Gloria Estefan

BETTER
than ever

After a grisly tour-bus accident, doctors feared Gloria Estefan might never walk again. Yet one year later, thanks to a medical miracle and her commitment to a strenuous exercise regimen, she was once again vigorously spinning her songs into gold on a Miami concert stage.

It’s all behind her now: March 20, 1990, when Gloria Estefan lay on the floor of her wrecked tour bus with two fractured and dislocated vertebrae. She was trying to comfort her 9-year-old son who had broken his collarbone, trying to let her husband’s soothing reassurances calm the hysteria that welled up each time she realized that she couldn’t move her legs, and trying to focus on a tiny spot on the bus ceiling so that she might endure the excruciating pain as they all waited for an ambulance.

    “Coming out of the dark,

    I finally see the light now.

    It’s shining on me.

    Coming out of the dark,

    I know the love that saved me.

    You’re sharing with me...”

Gloria wrote the hit single, Coming Out of the Dark, to symbolize not only her miraculous physical recovery from this tragic moment, but also the miraculous collective power of love she received from her family, her friends and her fans – a power she believes was responsible for her comeback.

An outpouring of sympathy began to flow into her hospital room in the form of flowers, telegrams and thousands of letters almost immediately after her surgery. “Love is the most wonderful thing there is,” she says now, “and on a mass scale, love is overwhelming and incredible to experience.”

Today, busier than ever, Gloria has another hit album, Into the Light, and a European tour under her belt. I was lucky to catch her for an interview as she rested for a while in her Miami home before embarking on her U.S. tour.

Resting is not something that Gloria does often. Even between tours, her days are organzied to the minute: she is either writing, recording or preparing for her next engagement. High on her list, however, is her son, to whom she devoted as much time as she can.

While he sleeps, she works into the wee hours, composing new songs. When he’s at school, she’s at the gym, pumping up and sweating down.

Her exercise regimen is nothing short of demanding, which is what you would expect of a world-famous singer who performs for two hours straight, night after night. What’s unusual is that this incredible Cuban-American siren has two permanent 8-inch-long, ¼-inch-thick, stainless steel rodsprotecting her spine.

Add to that the fact that her new show is far more physically demanding than the routiness she performed before her accident. The stage for her 1991 Into the Light European and U.S. tours is bileveled and raked, so that during the entire show she is either bounding up and down stairs or dancing on an incline.

Six days a week, as soon as she wakes at noon, Gloria gets dressed and heads straight for the gym. To build her cardiovascular endurance, she spends at least 30 minutes on a starionary bicycle, rowing machine or StairMaster.

To build strength and maintain tone, she lifts weights, concentrating each day on one of three body sections: chest and back, legs, and arms and shoulders.

“I never did this much before,” stresses Gloria. “But now, with the rods and screws in my back, I tend to get stiff when I don’t exercise.”

Although Gloria jokes that her favorite exercise is taking a shower, she is tremendously dedicated and hardworking.

She doesn’t like to skip workout days because she knows it will be that much harder for her when she does exercise. Yet if on a particular day she doesn’t feel up to the effort, she gives herself a break.

“I’m not a fanatic,” Gloria says. “But I have to choose between the lesser of two evils. If I give up exercise for two or three days, I’ll have to go through the pain again. It’s just like starting over. It’s a matter of keeping myself strong for what I am doing at the moment.”

A personal trainer accompanies Gloria when she’s on the road to help her maintain her fitness level and to keep her motivated. “When I feel lazy, he says, ‘Come on. Let’s go!’ “ The trainer will also call ahead to the next hotel to make sure that there is either a gym on site or within walking distance.

The combination weight training/aerobics routine designed by her trainer gives Gloria the quickest result. Her body responds almost too well to weight training alone. “I have to be careful because I have long muscles in my biceps, so I concentrate on high repetitions and light weights.”

Even so, the most that Gloria has bench pressed is impressive: 100 pounds! “I don’t do that now, but I have. I mainly like the bench press for how it has improved my chest. But I stay between 35 and 85 pounds to maintain tone.”

Her most dreaded of all weighttraining exercises are bent-over dumbbell flyes and lunges, even though she acknowledges they keep her deltoids and quadriceps in great shape. The areas on her body that give her the most trouble include her triceps (which she believes are among the weakest muscles on women), lower abdomen and hamstrings.

An aerobic routine that closely mimics what she does on stage is step aerobics. “It’s more grueling [than other aerobics classes], but it’s fun and really the best for me,” she says, explaining how it builds strength in her legs and endurance for her heart. “I have to go up and down steps a lot during the show while I’m singing. It really helps my breathing.”

Dancing is the icing on Gloria’s workout cake. It seemed to facilitate her rehabilitation progress, and keeps her limber. “When I did a music video in December 1990, Seal Our Fate, it was the first dancing I had done since the accident. I was still pretty stiff,” she remembers. “But dancing seemed to move me along much quicker. From then until March, the first day of my new tour, I was able to increase my training to four days a week.”

In less than a year, the woman whose back muscles were severed from her spine by doctors so they could repair her mutilated vertebrae, who had bone grafted from her hip, who couldn’t sleep for more than 45 minutes at a time without waking up in unbearable pain, was doing exactly what she’d been urging her fans to do in her hit single, Get On Your Feet: She got up and made it happen.

Undeniably, Gloria is an amazing woman: tenacious, resilient, goaloriented – the list goes on. It’s hard not to respect her for being able to excel in spite of her tremendous hardship. But the most extraordinary thing about Gloria Estefan is what she has given us by her shining example. She has proven that love can make miracles, that survival is one of the strongest instincts, and that while the body might be fragile, the spirit cannot be easily broken.

When Gloria says, “I love to give my fans as much as I can,” she means it.

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