From idea to the gym, one tiny step at a time

A new class appears on your health club’s schedule, and it promises to sculpt your thighs, flatten your abs and make your gluteus maximus a lot more minimus, all with the use of a new contraption that looks like it may have had its roots at Home Depot.

Chances are this latest offering wasn’t incubated in a corporate boardroom. Many programs that make their debut in gyms are homegrown, sparked by one person’s frustration about losing weight or getting in shape, the need to heal an injury or just brainstorming a better way to do an exercise.

That’s how the Heavy Hoop, the Katami Bar and the Bosu Balance Trainer came to be. While Bosu has already infiltrated thousands of gyms, the hoop and bar have yet to achieve their 15 minutes of fitness fame. But their inventors have already passed several hurdles on the way to achieving the status of a national exercise program -- building a successful prototype, field testing, and pitching it to a gym or chain of gyms.

It was some stubborn post-pregnancy weight that was the catalyst for the Heavy Hoop. Running and biking weren’t helping former aerobics studio owner Wendy Iverson drop any dress sizes, so she picked up something she thought might give her a better workout: a Hula-Hoop.

Fifteen years later, Iverson’s Heavy Hoop will make its debut next month at Gold’s Gym Hollywood. The cardio- and strength-training program uses a weighted hoop that’s lifted up and down, twirled around the waist, and rolled side to side. That it took someone a decade and a half and several maxed-out credit cards to bring a workout to the public is something gym members don’t know when they take a new class or get wind of a fresh trend. But getting from idea to fitness studio can be a long, frustrating, expensive proposition requiring infinite patience and an iron will. A few connections don’t hurt, either.

It was Iverson’s unwavering faith in that hoop that kept her from throwing in her workout towel. The Hula-Hoop was already familiar to the former baton-twirling champion, who discovered that exercising with it worked her upper and lower body, and provided cardio benefits. “I was getting strength training,” she says. “And the weight was coming off.”

Iverson, a tall, toned 43-year-old from a small town outside Milwaukee, further challenged herself by strapping on ankle and arm weights, but that resulted in sore joints. More prototypes followed, including filling the hoop with BBs (they spilled out all over the floor) and lacing it with telephone wire, wrapping it in duct tape and padding it with piping insulation from the hardware store.

After getting a patent on a weighted, padded hoop, she did some homemade videos, spent thousands of dollars having hoops made out of lightweight steel and took her new invention out into the world. But the world wasn’t interested. “I had this great idea and thought if you tell somebody about it, they’d help you,” says Iverson.

Undaunted, Iverson began teaching classes at local health clubs and took on a business partner who helped guide her. Two years ago she finally broke through to the Bally Total Fitness chain, which granted her an audience. The reaction was immediate and good.

“Everybody has at some point had experience with a Hula-Hoop,” says Norris Tomlinson, Bally’s national director of group exercise, who helped Iverson tweak her workout, part of a growing trend in efficient classes that work the entire body. “Familiarity does breed popularity. And Wendy’s program is fun.”

Test classes rolled out in Chicago, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., to good reactions, but a change in the company’s top brass took her program out of rotation. They’re due back next month at Gold’s Gym Hollywood. Angel Banos Jr., Gold’s Gym Los Angeles president and chief executive, says Iverson’s “passion for the product” was a factor in taking it on after he saw it at a fitness expo. “There was something new and different yet not intimidating about it,” he says.

The struggle to market the hoop, Iverson says, “made me stronger inside. But what a cruel world.”

Paul Katami’s efforts to bring his Katami Bar workout to the world haven’t been as protracted, and he’ll admit that being a popular instructor at Crunch in West Hollywood has helped speed the process.

He was a personal trainer and aerobics teacher with dance and acrobatic training who was working with rehab patients in 1999 when he discovered that some had difficulty doing twists, dips and stretches while using a traditional straight bar. He created a slightly curved, more ergonomic bar that allowed people to exercise without pain.

Two months later Katami broke his arm, resulting in three surgeries over three years. Finally out of his cast but out of shape, he hauled out the bar.

It allowed him to stretch, do yoga and Pilates moves and condition his body while maintaining proper alignment. “I was using it on a daily basis and seeing longer, leaner muscles and muscle tone from it,” says the 31-year-old Katami. After coming up with about 30 to 40 exercises he could do with the bar, from abdominal crunches to knee lifts and back stretches, “I thought, ‘This is great, but what do I do with it?’ ”

Take it to the masses. After creating a 5-pound metal prototype, he brought the bar to Crunch in West Hollywood, where he had been teaching. The gym, known for trendy, cutting-edge classes, became the test market after Donna Cyrus, the gym chain’s national group fitness director, tried it.

“It kept your body in alignment that assured that the exercise would be done in the most effective way,” she recalls. “You couldn’t really cheat. It works on sculpting, flexibility and you can also do cardio with it.”

Cyrus, who gets 30 to 40 pitches for new classes a month, also saw the bar as economically feasible, and liked that it didn’t take up much room. That’s why she suggested Katami take it to Crunch’s parent company, Bally Total Fitness, which is looking at the program. Katami also has an infomercial for the product, along with several instructional videos. “With the majority [of ideas] you want to say, ‘What were they thinking?’ ” says Cyrus. “It’s not for a gym-going crowd or it’s too difficult or too inane, or the exercise has no validity.”

That makes the argument for bringing on a little help when developing a program that’s suitable for the masses. Take, for instance, the Bosu Balance Trainer, the inflatable dome-shaped device used for core strengthening and balance and is a staple in thousands of gyms across the country. Its inventor, 34-year-old David Weck, is a personal trainer who came up with the concept five years ago after suffering a back injury. Working out on a stability ball helped rehabilitate his back, but the ball had its limits -- for instance, standing on it was risky. He cut the ball in half, and the Bosu (it stands for Both Sides Up) was born.

Weck, based in San Diego, sold homemade Bosus to the U.S. ski team and the New York Knicks, then found a company to manufacture and market them. A development team that included Weck, plus veteran fitness educators and consultants Candace Copeland Brooks and Douglas Brooks of Moves International Fitness in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., were brought on to help design a program that eventually debuted at Crunch.

“David had great ideas for how the Bosu could be used one-on-one,” says Copeland Brooks who, with her husband, also helped develop the program for Step Reebok. “We took a lot of those ideas and expanded them with our ideas.” Brainstorming sessions and workshops resulted in creating a program that included cardio moves such as stepping on and off the ball, and adding pauses and leaps to enhance agility and balance. Bosu caught on, she believes, “because it does what it says it will do. There are lots of ways to vary the program, to make it harder. You can even challenge elite athletes with it.”

But for every Bosu or Katami Bar, there are thousands of other would-be workouts hoping to make it big. At the upcoming International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Assn. trade show in Las Vegas, one of the anticipated new programs is “Shisei,” touted in a press release as “a completely new approach to healthy living ... based on timeless Japanese values that focus on improving balance through posture, exercise and relaxation.” Whether it and other new programs will catch on depends on more than an attention-grabbing hook. They have to deliver what they promise, demonstrate staying power and be interesting enough to keep bringing users back.

“I’ll go to a trade show and see something a little wacky, and if it’s not there the following year, I know it didn’t make it,” says Kathie Davis, executive director of San Diego-based IDEA, an organization of health and fitness professionals, which holds its World Fitness Convention in July. “I think people see through that. The professionals in our market are very particular.”