IN 1984'S Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, there’s a legendary scene in which Harrison Ford’s Indy perches precariously on a rope bridge suspended high above a crocodile-infested river. Wielding a sword with one bare arm heroically flexed, the archaeologist prepares to cut the bridge and take out the bad guys.
Indy was supposed to have two intact sleeves for the shot, but Ford’s trainer for the film, Jake Steinfeld, approached director Steven Spielberg with another idea.
“[I] said, ‘H looks great; rip the sleeve; I’m telling you,’” recalls the trainer and bodybuilder better known as Body by Jake.
Ford looked at Steinfeld and deadpanned: “This isn’t a bodybuilding picture, Jake.”
They went for it anyway, and the move turned out to be a good one—so good, the look was immortalized on the film’s poster, cementing the results of Ford’s Body By Jake training sessions into cinematic history.
Forty years later, whether it’s Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White for The Iron Claw or Jake Gyllenhaal for the Road House remake, it’s standard Hollywood practice for actors to get absolutely ripped for film roles, with the help of an army of personal trainers and endless studio funds.
But in the early '80s—before every Hollywood star had a personal trainer—Ford, then 40, tapped Steinfeld to get him into shape for his second go-round as Indiana Jones. The job would help turn Steinfeld into a household name and one of the founding fathers of fitness influencing—not to mention usher in the age of the Hollywood personal trainer.
Steinfeld had left New York for Los Angeles in the summer of 1977 at age 19 to begin a career as a bodybuilder, hoping to emulate the success of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno in competition. He got hooked on bodybuilding after his father bought him a set of weights at age 13—a gift that changed his life. “I was an overweight kid," says Steinfeld, who still has a strong accent from his native Brooklyn. "I had a bad stutter growing up. Not only did the weights build my body, but they built my confidence and self-esteem.”
After arriving in Los Angeles, he realized the competition was fierce, and his rivals were willing to do a little something extra than Steinfeld was to win.
“I came in second place in the 1979 Mr. Southern California competition,” he says. “The guy that beat me was on steroids. I knew nothin’ about the guy, but I didn't want to put a needle in my own butissimo.”
While Steinfeld never reached the bodybuilding heights of Ferrigno, he did get a job playing the Incredible Hulk at Universal Studios (a role he would later take on for an episode of Spielberg’s Amazing Stories), two miles from his Studio City apartment.
“The apartment complex was filled with predominantly with out-of-work actors,” he says. “This girl came up to me sitting at the pool one day and said, ‘I see you here all the time. I like you, but I don’t wanna look like you, but I’m wondering if you could help me.’”
She asked Steinfeld for help getting in shape for a Club Med commercial filming in six weeks. After arriving at the address she gave him, Steinfeld says he was greeted by an unfamiliar face—to him. “If you weren’t on the cover of Muscle Digest, I didn’t know who you were,” he says. “I just looked at him and I thought, ‘This dude could use a workout, too’.” The guy turned out to be Francis Ford Coppola. (The model was the girlfriend of one of Coppola’s producers, who was working out of his home.)
Steinfeld devised a very simple training plan for his new client. “I came up with this workout using a broomstick for stretches and a towel for resistance training," he says. "Grab the towel and do bicep curls; I’m going to pull down, and you pull up. I'm gonna put a whole lot more resistance on you as opposed to me handing you two five-pound dumbbells.” In addition to the broomstick and towel, Steinfeld had the woman lift cans of tomato paste and use chairs for dip pushups.
Soon enough, word of Steinfeld’s personal training workouts—a foreign concept at the time—began spreading at parties around Hollywood, and his unlisted number made him even more in demand. “In Hollywood, if you're good and people want to get ahold of you and can't—they seem to want you more,” he says. “It becomes this mystique of ‘Who is this guy?’” Soon enough, the answering machine in his studio apartment was flooded with messages from Steven Spielberg, Priscilla Presley, Bette Midler, Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, and, of course, Harrison Ford.
