BY YANNIC RACK | Jimmy Fusaro is not your average fitness trainer, and he doesn’t run your average gym either. Walk in the door of X-Fit — just under 1,500 square feet tucked away on the 12th floor of a nondescript building on W. 27th St. — and you’ll be greeted by walls decked in movie posters and signed boxing paraphernalia, with a stack of tires, wrapped in ropes, sitting in a corner. It’s the first of several home-built exercise machines surrounding a far more recognizable, but just as formidable, boxing ring.
And then of course there’s Fusaro, a 53-year-old former professional kickboxer, bald, with penetrating eyes and a no-nonsense attitude that he wears like a piece of clothing — literally. The T-shirt he has on proclaims, “F**k yoga” (with the real letters, not the asterisks we’ve provided).
Fusaro doesn’t mind yoga, he’s quick to explain, but that’s not the point.
“If you’re gonna exercise, or you’re gonna do a sport, why would you do the same sh*t everybody else does?” he said. “You wanna try something different, have some fun.”
So what you do is hit a stack of tires with a baseball bat, for example, or try any of the other exercise machines that Fusaro creates at a small workbench behind the reception desk.
There’s a rowing machine mounted vertically on a pipe; a bench with hand-pedals he built after surfing on Hawaii (“I didn’t realize the hardest part about surfing was the paddling out, not standing on the board”); the “push-up gauntlet,” essentially a board with various handles and baseball balls attached to it, to stimulate different muscles doing the same basic exercise; and an umbrella stand fitted with a metal bar and weight handles — which used to include a golf club tied to it with a rubber band and was employed to train the upper-body strength of a golfer.
“I built this gym so that it’s something you wouldn’t see anywhere else,” Fusaro said, adding that many of the machines were in fact contrived for individual clients.
He credits the creative handiwork to his jobs in construction in the ’80s and ’90s, but the training philosophy behind his gym, which he opened in 2001, owes more to his athletic background.
Fusaro embarked on a boxing career in 1979, at age 18, throwing punches at the YDA (Youth Directions & Alternative), a community center in Huntington, Long Island, where he grew up.
In his third week there, he said, a reporter from a local paper came to the gym to do a story on another guy fighting in the Empire State Games. He needed a sparring partner for a photo-op, and Fusaro was the same size, so they put a pair of gloves on him, shoved a mouthpiece in his face and told him to try and not get killed in the ring.
“They were in the other corner, doing the photos, and the bell rings and he just comes flying and wailing away, ‘Boom, Boom, Boom,’ ” Fusaro recalled, leaning on the ropes of his present-day boxing ring and replaying the fight with his fists in the air. “He stopped for a second, I guess to admire his work, and I punched him right in the nose, ‘Boom,’ he wobbled. And I hit him again and he went down.”
They stopped the sparring demo when his opponent was bleeding all over the floor, according to Fusaro, because his big fight was later that week. “That’s when they started working with me,” Fusaro said with a smirk. “I got a crash course.”
A few years later he became a full-time amateur boxer, joining the Suffolk Police Athletic Club and entering the Golden Gloves championship, where he won his first fight with a 54-second knockout.
In the 1990s, he also embarked on a professional kickboxing career — but was sidelined from all competitive sports by a diabetes diagnosis at age 34.
But the crushing blow to his fighting ambitions also meant his career in the training world kicked off. After a move to Manhattan in 1996, Fusaro found work as a personal trainer, as well as a boxing and kickboxing instructor — first at the New York Sports Club, and later Equinox.
Today he doesn’t like to dwell on his athletic career, even though he still displays some of his trophies on one wall of the gym, along with a framed pair of green trunks signed by world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier.
“What I built here, that’s what I think about every day,” he said. “That’s my source of pride.”
His hands-on approach — he’s the only coach at his gym and offers one-hour personal training sessions — has earned him some longtime clients.
One of them, Vera Konig, has been coming to X-Fit for nine years. At 73, she still leaves her Upper East Side apartment twice a week to train with Fusaro, going through boxing routines and sweating it on the workout machines.
“I’m gonna tell you, I swear by this guy,” she said during a recent morning session. “I also swear at him,” she added with a laugh.
Konig, an avid tennis player, describes Fusaro’s training as “purposeful.” Last year she had both her knees replaced, but was back in the gym less than two months after the surgery.
“He helped me through it,” she said. “And he’s helped me age gracefully.”
Fusaro will train anyone with the will to put in the work, and he also teaches boxing, American rule kickboxing, and Muay Thai. At one point he coached parole officers as a defensive tactics instructor — one of the dummies he built for them still leans in a corner — and his current client roster includes the likes of David Rhodes, president of the School of Visual Arts, talk show host Carson Daly, and celebrity chefs April Bloomfield and Mario Batali, to name just a few.
Nonetheless, Fusaro fears this might be his last year on the mat — with so many competitors opening up all around him, business is often hard to come by.
“There was nobody here but me, in this whole area. Now, if you go from this corner to Seventh Avenue, you got SoulCycle, there’s a Thai boxing guy, there’s a couple of spots that do one-on-ones, the two buildings on the end each have gyms,” he said, pointing in all directions.
“It’s just that the market is saturated. The Equinoxes, the Planet Fitnesses, the small little gyms that open up left and right. It’s just killing the business.”
He also thinks there’s a generational gap to blame. “The millennials, if they can’t do it in a group, they won’t show up,” he said, launching right into a related anecdote from when he went to a fight a few weeks ago — and was baffled by the attitude of the young boxers there.
“Even the kids who lost were doing all these selfies on their iPhones,” he said. “They just got their ass beat, but it’s going on their Facebook, their Instagram, their Twitter, their Snapchat.”
For anyone looking to get in shape for the New Year, he recommended taking up a sport — or at least doing some research first.
“Start with an easy workout and work your way into it,” he said. “I always recommend a smaller workout, three basic exercises: pushups, crunches, body-weight squats. Do ten of each, three times. If you don’t mind doing that — and you can do it right in your own apartment — then you should think about joining a gym. Don’t just go without figuring out what you wanna do, because a lot of times you’ll be disappointed and never go back.”
He couldn’t resist throwing in a Jimmy Fusaro-style piece of advice, however.
“The thing about New Year’s resolutions is, don’t make ’em,” he said. “If you don’t make the resolutions, you don’t have to worry about breaking ’em.”
Chelsea Now readers can get a special offer and save 20% off their first training session (normal cost is $100 for one hour). X-Fit is located at 28 W. 27th St. (btw. Broadway & Sixth Ave.). To book a session, call 212-725-7991 or visit xfittraining.com.
