The day that Harley Pasternak scoops me up from Vancouver’s Opus Hotel, one hand is behind the wheel and the other is in full BlackBerry-phone pep-talk mode. The Hollywood Trainer to the Stars – a Gerber baby face attached to a Herculean bod, with a smile as wide as a jumping rope – mimes a quick “Hey, how are you?,” motions for me to get in the car and then keeps talking.

“Give her 50-second cardios,” he’s saying with the ferocity of one of those white shirts on the New York Stock Exchange floor buying this stock, selling that one. “She’s very nice. Very sweet,” Harley continues. “But don’t be nervous. You got that? Because if you’re nervous, she’ll smell it.” The fitness guru beams me one of his jumping rope smiles, shrugs just a little. 

This is the thing, the Toronto-bred, L.A.-based trainer later tells me: The “she” he’s been talking about is Alicia Keys. And in a madcap Three’s Company-type turn of events, just as I was travelling from Toronto to Vancouver to meet Harley, he got a call from Alicia’s people begging him to fly to T.O., where she’s doing some promotion, to come give the super-smooth singer a super-duper workout.

No sweat? Well, just a little.

Harley’s luggage is in the trunk of the car, packed for the airport. It’s only on the drive over that he’s managed to convince them – through a little politicking and a lot of caressing – that while he can’t make the trip himself, he’s sending one of his best associates to get physical with the singer. And it’s this associate – one of about 10 disciples who work for Harley in his burgeoning personal bootcamp business – that he’s been slamming with pep talk.

“That was close,” he sighs. Not that he’s too worried about ditching me. There’s also the little problem of Halle Berry, who’s here in Vancouver shooting X-Men 3 and the reason he’s on the West Coast to begin with. She’s the A-list star he trained with for Catwoman some years back, whose ferociously feline curves catapulted him to a whole new cat’s meow of fame. (When they first met on the set of Gothika, Halle warned Harley that she’d had the same trainer for 13 years and wasn’t about to leave him. “So I did my thing,” Harley says, “and after the third workout she asked me to come back to L.A.”)