Freedom of the (Leg) Press

“Can we do it again?” asked Emma Silverman after her dad, Ken, had just completed a 1,000-pound leg press at the One on One Athletic Club on Thursday evening. The “it” was a ride on the leg press sled.

And her dad didn’t say no. He gave her a few more repetitions on the sled – but not before removing some of the 20 45-pound plates hanging off the 50-pound bar. The plates and the bar totaled 950 pounds.

Emma weighs exactly 50 pounds based on the pre-event weigh-in at the club, and it was her “live weight” that brought the total to 1,000 pounds.

It’s not a common father-daughter activity, not least because 1,000 pounds – as Silverman’s trainer, Roger Bowman, put it – “That’s a lot of weight.” Bowman, who’s worked at One on One for four years, confirmed that it’s not common to see that kind of poundage go up and down the leg press sled at the club.

So what motivated Silverman to begin training five months ago in December 2008 for his half-ton effort? It was to raise money for Ann Arbor Active Against ALS. Silverman recalled how he’d come up with the idea over dinner at Carlyle Grill before seeing the new James Bond movie at the Quality 16. A lot of his friends had just run the Big House Big Heart 5K to raise money for A2A3, he said, and he wanted to come up with a way to contribute as well – the A2A3 fundraising theme is to raise money by doing something active.

Silverman’s initial concept was to try to find 100 people to pledge a penny-a-pound for the 1,000-pound attempt, for a total of $1,000. He was able to double that, but didn’t insist on the penny-a-pound approach. One example of a variant was a co-worker who offered $100, but wanted to see video evidence of the lift. Here’s the $100 video footage.

Silverman’s training regime at the club leading up to Thursday’s lift  depended somewhat on whether it was a session supervised by Bowman, or done solo. With Bowman there, he could physically help Silverman through a couple of extra repetitions – forced reps – that he couldn’t have done otherwise. Plus there’s the psychological boost. We asked Bowman for examples of the kind of encouragement he gave during a session. He ticked through some plain vanilla phrases, “Come on,” “Keep going,” “You can do it,” before offering: “Don’t tell me no!”

The same “Don’t tell me no!” sentiment was reflected in a conversation about fundraising after the lift. Silverman, Bob Schoeni (whose ALS diagnosis led to the founding of A2A3) and  Joel Dalton (who’s director of the Burns Park Run coming up Sunday, May 3, 2009) talked with The Chronicle about how you ask people for money: “You don’t say no to a guy who can lift 1,000 pounds!”

Dalton said that pitching pledges for a finite weight was in some ways easier than the strategy his own family was using to support A3A2, a “pennies for pushups” program. If you know that the weight is going to be 1,000 pounds, you can calibrate your donation accordingly. With pushups, you don’t know exactly how many Joel, Cammie and Kenzie will do. We asked Joel point blank: Are you doing real pushups, backs straight and everything? Joel contended they were, and the photograph on the website suggests that the Dalton kids’ pushups are every bit as real as Ken Silverman’s 1,000-pound leg press.