The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, paid his respects by doing push-ups beside her casket as she was laid in state at the Capitol.
Johnson, an Army veteran who is perhaps best known as Ginsburg’s former trainer, dropped to his knees before doing a series of three push-ups before Ginsburg’s flag-draped casket at the Capitol’s Statuary Hall on Friday.
Johnson said in March that come what may, Ginsburg had not stopped her famed workout routines even amid the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2018, Ginsburg appeared alongside Stephen Colbert, doing more than 30 push-ups with the host on his show, Johnson told The New York Times.
Outlined in Johnson’s book, “The RBG Workout,” the late Supreme Court justice’s sweat sessions often tuned to “PBS NewsHour,” included “full-strength planks, push-ups, chest and shoulder presses, bicep and leg curls, one-legged squats and knee raises,” Johnson said.
Ginsburg continued her famous workouts amid multiple bouts of cancer — first beginning her training with Johnson after a battle with colon cancer in 1999 and continuing their sessions together for more than 20 years.
Last October, Ginsburg said she had also maintained her workouts after she was treated for a malignant tumor on her pancreas in Aug. 2019.
“Even in my lowest periods I couldn’t do very much, but I did what I can,” Ginsburg said at an event at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.
Johnson, who trained the liberal icon twice a week for hour-long sessions, described Ginsburg to CNBC as “a machine.”
“She can come in there with only one hour of sleep, or two hours of sleep, and she is still committed to doing the work out,” he said.
Johnson also told The Times ahead of the release of a documentary chronicling the justice’s life in 2018, that in the two decades he trained with the justice “the one word she has never used with me is ‘can’t.’”
“When Justice Ginsburg finally did push-ups off her knees, she lit up,” Johnson said.
