women wanting to get into shape for weddings, fat dudes wanting to drop 20 before the class reunion, college ball players readying for the NFL Combine…you name the type, you name their pathetic or exulted status or situation, and I’ve helped that type transform into someone far leaner, far more muscular, far fitter and far more capable then they were before they crossed my path. You name the fitness malady and I’ve solved the fitness problem. Regardless the dastardly dilemma, I’ve been seen it, I’ve dealt with it, I’ve been there and I’ve done that. It all comes down to results - and Brother, when it comes to results, I never miss!

No one knows more than I do about the art and science of body building. Want to know how best to reduce body fat? Ask me. Want to know how best to add muscle? Ask me. Want to do it all in the fastest possible time frame? Ask me.  I’m your man.  I’m an expert in the lost art of Olympic lifting; I know powerlifting and bodybuilding backwards and forwards; I myself am a multi-time world champion in a multitude of sports and many of my advanced students routinely win national and world championships. Yawn. Frankly I’d rather transform some dork nerd than help some overpaid NFL linebacker drop his 40 yard dash time from 4.7 to 4.4 in the off-season.

Who cares if I helped an Olympic champion add 25 pounds to his clean & jerk in two short months prior to the 1988 Seoul Games? Sure I helped a certain Mr. Olympia successfully defend his title a few years back and yes I helped a certain NFL superstar win Defensive Player of the Year. Yawn. The problem with the elite athlete is they know too damned much: they come to me chock full of preconceptions and theories and cutesy smart-boy talk mixed with machismo bravado and periodic peacock-like street posturing. I spend half our precious time, debating, defending and talk, talk talking. Like I said, give me a motivated, compliant loser any day of the week – assuming they can pay my exorbitant fee.

I prefer to work with a stone cold rookie with lots of disposable income: optimally I want a client that just stands at attention, like a robot, shuts their f#@king mouth and does exactly what I tell them to do exactly when I tell them to do it in exactly the way I show them. I’m big on exactitude. Doing things my way saves a hell-of-a-lot of time and aggravation. The fastest way is my way; that’s a flat proven scientific fact. For example: a few years back I started working with a dweebish graduate student, a nice upper-class Jewish boy. Neurotic, tortured, a mathematical whiz kid, he’d rolled up two doctorates (one in chaos theory the other in quantum physics) by age 24.

I entered his sheltered, pathetic, twisted, wounded, whiny, sexually ambivalent little life after the poor prick had gotten jumped, mugged and beaten in a strip bar parking lot. For some unfathomable nerd reason, my boy and two other MIT post-grad physics geeks decided to stop at a notorious roadhouse strip club across the tracks. It turned out to be a real bad idea: the wolves and predators that inhabited this particular dive sniffed these dweebs out faster than a wolf pack stumbling across a herd of baby elk.  They had fights break out in the strip club amongst the predators over who was going to rob, beat and cavity search these three goo-goo eyed students transfixed by totally nude female flesh. The MIT sissies were attacked by a mob as soon as they left the club to climb into their politically-correct hybrid car to head back to Cambridge.

The police report indicated that the owner, bartenders, bouncers – even one of the strippers – had all participated in the beat down and robbery. The nerds ended up hitchhiking home in their underwear in November. Car, clothes, wallets, credit cards, money, shoes – everything gone. Believe me when I tell you they got off lucky: they could have gotten turned into eunuchs or had their first taste of jailhouse love. Anyway, to make a long story short, the nerd science whiz sought me out and forked over a lot of up-front cash so I would make a man of him.

I immediately put him on my patented all-out, mega-mass muscle and bulk blitzkrieg program. I made our first priority packing some muscle on his puny and anemic body. When it comes to adding quick muscle, nothing beats bar-bending power-training done under my direct supervision, plus 8,000 calories a day – including four quarts a day of whole milk – and lots of deep, dense, narcotic-like sleep. Combine these timeless tools and timeless elements and stay consistent: nothing rectifies a weakling physique quicker then tons of calories, heavy-ass power training (under a Master like me) and lots of growth-inducing, hibernation-like sleep.

The kid did exactly what I told him to do. I had him on a three thrice weekly power program: legs and shoulders on Monday; chest and triceps on Wednesday; back and biceps on Saturday. He ate 1,000 calories per meal eight times a day, come hell or high water.  He slept half the time, lying in his cave-like bedroom for ten hours at a crack. He blackened the windows in his room, installed two air conditioners, had a 60-inch flat screen plasma TV, a kick-ass stereo and no phone.  That boy became a f@3king fanatic – he morphed into the bodybuilding/powerlifting equivalent of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Being a Jew, he simultaneously began studying the bone-breaking combat martial art of Krav Magda under an old pal of mine, former Israeli commando and Mossad deep-cover West Bank agent/assassin Hiram Chomsky.

Rumor has it that my boy went back to that strip club and was responsible for a remote control robotic arson attack that burned that club to the ground. Rumor also has it that my boy ran down a half dozen of the strip club perps and broke a half dozen arms. But those were all just rumors…what I know for sure is nine months after starting with me he ended up winning the AAU District II Raw Regional Powerlifting championships in the 198 pound class posting a 600 pound squat, a 600 pound deadlift and a 400 bench press without a bench shirt.

