Swiss Space Hopper Bounces Back As The Latest Fitness Fashion
The Age
Monday April 15, 2002
To the untrained eye - and body, for that matter - they look full of nothing more than hot air. A load of balls - colour-coordinated to match your leotards.
``The gimmick factor has been a problem," concedes Lisa Westlake, a fitness instructor in Melbourne. ``All that's missing is two ears and two eyes and off you go, bouncing down the street."
Westlake is trying to turn us all into born-again space hoppers. She recognised the potential of ``Swiss" or ``fit" balls in the mid-1990s. Until then, the large inflatable balls had come in orange, had a black, leering smile and were usually found beneath the bouncing bottoms of overexcited six-year-olds.
They had also played a central role - without the ears and eerie smile - as a rehabilitation and physiotherapy tool.
``I started a back-care class at the gym where I worked and some of the other members started coming, out of curiosity," she explains, ``so I came up with some exercises, which were suitable for them to do with the inflatable physiotherapy balls we were using.
``Then the Italian manufacturers came over to find out who had placed such a big order for their balls - physios only ever used to take one or two. They told me that Fit Ball work-outs had been developed in Europe. I decided to launch them here."
The problem, initially, was perception. Fit Balls were the latest in a long line of fitness fads, many of which had involved expensive - and redundant - pieces of equipment.
Slide - complete with slippery plastic mat and ``slippers", resembling shower caps, worn over your runners - had run, and indeed slid, its course. Step was here to stay, thanks to clever choreography and a hefty dose of marketing. Pump - with its outlay on weights and bars - had exhausted most gyms' equipment budget. Fit Balls were simply one fashion - or fad, as some saw it - too far.
But Westlake persevered. Fit Balls, she argued, were one of the few pieces of gym equipment that anyone could use - old, young, disabled or elite. What was being dismissed as gimmickry and fad was a piece of exercise equipment based on solid research into the potential benefits of exploiting an unsolid foundation.
``The same company that makes Fit Balls made the space hopper," she says, ``and space hoppers were invented to encourage children, who had limited movement or disabilities, to exercise."
Forty years ago, a Swiss physiotherapist researched the potential of using a large inflatable ball to strengthen the bodies of disabled children. The ball brought out their sense of play, while providing an unstable platform, which encouraged the body to use deep-muscle strength to steady itself.
Orange hoppers were born. So, too, was the Swiss Ball.
The same principle - that the ball forces the body to work its deepest muscles - has now led to Fit Balls emerging from the back of the gym cupboard to become a centrepiece of what instructors are calling ``core stability". In a rejection of ``vanity" exercise that seeks purely to tone and firm what can be seen on the surface, ``core stability" is about building strength - and a healthier body - beneath.
``In 1998 we all started to understand that core stability - abdominal strength - helps to care for the back," explains Westlake.
``To have a strong back, you need deeper strength. The deep muscles in the trunk of the body are like the foundations of a building: without them the body collapses. We started to see how Fit Balls could develop core stability."
The problem remains - that despite their track record as a reliable piece of strength-building equipment - they're round, bouncy and colourful.
``They're naff," says Greg, one bicep-bulging specimen at a Collingwood gym, when asked why he wasn't using one. ``I come here to lift weights, not mess about with green balls." But he admits that despite his apparent strength and kilo-laden exercise regime, he has a chronic bad back.
Strong to the Core by Lisa Westlake, published by ABC Books, is due for release next month.
© 2002 The Age