Personal Trainer, Sept 05

The Massage Therapy Workout
An innovative fitness technique employs balls to work the body.

By Stephen Hanks

   When an attractive, silver-haired, 50-year-old female in a tight black exercise outfit is confidently straddling a spherical object while seductively looking at you from the cover of a brochure which reads, “It takes balls to get into shape,” you tend to feel a compelling need to learn more. So we ventured to a spacious exercise studio in Manhattan’s trendy West Village and found brochure cover girl Yamuna Zake literally using balls—4- to 10-inch dense plastic ones in red, green and yellow—to help people tone and strengthen their bodies.
   What’s so unique about that, you ask? Aren’t people using big bouncy balls as a low-impact platform to do their situps and various weight training exercises in health clubs all over the map?
   “Yes, but when you use those balls,” Zake answers, “you’re not sinking into your body.” What? “The exercises you see with those big balls come from a fitness club/gym mentality. ‘Do your sit-ups on the ball. Do your push-ups on the ball.’ My body rolling workout is none of that stuff. This is a fitness system that frees and liberates the body.”

Body Rolling Beginnings
   Once you examine the training techniques employed in Yamuna Body Rolling, you realize that what Zake has created is part exercise program, part massage therapy, part chiropractic session, part injury prevention and part holistic healing. That’s not surprising since she has worked as a physical therapist, yoga teacher and bodywork specialist almost her entire adult life. Twenty-five years ago, after injuring her hip during childbirth, Zake developed a physical therapy system she called “Body Logic” and then incorporated the balls to create “Body Rolling.”
   “I wanted to develop a program that would allow people to take care of themselves and not need someone like a personal trainer,” she explains. “I want to help them develop a free range of motion, increase flexibility, improve their alignment and keep their body free from injury. So I just took a ball and ran my body over and around it and the ball became my hands as if I were giving myself a deep tissue massage.”
   After going through a ball creation trial-and-error period, Zake settled upon four different sphere sizes and densities, all of which can hold up to 350 pounds of body weight. The balls can be deflated for travel or storage, allowing people to do the exercises at home or on the road (although a few classes are recommended and Zake has also marketed a line of books and videos). While off-site training could reduce the revenue stream at her studio, as Zake points out: “There are a lot of people who aren’t disciplined enough to exercise at home and need classes.”

Fitness, Wellness, Oneness
   At her New York City studio classes, Zake trains the kind of eclectic mix of people you would expect to come from America’s melting pot. During a given session, she might be working with models in their 20s, housewives in their 40s, male and female dancers, casual joggers, and marathoners and triathletes, many of them looking for a workout they can do even when they are injured or in some pain.
   “This is fitness that’s about healing and total injury prevention,” Zake insists. “An injured dancer—and all dancers are usually injured—took a class recently and afterwards told me that it was the first time she’d gotten off the floor without back pain in months.”
   Zake’s exercises are a combination of low-impact aerobics, high-intensity stretching and deep tissue massage all in one. They work almost every area of the body, including the arms and shoulders. “The major thrust of this work,” she explains, “is that you work from the bone out; you work the muscle from its origin which is attached to the bone. When you’re gently rolling and pressing against the ball, you’re relaxing, stimulating and elongating the muscles at the same time until the muscle lets go.”
   Some naysayers, and they are few, claim that Zake’s system is all about stretching, a criticism she has a ready answer for. “It aggravates me that some people don’t get it,” she says. “It’s all about strength. You can’t get on that ball and balance without core body strength.”
   Yamuna Zake has more far more disciples than detractors. Since publishing the first of two books on body rolling in 1997, she has personally certified 600 practitioners around
the country. Does Yamuna dream that perhaps one day her name will be thought of like Pilates or Alexander, training and physical therapy visionaries who have become legends?
   “I believe that someday this will become a recognized body of work,” Zake says, “and that it will be around when I die.” With the kind of shape she’s in, that looks like a long time off.

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