Happy new year! Or, if your postal carrier is particularly speedy, Happy end of 2024! I’m not sure which is a better milestone, but either way it’s a great excuse to talk about a way to make your car faster. It’s legal in every series and any rulebook. It’s invisible to every tech inspector. It doesn’t cost a cent in parts. And it will even help you live a longer, happier life. I’m talking, of course, about going to the gym.
Every professional racer has a workout routine, and it’s not just so they can look great in promo photos. Racing is a sport, and the simple truth is that athletic drivers are faster than out-of-shape ones.
When endurance racing, a 2-hour stint is basically a 2-hour workout in 100-plus-degree temperatures while wearing a race suit. But even a 20-minute track session is probably a harder workout than most drivers ever encounter in their daily lives.
Workouts like this are exhausting, and exhausted drivers are slower. They make poorer decisions, offer less precise inputs and react more slowly. At the end of the race day, they’re too weak to do the manual labor of fixing the car, then too exhausted to hang out in the paddock with their friends before driving home with aches and pains tormenting them. And back at home, they’re slower and more likely to injure themselves while working in the shop, too.
Most pro racers make their money as driving coaches, and I’ve been stunned by the amount of time they’ve helped me find in every coaching session. So why not hire some help to get stronger, too? I was tired of hurting myself in the shop and tired of setting fast laps early in a stint that then trailed off to mediocrity. It was time to find a fitness coach.
So I hired a personal trainer four years ago, first for FaceTime workouts at home and now for one-on-one sessions in a traditional gym. Prices vary wildly based on where you live, but at least around here I was stunned at how cheap training is. It’s many orders of magnitude cheaper than driver coaching, and unlike pro racers, there are trainers and gyms everywhere, which means plenty of options.
Don’t have a few hundred bucks per month for a trainer? All you really need is some workout equipment, a mirror, discipline and any one of the million free apps/videos/guides/etc. available online.
Another great option is group classes, where a few dozen people work out at set times with a few trainers correcting form….
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