Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a world-renowned role model for several reasons: she transformed the law in the area of gender equality, she is the oldest sitting Supreme Court Justice at age 86 to ever serve and she has beaten three kinds of cancer on three separate occasions.
And now in recent years, she has been praised for her consistent dedication to physical training. As soon as word spread two years ago about how Justice Ginsburg—also referred to as RBG, The Justice and even The Notorious R.B.G.—stays in shape, people wanted to know more about the woman who sits on the bench.
But this isn’t the beginning of exercise for Justice Ginsburg, who has been working with personal trainer Bryant Johnson, a man she once called the most important person in her life, since 1999. Johnson, a records manager at the district court, happened to be training another judge at the federal courthouse when Justice Ginsburg reached out to him following her battle with colon cancer.
Today, Johnson and The Justice, as he frequently calls her, workout twice a week, typically after the work day in one of the two gyms within the Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC. While the physical work is challenging, this type of exercise is also a mental game, according to Johnson, and Ginsburg is winning.
From dedication to persistence, here’s what The RBG Workout is really about.
First, I have to ask, what’s it like training RBG?
Typically, my advice for seniors is just to start doing something. With Justice Ginsburg, that was totally different. She had what I call a SEE moment—a significant emotional event—when she had colon cancer and finished that last treatment of chemo. Her husband had told her that she looks like someone who just got out of a concentration camp, and that they had to find someone who would make her stronger.
We’ve been training together for about 20 years with my Dynamic Wisdom Workout. As a trainer, I have to activate what I like to call the prison anchor, which is whatever stops you from moving forward. Justice Ginsburg has been through three rounds of cancer and so much more. So every time a setback happens, it is my job is to deactivate the anchor and activate the elevation. I have to get her mind thinking about how we get past this. It’s never about what you can’t do, it’s always what you can do.
Talk to me more about the Dynamic Wisdom Workout.
There are five components that I try to instill in people one way or another, and before I train someone I evaluate their ability to maintain the five components. First: commitment. You have to be committed. The second is resilience because there will be peaks and valleys throughout your journey. Next thing is courage; sometimes you have to have the courage to do things. Fourth is you have to be thoughtful and understand why you really are working out. The last thing, you have to be tough. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and go through it. No matter who the client is, I instill those components one way or another and then I assess how they are, adjust and then adapt the workout to each individual. It’s about cognitive control, too: having a balance between the outside noise and your inside voice, people with great wisdom have that control.
What do you recommend to seniors who want to get in shape but don’t know where to start?
In order to be better at being mobile, you need to start moving. The beauty about exercise is that it’s one of the greatest equalizers—it doesn’t matter your race, religion, beliefs—in order to do a push-up, pull-up, crunch or anything else, you just have to do it. The body is made to move so you really should never go three days without doing something, even if it’s walking.
Here’s the one thing I always tell seniors: You would not be senior if you haven’t been consistent in just maintaining what you do, consistent in life. Some people don’t make it to being a senior, and it’s not that they don’t have the consistency it’s just starting to really move and take care of yourself is the challenge. Once they release what their prison anchor is, we can start to tweak the routine or whatever it is you started with, which depends on each person’s objective.
You released your book, The RBG Workout: How She Stays Strong … and You Can Too!, about two years ago. What is your opinion on the impact it has had on people across the globe?
The only reason why people know about what I’ve been doing with The Justice is because she said it, even though we’ve been doing this for over 20 years. When you think about Justice Ginsburg and her position on the Supreme Court, in reality you have a better chance of being a professional athlete than being in that position. But we rewrote the script.
Now that her workout is out, she seems more human and it makes people believe that anyone can do it. People always come up with excuses, but she’s a Supreme Court Justice. What’s your excuse?
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