Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 29, 1994 TAG: 9403290040
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BOB CONDOR CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Please pay particular attention to your breathing," says the all-time best-selling, most-recognized fitness-video star. "Breathe in and out through your nose and listen to the sound of your breathing. When in doubt, breathe."
"Be comfortable with your breathing pattern. And breathe deeply, continuously and rhythmically. The breath should surround your movement."
"The yogis say if we can control our breath, we can control our life."
Yes, yogis, says Jane Fonda. She figures yoga is the next boom market in exercise videos, and who's to argue with her? She has set the standard for fitness videos, from aerobics to pregnancy aerobics to low-impact aerobics to step aerobics.
Now she is talking about air itself in her new "Jane Fonda's Yoga Exercise Workout" video (A+Vision). She explains that yogic breathing is a great stress manager. If you find your breathing is shallow when you are anxious, she recommends taking deeper breaths through the nose.
Fonda provides this tip during the sun-salutation segment of the tape, a series of yoga postures to serve as a "greeting to the day." That explains watching this tape at sunrise.
A soothing piano solo accompanies the tape. Guru Fonda first holds her hands in the prayer position at the "heart center." She goes through a 20-minute stretching session to prepare you for the sun salutation.
She looks great, much younger than 56. You notice her hair is in a long braid done by someone named Barron as the credits inform later. You're doing postures called half-tortoise and child's pose and cobra. Also the downward dog, where you bend at the waist, put your palms on the floor and stand on your toes. More advanced and limber viewers will then bring their heels to the floor. Not this morning greeter.
The workout seems to be effective because you're yawning, which you know from other yoga classes means your body's energy is moving and awakening. It's not even 7 a.m. and you're feeling chipper.
There are helpful warnings about difficult positions, which can be too much of a wakeup call. In the cool-down sequence, you're also feeling relaxed, almost interactive with your celebrity yogi.
You snap out of it when the tape is followed by a look at Fonda's "library of products." Sixteen other videos are advertised, but noticeably missing is the somewhat controversial, best-selling exercise video ever, the original 1982 "Jane Fonda's Workout," which sold 1.75 million copies. Also not in the library is the 1985 "Jane Fonda's New Workout," the No. 4 best seller at 1.3 million.
According to surveys by Video Marketing News, Fonda sold 8.5 million exercise videos for nearly $250 million through 1992. Not bad for someone who, when she first proposed her concept of a home exercise video in the early '80s, was turned down by every major movie company and book publisher, including her own employers, Paramount Pictures and Simon & Schuster (which had published her best-selling exercise book in 1981). The big studios didn't even think movies would be big sellers on tape back then.
But Fonda persevered, found a distributor and profited. The original video went to the Billboard best-seller list and stayed there for three years. An industry was born.
Of course, Fonda didn't do it without controversy. It took her nearly a decade to shake much - but not all - of the public criticism about her 1972 trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Then she started to catch grief for putting out an exercise video that could result in injury. For one thing, she appeared barefoot in the original "Workout," which critics rightly claimed could lead to foot problems and other mishaps. Physical therapists also criticized bouncy stretches that could lead to injuries for beginners.
For her part, Fonda did seek to make amends, particularly with the release of her "Low-Impact Workout" in 1985. That tape is still part of the newly repackaged "Jane Fonda Library" and has sold more than 1.4 million copies.
"You learn from your mistakes," Fonda said in a New York Times story in 1989. "Even in the three years since I did the last workout tape, we've really learned a lot. For example, while higher-intensity aerobics are appropriate for some people and fine to do, it's better to not work out too hard and for a longer period of time."
That's where yoga fits in. And it seems former pro basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar got her started. He showed Fonda his daily yoga routine about four years ago, during his last season as an active player. He credits yoga, which he has done for more than 30 years, with helping him through his 21-year career in the grueling National Basketball Association.
Fonda was impressed. She filed the idea, and about two years later she and business associate Julie LaFond started thinking that maybe the ancient Eastern practice was ready for the Western mass market, albeit in a form Fonda calls "user-friendly, non-mystical, non-fat yoga." Her tape differs from traditional yoga posture exercise tapes already in distribution.
"Without negating the art of yoga," LaFond said from her California office, "we wanted to demystify it without having people feel they were studying a religion."
Fonda hired San Diego yoga instructor Mara Carrico to choreograph and script the video. The results will be satisfying to beginners and to those aerobic exercisers looking for a stretch-and-strengthen option.
by CNB