“I meet Spielberg and we hit it off, and he introduces me to ‘H,’ as I call him, and they want me to travel with them to Sri Lanka,” Steinfeld says. While Ford had already played Han Solo and Indiana Jones by 1984, he wasn’t yet known as an action star and wasn’t very concerned about looking like one. Then he sat down to read the script for Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom and saw how much of the film required him to be shirtless.
Steinfeld said yes to training Ford under one condition: he was listed in the movie’s end credits.
“I'm working one-on-one with you, and we create a rapport, a friendship. I’m in your bedroom, man, your living room. I meet your wife or your girlfriend, and I'm watching you as a person—not as a movie star, a billionaire, or as a global whatever you are,” he says. “It really gave me all the incentive to say to myself, ‘Wait a second, I might never direct E.T., but I'm going to have my own success in life.'”
Steinfeld says he never used heavy weights to get Ford into the shape you see on the screen. Instead, they trained six days a week using moderate weights and lots of repetitions—and yes, a towel and broomstick.
Before filming began, the two would work out at Ford’s house in L.A. using a slightly modified version of the same workout he’d used to train the Club Med model. At 5:30 each morning, the pair would begin their 30-minute session by stretching with the broomstick. Then, they’d move on to the rest of the workout. “We focused on different body parts depending on the day,” Steinfeld says. “Monday, Thursday: chest and triceps. Tuesday, Friday: back and biceps. Wednesday, Saturday: shoulders and legs. Abs every day.” Steinfeld says the pair would use the towel for resistance training before moving on to light dumbbell work, but they ultimately found that the towel gave them more resistance. “Whether it was towel pulls for your back, triceps extensions over the head, biceps curls—all kinds of bicep exercises. There was more play with the towel.”
To help Ford get the look he wanted for Temple of Doom, repetitions were key. “It was not about Indiana Jones becoming a bodybuilder,” Steinfeld says. “This dude was just ripped, and getting ripped is a lot of repetitions. We were doing 100-rep sets. I like the superset. I’m an old-school guy.”
After each set, Ford would drop down and do 50 to 100 of what Steinfeld calls his “Jake runs”—basically, mountain climbers—followed by a set of pushups.
As for Ford’s diet, Steinfeld says he kept it simple and clean with lots of fish and vegetables, not a lot of meat, and small portions.
After arriving in Sri Lanka for filming, the pair would keep up Ford’s fitness by visiting a YMCA in Kandy that made Steinfeld’s living room routines look like a class at Equinox. “I wouldn’t call the thing in Sri Lanka a gym,” Steinfeld says, adding that the two stuck to the same 30-minute routine during filming. “The more he saw the results, the more focused he got.”
Ford’s appearance in the movie was so aspirational that Spielberg trained with Steinfeld for years afterward. The director was even seen wearing his “Body By Jake” shirt to the 1990 opening of Universal Studios Florida.
In the years that followed Temple of Doom, Steinfeld went on to become a household name thanks to a steady stream of infomercials and his eponymous workout show, which he was able to parlay into more acting jobs, including a brief but memorable role in Coming to America. (Steinfeld says he is still recognized for that role today.) He also starred in his own sitcom, Big Brother Jake, which aired for four seasons on The Family Channel.
Today, Steinfeld is mainly focused on his role with the National Foundation for Governors' Fitness Councils, with which he has opened “Don’t Quit” fitness centers in elementary and middle schools in 46 states, with plans to open soon in the remaining four states soon.
Citing motivation as the glue that holds his workouts together, Steinfeld explains that his signature phrase, “Don’t quit,” came from a poem given to him by a friend after being cut by his high school basketball team. The phrase not only served as a sign-off on every Body By Jake episode, but was also the title of his album of motivational workout songs. (Steinfeld says Nike offered to buy the copyright from him for an ad campaign, but he wasn’t selling. “Just Do It” launched in 1988.)
Four decades after the release of Temple of Doom, Steinfeld can't say for sure whether he shaped what a modern movie star looks like. But he does credit himself with creating something else: the career of Hollywood personal trainer. “I trained so many different people, from H to Ralph Macchio for The Karate Kid, that people saw that opportunity,” he says. “I was the first guy to do it.”
