All I can say is that you gents love your trainers. I get a lot of recommendations for profiles from readers and an inordinate number of them are for trainers. In the interest of giving the public what it wants, I took to the gym this week to speak to Jeffrey Shablin, co-owner of Optimal Gym on Bainbridge Street. Shablin runs Optimal along with the fabulous Domenic Gallelli, who was featured in this column a few years back, and Yul Giraldo.
PGN: Where do you hail from? JS: I was born and raised in Bensalem. My father was a top executive for a company called Congolium. He started off as a printer for Triangle Publications in Philadelphia and worked his way up. My mother was a teacher’s aide and secretary. My father passed but she’s still here.
PGN: Were you a sporty guy as a kid? JS: Oh, absolutely! I was hyperactive as a child and at age 6, my parents took me to the doctor and said, “We have to do something about this.” I’m the youngest boy out of four with one younger sister so I think by the time I came around they were just exhausted. The doctor said you need to find a sport to burn off some of his energy or we can try diet or medication. So thankfully they put me in every type of sport they could find and I wound up at age 6 excelling in gymnastics. It worked out the best because it ate up a lot of hours and was year-round. I worked out four-six hours a day.
PGN: I never even thought about sports in terms of how long the seasons ran. JS: Yeah, in gymnastics you’re practicing all year long, there’s no time off. I did it all the way through college.
PGN: What was your favorite apparatus? JS: My favorite was parallel bars. My highest scoring was floor and pommel horse.
PGN: Watching the Olympics, the pommel horse seems really nerve-wracking. What’s so scary about it? JS: If you are the slightest bit off balance, you fall off: Something as small as your shoulder or hip being at the wrong angle and the momentum will knock you off. You need to have lots of focus, lots of focus.
PGN: What was your worst gymnastics moment? JS: Flying off the high bar and hitting my legs on a dismount, during a competition in front of everybody.
PGN: And what was the worst outfit? JS: [Laughs.] Oh my gosh, we had to wear these unitards with little short-shorts. It was slightly different from what they wear today, though not much.
PGN: No sparkles? JS: No, no, no. The girls got the sparkles.
PGN: Did you see the news report about the Olympic crewman? Apparently he was very excited about the bronze medal they won and during the ceremony, he, shall we say, he had his own salute for the flag. They were joking about it on “The Colbert Report.” Maybe that’s why you had to wear the shorts over the pants. JS: [Laughs.] I don’t know, I think there’s another story there. Was he excited about the win or his teammates?
PGN: Good question! [Laughs.] Colbert was joking that the only thing he didn’t understand was why the guy would be that excited over a bronze. So back to you: Did you do any other sports? JS: I did diving, and the only reason was because since I was a good gymnast, the school recruited me to help them with the diving. But it wasn’t a passion of mine, I just did it to help the school. I did the same thing with pole vaulting. In college, though, I put all my focus into gymnastics.
PGN: Other than hyperactive, what were you like? JS: Very social, probably more so than I am now. I was the peacemaker and protector. If I saw a kid being picked on I always stuck up for them. I was very fortunate that I didn’t have any bad school experiences. I talk to so many people who hated elementary or high school and had a rough time, but for me it was a good time. I always had a very strong personality and, even though I wasn’t out, I was still me and people accepted it. I was actually the only male gymnast in my district, so I trained at private clubs and still competed for our school, but as an independent at meets because we didn’t have a team. I did very well and everyone seemed to respect what I did.
PGN: That’s great considering you did the two gayest sports, swimming and diving. JS: Yeah, having three older brothers at the school probably helped too, but I never had any problems being accepted. I was very lucky.
PGN: The worst prank your brothers played on you? JS: I was and am a big horror-film lover — I love ghosts and zombies and all that stuff. One night, when I was about 7 or 8, I went to bed after watching a scary film. I shared a bedroom with my brother who’s closest in age to me and as I was trying to sleep, suddenly my bed started rising like in “The Exorcist.” My heart started pounding really fast and then it happened again. I said something to my brother and he ran out of the room screaming, leaving me to leap from the bed because I was afraid something might grab my ankles. I ran screaming to my parents’ room and they came upstairs to find my older brother under my bed laughing so hard he peed himself! My parents tried not to laugh as they reprimanded him for his prank.
PGN: And where did you go to college? JS: University of Pittsburgh.
PGN: So which is better, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh? JS: Oh, Philadelphia, but I had an amazing college experience in Pittsburgh. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I had great professors, a fantastic academic program and great social experiences. I grew up a lot there.
PGN: What did you study? JS: Communications. When I was a kid I used to watch “Bewitched” and thought that her husband had the coolest job in the world, and thought I would go into advertising too.
PGN: What did you do when you graduated? JS: I took a job with a company that sold advertising for billboard and signage. It was a horrible job! I hated it so somehow I ended up getting a job with a guy that my brother went to church with. He owned an international steel company and was starting a new sales division in Philly. I ended up becoming the head of that division and then they transferred me to Greenville, S.C., and then I ended up in Atlanta. All working for the steel industry.
