Fast Fitness in the Workplace

More than ever, the American public is aware of the importance of fitness and the role it plays in enhancing everyday life. Yet ironically, a sedentary lifestyle is killing a quarter of a million people each year, according to a study by Professor Frank W. Booth at the University of Missouri, who coined the term, “sedentary death syndrome” to describe what has become a virtual epidemic.

Why the disparity? One reason is time. Crunched by the demands of home, careers and family, Americans simply don’t have the time to workout – or if they do manage to carve out some time, they don’t get enough bang for their buck.

As a certified trainer with 18 years experience, Donna Snow became frustrated with the notion that clients were not realizing the results they wanted, and were slipping away from their fitness goals. In response, she developed the Standing Firm System – a portable firming station that promotes standing posture and total body strength. The simple design lends itself to a variety of resistance band exercises.

Not only does the exerciser engage the moving leg, but also the standing leg, hips and core muscles, working from the inside out, Standing Firm emphasizes posture, spinal alignment and core control. For example, people who use Standing Firm to perform leg lifts work their standing leg isometrically while the other leg works against the band. By contrast, the traditional leg-lift method (lying on the floor, which many people probably learned in old-style aerobics classes) works on leg at a time.

A widely publicized study (cited by the Associated Press, Fitness and Shape) by William J. Kraemer at Ball State University in Indiana found that healthy, active women realized the most improvement in their aerobic capacity by using resistance bands identical to those in the Standing Firm method. Snow’s program uses the bands to simulate weight training exercises, which gives a more complete workout in less time – a key factor in motivating time- crunched, would-be fitness buffs.

 “A common misconception is that a workout needs to be long to be effective,” Snow said. “The truth is that a five-minute firming workout done four times a day is just as effective as a 20 minute firming workout.”  The Standing Firm platform is only two feet long and sixteen inches wide so it can go virtually anywhere. By replacing a coffee break with a firming break an entire workout can be done without leaving the office.

The Standing Firm® System comes complete with the vertical twenty-minute workout and resistance bands for under a hundred dollars. In addition, the company plans to add downloadable workouts in January 2007. The convenient MP3 workouts meet the needs of users looking for solid results without taking hour- long classes or lifting traditional weight equipment.

For more information about the Standing Firm System, please visit www.standingfirm.com or contact Donna Snow directly at Donna@standingfirm.com or 724-658-0212