This story originally appeared in the Sept. 24, 2012 issue of Sportsnet magazine.
AT THE TOP of a steep hill overlooking the Pacific in San Francisco is a man wearing white basketball shorts, big black hiking boots, a black vest, a military-issued black sun hat, and sunglasses—his uniform.
He stands with his arms crossed, his Siberian Husky, Seminole, at his side, as always.
A few metres down the hill, the cold, misty June air whips across former NBA lottery pick Hilton Armstrong as he labours through each step.
He has a 45-lb. weight vest on and is holding a sandbag in his arms as he tries to move the legs of his seven-foot frame in front of one another through soft sand that goes halfway up his shin.
Armstrong is running furiously, though it feels like he’s going nowhere.
The man above watches silently. He doesn’t speak unless he’s giving orders. “A little faster, sir,” the man says, calmly. “You’re not finished, sir.” It’s the honorific he always uses.
He’s the reason why every summer for the past six years, NBA players like Armstrong, Blake Griffin and Zach Randolph have traveled across the country to have their bodies and minds pushed to the limits and beyond.
He’s Frank Matrisciano, better known as “Hell’s Trainer,” and he makes the world’s best athletes look like rubbery-legged doughboys in a matter of minutes by putting them through an excruciating workout regimen he’s been doing for “122 years now.”
You may have never heard of Matrisciano or his self-dubbed brand of natural-environment workout, “Chameleon Training.”
You won’t find his DVDs on sale at Best Buy and you’ll never see his face plastered across your TV screen at three a.m., hawking the latest volume of Chameleon Training with Frank.
And that’s how he prefers it.
Details of his workouts are a tightly guarded secret (during the NBA lockout, strength coaches from six different teams asked him to teach them; Matrisciano said no.), and he won’t allow himself to be photographed unless his face is covered with a mask.
“I’ve always been in the shadows,” he says. “I don’t want to be bothered by agents, or AAU guys. People know who I am, but they don’t know me face-wise.”
He’s trained everyone from pro athletes, Special Ops forces, Hollywood actresses, housewives and Wall Street execs.
But lately he’s found himself training NBA players more and more.
They’ll all tell you the same thing: Training with Matrisciano is the hardest thing they’ve been through. That’s why so many don’t last.
And yet, people seek Matrisciano out (he’s never recruited anybody).
He invites them to train for two days before arranging a longer stay—three days on, one day off for six weeks, each day harder than the last.
For most, one trip to the hill is more than enough.
Fellow pros will turn to a regular, like Armstrong, and ask, You do this every day? “That’s when you know,” says Matrisciano, his northern New Jersey accent still prevalent despite years living on the West Coast.
“This guy’s done, I’ll never see him again. I’ve had guys who come for literally 11 minutes. And my reaction is, ‘It’s a pleasure meeting you, this obviously isn’t for you.’ Worst case is they had a nice meal, maybe saw Alcatraz.”
It’s more common for guys to simply disappear during their first day off. “I’ve heard 144 excuses for why guys don’t come back,” he says, almost proudly. “Literally. I wrote them down. Even the guys who do come back, they still complain.
They say, ‘Frank, I hate your guts when I’m out there, but the reality is it’s the best shape I’ve ever been in.’”
Which is the only kind of shape Matrisciano knows.
He’s been doing this for more than 30 years (Matrisciano won’t divulge his age—he doesn’t believe in numbers and says his “biological age” is somewhere between 21 and 24).
“I try to be respectful, but if you look at this stuff out there—insanity cross-fit, the P90X tapes—well I did that stuff a hundred years ago,” he says.
His training is a combination of a lifetime of different influences.
There’s his rock-climbing friend Keith, who can swing his body on the world’s most dangerous cliffs using just his fingertips; then there’s “Grim Reaper,” a Special Ops buddy who developed his own martial art. Matrisciano even incorporates lessons from fitness legend Jack LaLanne. It’s all dissected and “put through a strainer.”
Before Matrisciano accepted a job with the University of Memphis Tigers in 2011, he’d spent the past decade using San Francisco’s natural environment as his personal gym. He utilized every sand hill, staircase, fire road, rocky beach, and playground (often, kids would get to watch NBA stars doing drills on the monkey bars and then try to mimic them).
He rarely uses the equipment of traditional weight programs, what he calls “illusion training.”
