Sturdy, brown and bristly, like a well-groomed bear in spectacles, Werner Kieser is describing the merits of a "pert ass". His English flounders, and his hands cup the air, as if squeezing invisible melons.
Kieser is the founder of Kieser Training, the international chain of "strength-training" centres, and the author of Full Strength, a training handbook. Today, he is in the London Kieser centre in north London, drinking Perrier, and extolling the virtues of strength training in a mixture of English and German. It's a system which he claims can eliminate back pain, prevent osteoporosis, improve posture, weight-loss and self-confidence. It can even reduce cellulite, he says.
In 1958, when he was 18 and a junior boxer, he got hurt in the ring. Instructed not to train or fight for a year-and-a-half, he ignored the advice of his doctors and regained his strength through training with weights. Indeed, Kieser's love of weight training eclipsed even his love of fighting. "I found my mission," he says, "and boxing lost its magic."
"Strength is essential for feeling here on earth," he announces, somewhat nonsensically. Nevertheless he taps the table importantly. "Strength training is different to aerobics and sports. They are fun. I can't sell lies, strength training is no pleasure. But it's necessary. It's like cleaning your teeth. You may like it, but you'll never get enthusiastic about it."
The Kieser centre is not like a normal gym. There are no running machines, no televisions, no well-toned lovelies in tight pink lycra. Indeed its off-white walls and polished floorboards are spartan. Steel girders run the length of the ceiling, and below sit huge, bulky, grey machines looking like prototype Daleks.
"If you have seen one Kieser centre you have seen them all," he says. "The architecture is not because we don't want to spend money. It is industrial because we are involved in industrial production. We produce lean body mass. That's our product.
"In the beginning, we also had a sauna, but we got rid of it because people used it as a subsititute for training. But it isn't a substitute. If you stayed one year in the sauna you wouldn't change anything, you'd just get clean."
The great, hulking machines are the key to the Kieser Training system. In the mid-70s, Kieser met Arthur Jones, the inventor of the Nautilus machine. Kieser says his name with gravity. I nod my head, as though the Nautilus machine is the greatest machine I, personally, have ever seen. "He is a genius," says Kieser.
Jones also developed the MedX machines in use in Kieser's training centres today. They allow muscle tension to be controlled from full extension to full contraction. Jones has also created MedX machines which exercise muscles you never knew you had. Like the front of the calf, for example. This, Kieser informs me, prevents "intro-muscular imbalance". Whatever that may be.
According to Kieser, most sports people are over-trained. "You should train twice a week, for 30 minutes," he says. "The stronger you get, the less training you need." Twice a week for 30 minutes? David Fritz, the centre's managing director, says that this is a factor which makes Kieser Training popular with older people, who have less time on their hands, or who may deem exercise as a necessity rather than a social event.
In fact, Kieser claims that it is the elderly who profit most from strength training. "As you get older, you lose strength. You can't even grasp the handles of your bag, you need someone to do everything for you." He argues that older people are weakened by care, and that strengthening the muscles ensures a longer, healthier life. He tells me that among his 750 customers are an 89-year-old man and two 84-year-old women.
Muscle strength is particularly important for women, a third of whom, Kieser says, suffer from osteoporosis after the menopause. "The only non-pharmaceutical way to prevent this is training with weights. Likewise, astronauts lose their muscles and bones because of lack of resistance. Every morning, we have to overcome gravity to get up. Astronauts don't."
When they arrive on the doorstep of Kieser Training, some patients are so weak, he says, that they have to be brought up to normal strength levels before they are able to "build up a reserve of strength". There is a doctor in each centre overseeing those patients with the kind of chronic back pain which means they cannot perform regular strength training. The individual muscles are isolated and strengthened until they reach normal levels.
Initially, Kieser Training was unpopular with women. The Swiss federation of body building even condemned Kieser for involving women in body-building. "Most women at the time said they wanted no muscle. But I would say, 'What else do you want? Fat or muscle?'"
"Strength training can even help cellulite," he goes on. He argues that it is simply the way we store fat, in the same way that black people and white people and "Celtic people" store fat in different ways. Celtic people, apparently, become like spheres. "Black people store fat in the bust and the buttocks, to increase the surface area of their bodies, but reduce the content. They have to radiate heat. The Celt has to retain heat. It is genetic."
Before I leave, I am frogmarched over to one of the machines so that my back strength can be assessed. I am weighed, measured and strapped into the machine. With my shoulders up against a black pad-thing, they tell me to "Push! Push! Push!" and I briefly wonder whether I might have inadvertently strayed into a maternity ward, rather than a gym in Mornington Crescent. "And relax!"
A computer spews out my lacklustre performance on a pretty-coloured graph. "Your curve is beautifully shaped," they say. "Just a bit, erm, low." Fritz offers me a free introductory session in Kieser Training, anytime I like. "Thank you," I say, politely, as I heave open the training centre door. "I'll, er, think about it." Kieser, heading back to Switzerland, thanks me for coming. In the doorway he shakes my hand - his great, manly paws pounding my weedy fingers.
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