Carlos Gardellini, Personal Trainer
Dr. Maximilian Counet, MD, Gerontology
Thursday, 19 January 2045

Dr. Counet: Mr. Gardellini, first of all, I want to wish you a happy 84th birthday today. I can report that indeed you have the physical and mental equivalence of a healthy man in his late forties or early fifties. Congratulations!

Carlos Gardellini: Thanks, Doc. I’m very lucky. Actually, it was back at the turn of the century when I truly discovered the secret of exercise: it’s the fountain of youth!

Dr. Counet: I have seen your holopage – what we used to call a webpage – from that era. I must point out, www.BodyByCarlos.com was certainly way ahead of its time. The beginning of this century was revolutionary for brain science. At that time, we’d known for centuries that exercise was the key to maintaining physical youth. However, it was only in the 2nd decade that we discovered that our knowledge of the brain was flawed.

Carlos Gardellini: That’s right. Back in 2014, when I started studying for my first certification in personal training, I stumbled across this very flaw. Since the time of the ancient pharaohs we had always believed that we have all the neurons we’ll ever have by age five. But we were wrong! Brain researchers were fully convinced this was so, until we were finally able to develop the necessary tools and discovered that we can grow our brains continuously. There is no reason that a person of any age cannot develop and grow adolescent brain cells – neurons – through exercise.

Dr. Counet: And this knowledge changed your life?

Carlos Gardellini: Well, yes and no. In general – with a single exception – I’ve always kept myself in pretty good shape. Why? Before the cancer-curing nanotech breakthroughs of the 2030s, cancer devastated my family. One oncologist told my uncle four decades ago, “these cancers should have killed you. They didn’t for two reasons: modern medicine and your fantastic shape, even in your eighties.” So I’ve always had the personal motivation to stay fit. And, professionally, I’ve had access to incredible NASA studies. A 40-year old can become 70+ physically after just several months in space. Decades of data on earth shows that a 70-year-old has a 1-in-2 chance of breaking a hip, and a 1-in-5 chance of dying, after just a simple fall. NASA’s conclusion? Exercise and trick a body in its seventies into becoming decades younger.

Dr. Counet: What was that exception?

Carlos Gardellini: Back in 2008 I appeared in a multiple-award-winning documentary, Orphans of Apollo, which chronicled a project I worked on at the turn of the century. It scared me, seeing two vastly different versions of myself on the big screen, just seven years apart. Old friends didn’t recognize the present – fat – Gardellini! New friends didn’t recognize the younger – fit – Gardellini! Stress, age, aches, pains and laziness had taken their toll. So I set myself a goal: I’d use all my hi-tech knowledge to develop the world’s most efficient-and-safe training program. And in 2011, at the age of 50, I returned to the Haley’s Comet Marathon I’d run at 25, and beat my own time from 1986. I ran 12 minutes faster and have never looked back. All my training and life-extension tricks have been on BodyByCarlos.com for decades.

Dr. Counet: Is that what made you decide to become a Private Trainer (PT) in middle-age?

Carlos Gardellini: Only partly. The real blame lies with Mr. Lucas Kohlberg, who was the boss at the World Class Fitness Center in Brussels. Lucas had known me since my Fat Gardellini days, when I first started working out there with my own PT, Mr. Lynx Teta-Delozege Tepatondele. In early 2014, I first approached Lucas with an idea for the club to offer a version of one of my high-efficiency training regimes, “The 7-Minute Workout”. Lucas shared The Big Secret with me: worldwide there is a chronic shortage of middle-aged PTs offering specialized instruction for an increasingly older clientele. It was Lucas, with substantial encouragement from Lynx, who convinced me to get fully certified as a full-time PT and begin teaching classes and offering private training. That’s when I devoted myself to specialist training, literally offering people the mental, physical and spiritual fountain of youth. I knew it right there and then: now I get to enjoy the life of a young man, all over again! I’ve actually spent over half of my adult life getting paid to stay young and helping others to do the same thing. If that doesn’t motivate a person to get out of bed in the morning, what will?

Dr. Counet: Any current goal(s)?

Carlos Gardellini: Sure. Haley’s Comet returns in just 16 years, in 2061. How cool would it be to run a marathon underneath it again, at age 100, and beat my times at 25, 50 and 75?