“To me it’s a mirage,” he says, his words clipped but carefully chosen. “You’re fooling yourself. They say, ‘Oh, Frank doesn’t use weights’. Well, if I have a 100-lb. log, is that a weight? If I have a sandbag that weighs 70 lb., is that a weight?
Everything I have is a weight. If they use all those dumbbells during the season, and they do the treadmill and are in such great shape, why do players come to me and their legs start shaking and they collapse after seven minutes doing drills?”
Of course it takes a special kind of commitment to persevere through a lifetime of Chameleon Training.
Matrisciano says he was born with it, and his stories are almost Chuck Norrisian: There was the time when he was 12 and had torn a ligament in his ankle. His mother didn’t want to drive through a violent snowstorm, so instead of enjoying a day off from school, Matrisciano wrapped his cast in garbage bags and made the five-mile walk, snow up to his knees the entire way.
Or there’s the time he suffered another brutal ankle injury a few years back and competed in the Alcatraz triathalon the following day. His foot was swollen like a grapefruit, but he finished the race.
“One time in the summer, he ran from the airport to the hotel in Las Vegas because he didn’t want to take a cab,” says pro basketball player and former Stanford star Dan Grunfeld, a close family friend and one of the first ballplayers Matrisciano trained.
This is the same man who, when a rock gets in his shoe while jogging, doesn’t stop, doesn’t remove it—he just keeps running to challenge himself.
“There’s no ‘try;’ if you’re going to do something, do it,” Matrisciano says, offering up one of his many pearls of wisdom that he regularly sprinkles into conversation.
Another of his philosophies is keeping things simple. Matrisciano eats a steady diet of brown rice and chicken breasts. In San Francisco, he lived alone with Seminole, his apartment bare save for a bed, TV and a dresser.
“I have one fork; I use it, I wash it, I put it away,” he says. “People say I’m a minimalist.”
He’s also Chameleon Training’s most successful pupil and most diligent student.
Matrisciano says he’s his own worst nightmare. “I will never ask someone to do something that I haven’t done more of, and they respect me for that.” If Matrisciano asks for a five-mile run with 60 lb. on your back, you know he’s done 10 miles with 120 on his.
If he asks for 10 pull-ups, he’ll do 20, with a weight vest. “I had heard the stories, but when I first saw him working out with us I was in disbelief,” says Armstrong, “He was like Rambo.”
That’s when Matrisciano is in full Hell’s Trainer mode—sunglasses, hat, the whole uniform. When the shades come off, “he’s a happy person,” says Armstrong. “He smiles, laughs and jokes. It catches me off-guard.”
He’s the kind of guy you can rely on.
When Grunfeld tore his ACL as a junior, Matrisciano regularly made the 90-minute drive to Stanford to take him the two-minute trip between his class and his apartment.
“When my hat and sunglasses are on, I’m not their friend,” Matrisciano says. “When they’re off, we have fun, we go out. But that’s the reality of it. They’re here to work.”
That is exactly what Armstrong, Randolph, and Trail Blazers guard Elliot Williams are currently doing with Matrisciano in Memphis. They’re preparing for the upcoming season, knowing that no matter what any other player in the league is doing, they’re doing more.
It’s not San Francisco, but Matrisciano’s adjusting nicely. He’s created and patented a 30-foot-tall structure called The Chameleon, complete with ropes dangling from 25-foot pipes, an apparatus called “Save Your Kids” (monkey bars fixed with moving handles), a sand hill and more. It’s all meant to replicate his six favourite workout spots in San Fran.
The players don’t mind, although they miss the beaches.
But Matrisciano might be in Memphis for awhile; he met a woman named Candice Lamas. His apartment is now furnished (“Happy wife, happy life, right?”). “If someone told me that I’d leave San Francisco, I’d say you’re crazy. Now, a year later, I’m in Memphis, training the guys here, and I have Candice. Everything happens for a reason.”
No matter where he is, players will find him. “I care about these players, I care about their future, I care about them after they retire,” Matrisciano says. “I want Zach Randolph to play until he’s 40. And I want Zach to be healthy when he’s done playing basketball, enjoying his money.”
That’s Matrisciano’s way. “He’s not there to give you a six-pack and biceps,” says Grunfeld. “He’s there to teach you about hard work, and what your body and mind can take. To say it was grueling would be an understatement. But it was also very rewarding. I just learned a ton from him.”
Chameleon Training has nothing to do with basketball, Matrisciano insists.
“This is about life. I’ve never been a trainer. I’m a life changer.”