That Kid morphed from pathetic pussy into a psycho terminator in less than a year.

For me, he was just another notch on the PT handle of my proverbial Colt .44 six shooter.  I got lots of notches on my gun handles. From his perspective I walked on water. The Kid weighed a scrawny 141 pounds when I began working with him. He weighed 204 pounds carrying an 8% body fat percentile in the weeks leading up to the competition. He looked like the great primordial Jewish lifter of yesteryear, Marvin Eder – Marvin Eder with a Mohawk haircut. For the competition I decided that it would be appropriate for The Kid to shave his goofy-ass hairdo into a Mohawk. He’d been wearing his hair like Moe on the Three Stooges and with his Elvis Costello glasses he looked like a spastic retard.

His new look came as quite a shock to his dignified 67 year old father, head of cancer research at NIH, and his mom, a Latin professor at Georgetown Prep. They came to watch the competition and left in a huff when after making his third attempt squat with 600 The Kid strode to the front of the platform and yelled to the crowd at the top of his lungs, “I’m one Bad-Ass MOTHERF _ _ KER!” After the competition, we had a few dozen cocktails and I convinced the Kid to get his very first tattoo: it was a big purple box surrounded by flames on his stomach. Inside the flaming box it read, “2000 AAU Regional Powerlifting Champion: 198 pound class.”

Nowadays my boy is all grown up. He heads up a research & development department for a huge Silicon Valley computer firm. He makes a seven-figure income, dates a supermodel, has perfect sweptback black hair and looks like a rocked-out Jewish Tom Cruise. The Kid is now has a 450 raw bench and owns a multimillion dollar homestead next to Neil Young’s ranch in Marin County. I visit him at his mansion all the time. My boy is now a man. He’s on a gravy-train with biscuit wheels and he owes it all to me.

I have been in the body modification game for thirty years. I started off as my own Lab Experiment: I am no longer ashamed to admit that I was first introduced to progressive resistance training in reform school. After being convicted (rightly, I will now admit) for setting the arson fire that burned the orphanage to the ground, by age 12, I was institutionalized. I learned powerlifting from an exceedingly friendly guard who took me under his wing. He happened to be a nationally-ranked superheavyweight powerlifter. That man set me straight about a lot of things: Officer Friendly helped me learn proper lifting technique. I learned from him the incredible benefits of grueling hard work. I learned the benefits of training outside in the snow with insane intensity, using rusted, bent barbells, homemade concrete plates and broken down benches. You got your facts learned fast when you are 12 years old and hunted and hated by the 18 year olds that run the joint; they want to shank you and have a bounty on your ass – you need protection in the barren exercise yard and Officer Friendly protected me.

He helped me discover lifting and he helped me discover that I was not a gay man.

We did squats, power cleans, bench presses, deadlifts, overhead presses, jerks, curls and nose-breakers. We did dips, chins and nothing else.  We’d trained seven days a week, every week, year round, outside, regardless the weather: snow, rain, sleet – it didn’t matter. I entered reform school weighing 97 pounds and thanks to extra portions of food obtained in return for “favors” I left weighing a rock-hard 210, I had more than doubled my bodyweight.

Upon release I found my life’s passion: I morphed from pathetic punk arsonist into confident Mac Daddy debt collector. I needed a profession, a real job for the real world, a job that psychologically fit my personality type. I realized my dream by becoming a super successful bail-bond fugitive bounty hunter and private debt collector. My business card read, “Have tire iron will travel. Wire Detroit.” I had a lot of business right from the git-go. Clients were drawn by my 100% “collections collected” success rate. My long-term career plans were upended when I became (admittedly) over-zealous during an automobile repossession and several innocent bystanders were seriously injured when run down, and run over, repeatedly, in the resulting fracas. The judge indicated that he would be amenable to my avoiding long term incarceration if I were amenable to joining the US Army. As he eloquently stated, “While I could not in good conscious release this man back into American society I would have no problem unleashing him on the enemies of America.”

That judge was a patriot.

I took him up on his kindly offer and this marked a life turning point. Reform school had provided me with my progressive resistance foundational training; fugitive hunting and debt collecting cleared up a lot of lingering questions in my mind about street fighting, wrestling, punching, kicking, hitting people with tire irons and fleeing the scene before the authorities arrived. As it turned out, the US Army rounded out my fitness education; particularly during my eight years in the Special Forces. The Army squared away my (up-until-then) deficient cardiovascular and firearm fundamentals. It was time for me to put all the different elements together and create a transformational super system…But that’s a tale best told another time.

Santana Hana is a self-described “Bad Mama Jama” and lives in Bogalusa, Louisiana. An ethnomusicologist by trade, he was recently awarded the state’s highest honor, “The Loop Garu” for a syndicated series of tough love dialogues with the vicious Bayou criminal gang, “Members Only,” a fearsome swamp mob comprised of runaway mulattoes, mongoloid Creole Indians, savage swamp slave offspring and leper colony escapees.