Buff Like Harley: How an unassuming kid from North York got his number on every speed dial in Hollywood

Pasternak grew up in Toronto but has been based in L.A. since 2003. The deals with Rogers and GoodLife have brought him back to Canada a lot lately—five times since January. His parents still live in York Mills, and Jess Hirsh, his girlfriend of less than a year, also lives here. She works in finance and dutifully follows the 5‑Factor Diet. They met—where else?—at a Lady Gaga concert.

Healthy food and sit-down dinners were the norm in the Pasternak household. In 1980, Barbara and Joe Pasternak started a hydraulic hose manufacturing and distribution company that today supplies the petroleum and steel industries. When Harley was in high school, his dad encouraged him to work summers in the family business. “He wanted me to know this wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life,” Pasternak says. All three Pasternak boys inherited their parents’ work ethic: the youngest brother, Bobby, co-owns Quagmire Golf Products, and the middle, Jesse, is a surgical resident at Hamilton General. When Pasternak was 12, his mom brought him along to the Y at Bayview and Sheppard, where she took aerobics classes. Harley was transfixed by the shiny gym equipment, even if he didn’t know exactly how to use it yet. A year later, he was an amateur bodybuilder, a subscriber to such magazines as Flex and Muscle and Fitness, and “that guy with the muscles” at York Mills PS. His new physique gave him confidence and didn’t go unnoticed by the girls who had previously ignored him. “This was the ’80s,” he says. “Every guy wanted to look like He-Man.” The pinnacle of Pasternak’s high school experience was the 1989 York Mills student fashion show. There was a bathing suit segment, and he prepped for it with all the dedication of a Mr. Universe contestant.

After his first year at the University of Western Ontario, Pasternak took a summer job at a Bally Total Fitness. Getting paid to hang out at the gym was a dream come true. At the time, the personal training industry was virtually non-existent—definitely not a serious career option. “I didn’t have anyone to look up to,” he recalls. He-Man, for all his strapping masculinity, was a cartoon. “I knew I didn’t want to be Richard Simmons. There was Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jane Fonda, but they were actors, not trainers.” He planned to become a doctor (“whatever kind of doctor involved the least amount of blood,” he says), and after completing an undergrad degree in kinesiology, he entered the masters of science program at U of T. His area of study was supplementation and the effects of nutrition and supplements on strength and endurance. An advisor suggested that Pasternak get in touch with Ira Jacobs, a senior scientist with Defence Research and Development (a branch of the Department of National Defence). Pasternak spent the next two years there as a researcher, working with a group of military scientists. Their research eventually focused on the possible positive effects of caffeine combined with ephedrine on combat soldiers, and the results of their study were published in the American medical journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise in 2003. But after two years in a lab, Pasternak was rethinking his career plans. “I’m a social person,” he says. “I didn’t like sitting alone in a lab with test tubes. I tended to drop a lot of stuff.”

Meanwhile, the fitness landscape had changed. Such ’80s exercise fads as aqua fitness and jazzercise were edged out by more serious strength training, along with Eastern-inspired yoga and Pilates. The new emphasis was on improving the entire body, rather than individual problem areas. Gym memberships were also on the rise (4.5 million Canadians belong to a health club today), and as membership swelled, so did the opportunity to turn a bigger profit. Today, you can barely walk two feet in a GoodLife club without seeing some kind of personal training promotion. Encouraging members to take their workout regimen to the next level (and the next price point) is now one of the major management goals at gyms all over the country. And it’s working. At GoodLife, 30 per cent of new members cough up hundreds of extra dollars a month for the one-on-one experience. In Canada, there are between 10,000 and 15,000 registered personal trainers, the industry being one of few that grew during the recent recession.

The most famous study on the effects of personal training, conducted at Ball State University in Indiana, compared two groups of 10 men. Both groups were put on identical 12-week strength-training programs and prescribed the same amount of exercise at the same frequency. Members of Group A worked with a personal trainer; Group B did the program independently. At the end of the experiment, the group working with the trainer had gained roughly 40 per cent more muscle strength than their solo counter­parts. The disparity comes down to the fact that a trainer will push his or her client to work to their maximum capacity. It’s motivation for sale, and no one motivates quite like Harley Pasternak.

Master and servant: Pasternak usually demands that his clientele (including, clockwise from above, Hilary Duff, Katy Perry, Kanye West, Jonah Hill and John Mayer) come to his West Hollywood house for training sessions. “It forces them to surrender the ego,” he says (Images; First page: Pasternak by Bernhard Kühmstedt; Berry from infevents.com; Bono from infphoto.com; Downey by Roger Wong/infphoto.com; Fallon by John Carta/Splash News; Gaga from Wales News Service/Splash News; Keys from ACL/London Ent./Splash News; Pattinson from Splash News; Portman by Jennifer Mitchell/Splash News; Rogen by Mario Anzuoni/Reuters; Rudd by Ron Smits/London Ent./Splash News; Seyfried from Splash News; Simpson from Warner Bros./Photofest; This page (clockwise from top left): from infphoto.com; from Fame Pictures/Keystone Press; from infphoto.com; from Splash News; JLM/Splash News;)

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