My Video Fitness Instructors, Myself

The New York Times reports on the success of video fitness instructors who reach and motivate their target audience, women over 35.

Incredible. Awesome. Amazing. These are just some of the adjectives grown women use to describe the fitness instructors who motivate them while they exercise at home. Despite the easy availability of group fitness classes and online workouts, many women over 35 prefer to exercise in private, with an instructor who can guide them past the burn of a deep lunge. Their fearless leaders are not perky 22-year-olds with dewy faces, but women in their 40s. In this world, the real stars are less pretty young thing and more yummy mummy.

Among them is Ms. Friedrich, 43, the aerobics boot-camp-and-kickboxing queen who has released more than 80 videos and DVDs since 1989 and has taught on FitTV, part of the Discovery network, three hours a day for the last four years. And Jari Love, 42, whose abs look as if they could deflect an oncoming bus and whose weight-training videos inspire an international following.

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The video fitness world has evolved since a soufflé-haired Jane Fonda in leg warmers released her first VHS in 1982. It is no longer enough to merely look good in spandex (though that’s clearly a requirement), so today’s video fitness stars are selling the idea that their bodies look buff despite their having given birth multiple times. That age has not withered them. That exercise — not plastic surgery or Botox — has given them that youthful glow. (Ms. Love, Ms. Sansone and Ms. Friedrich all insist that they have had no plastic surgery on their faces or bodies). And that their workout plan is the key.

Many of their acolytes are busy women who not only find it more efficient to exercise at home, but more comfortable. Lorrayne Schaeffer, 41, a computer engineer in San Diego, exercises only at home, and only with Ms. Friedrich. “I feel intimidated at a gym,” she said. “At home I can do it on my own time not have to compete for the equipment — just me and Cathe and the crew.”

According to Jill Ross, director of product acquisition at Collage Video, 8.5 million fitness DVDs were sold in the United States from July 2006 through June 2007; the average home video user is about 45, and most instructors don’t hit their stride with viewers until around age 37. “You need a certain commanding presence,” she said. “If Oprah was 22, would she be fun to watch?” (Incidentally, Ms. Ross said, brunet video stars generally are more popular than blond ones, because they are perceived as more serious.)

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