James Box

James Boxx

JAMES BOXX
Age: 32
Occupation: Aspiring Police Officer
24 Hour Fitness Club: Arnold, Missouri

Goal: “To make the police force and ditch the coffee-and-doughnuts look.”

The Plan
After 8 months as a police dispatcher, James decided to try for active duty. “I wanted to do something to make my son proud,” he says. But thanks to a sedentary lifestyle, James’s first challenge was implementing “active duty” of another kind.

The obstacle
James had to rebuild his body to pass the police academy fitness test—which requires running 1.5 miles in 14 minutes, 40 seconds, and knocking out 27 pushups and 35 situps in a minute each. His first stabs at training weren’t inspiring. “I could barely run a quarter mile before I was horribly winded; I could tell it was going to be an uphill battle,” he says.

The Solution
“Endurance was the big challenge,” says Eric Clarkson, his 24 Hour Fitness trainer. James needed to do cardio intervals between sets of weight training. Strengthening James’s core muscles was also critical for the fitness test, so Clarkson prescribed stability ball exercises with box jumps and ab work. Update: At press time, after four workouts a week for 6 months, James aced the police fitness test. Learning mental tenacity was the key, he says: “I can run a mile in 71/2 minutes, but if Clarkson hadn’t been there to reinforce my goal every step of the way, I wouldn’t have made it, because I wouldn’t have realized what was possible.”