PGN: So you really are an iron man! JS: Yes! But it’s a really conservative environment for a gay man. I couldn’t be openly gay, especially down there in the South, so I had to have a lesbian beard. She worked for Coca-Cola and I was her beard. We escorted each other to work parties and functions and everyone thought we were dating. This was only about 17 years ago and yet it was a different world back then. I was doing really, really well: I was the youngest sales manager in the company and they were even giving me a small piece of the company if I stayed long-term but I couldn’t. I couldn’t handle going to one more strip club smoking cigars with the bosses and clients and pretending to enjoy it. They were also starting to push me into marrying my “girlfriend.” They put us under a lot of pressure to tie the knot. I don’t know, maybe they suspected something about me!
PGN: Wow, I know a lot of corporate women have voiced the unfairness of being shut out of the “good old boys” part of the corporate world, men’s-only golf resorts and gentleman’s clubs, but I never thought about gay men hitting the glass ceiling for similar reasons. JS: Yes, and our territory extended to Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina so it was crazy how homophobic and racist things could get. Atlanta was the safe bubble, but once you stepped out of it, anything different wasn’t tolerated.
PGN: So how did you get from selling steel in the deep South to Optimal? JS: Well, I’ve always been active and athletic. Knowing that I was unhappy doing what I was doing, my mother said to me, “You’re always helping people out at the gym, you’re the one they come to with questions. I’ve been reading that personal training is becoming a big thing, why don’t you look into it?” This was about 14 years ago when the fitness industry was just starting. I was fortunate that I was hooked up through the gay community in Atlanta with some very wealthy women and immediately started doing personal training. They loved me and word spread quickly. Soon after I moved back to Philly to be closer to my family and started working as a trainer here.
PGN: How did you meet your business partners? JS: Domenic and I met at 12th Street Gym, where we were both personal trainers. I met Yul, our other partner, at Blue Ball one year. He’s also now my husband as well as business partner. He’s from Columbia and was living in New York; we met and after seven months, he moved here and became a trainer and the three of us soon formed Optimal Fitness Training, which we operated under the 12th Street Gym roof. We won a Best of Philly award and got so big we needed to find our own place. We were lucky enough to find this place and were able to strike a deal with the owner to partner with him. It used to be called Pennsport gym but we changed the name to Optimal Gym and now we have five different locations. This is the only space where we have an additional partner.
PGN: Huh, I was mistaken: I thought you were romantically linked with Domenic. JS: No, it’s confusing! Domenic and I are best friends. We have a very unique relationship. We did date for a year, but he’s got a wonderful woman that he’s with now and I love her. My husband Yul and Domenic are like brothers: They love each other like brothers and fight like brothers. It says a lot about Yul that he would come into a situation where he’d be working with my ex as a business partner. I think there are some people who imagine that there’s more going on but there’s not. We’re all just one big family.
PGN: What did Yul do before becoming a trainer/gym owner? JS: He was a makeup artist at Bloomingdales in New York! As a big guy, he really stuck out in the makeup department and everybody loved him. The fact that he’s very attractive didn’t hurt either. He was one of the top salespeople. He’s great at the gym, too. He’s a good quality-control person, so he can come into the gym and see what needs to be fixed or looked at in a different way.
PGN: What’s so optimal about the gym? JS: We really make sure you get everything you need. We offer a lot of free help when you first come in. You get a full evaluation; you then get put into four weeks of the Optimal Workout, which is functional training. You get unlimited small-group sessions and a whole lot more. We combine our services with a medical component, the Rossi Wellness Center, which gives you free lab work and a weight-management consultation. If you choose to continue with us after those four weeks, we make sure that you can’t not succeed. It’s very personal.
PGN: So do you have to be trainer and psychiatrist? JS: Yes, all of our group understands that a good number of weight issues start in the head, so there’s a lot of coaching and mentorship that goes on. Everything is very personalized: We don’t just throw the same routine at each person. We just did the whole weight-loss challenge with Franny Price for the PGN. I think she’s lost about 75 pounds. When she first came on board, she was very stubborn: “I did body building back in the day, I know what I’m doing. I know what to eat and that I have to cut my diet down to … ” She had all these extremes. We had to say, “No, it’s about changing your lifestyle, not starving yourself.” Now she totally gets it. She’s completely changed and you can see visible differences. It’s fantastic.
PGN: Do you collect anything? JS: A little. I like iron cast statuary, you know like the gymnasts and body figures, but I’m not a huge collector.
PGN: Something romantic you do? JS: At Yul’s insistence, we have a date night every weekend. No matter what’s happening at work or wherever, we dress up for each other and go to a different restaurant. It’s just us and it gives us time to focus on each other. It’s super-important and how we keep the spark going. PGN: My best feature is … JS: Um, my arms.
PGN: How many tattoos? JS: Four. I have a symbol that I created that represents me, Dom and Yul that’s there to remind me of what we have together. It’s very special. Another is my and Yul’s initials.
PGN: Who would you want playing the three of you in “Optimal: The Movie”? JS: Well, I don’t know who would play us but they’d have to be superheroes. Domenic is obsessed with Batman, I’d be Spiderman and Yul would be Superman.
PGN: What’s your stupid human trick? JS: I can make a fish face. That’s about it.
PGN: What three people would you like to train? JS: President Obama, I’d love to train him. If she was alive I’d pick Marilyn Monroe: She’d have such interesting stories to tell. And then Einstein. All because I’ve had some amazing experiences with clients; you get so close to people doing this and hear some great stories. It’s one of the great things about my job!
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