Who is this woman who inspires such devotion?
12:00 AM CDT on Tuesday, August 23, 2005
By DARLA ATLAS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
When she was 16, Cathe Friedrich found her calling.
It happened the day her friend asked her to tag along for a class at an Elaine Powers Figure Salon.
"It was the days of this," says Ms. Friedrich, now 41, her arms outstretched and moving in tiny circles. During the class, "my friend was burning out, but I felt something change in my body. I thought, 'This is great!' "
After class, Ms. Friedrich wanted to hang around, look at the equipment and learn all she could about the place. Her friend was ready to go.
"So my mom picked me up later," Ms. Friedrich says, adding that she got a membership that day. "Within three weeks, I asked to start teaching."
It was there that she met Chris Williams, who was the club manager. The two, who have been business partners for 23 years, decided they could produce workout videos that were more intense than most others on the market.
"That was my niche," she says. "Whoever the real diehards were."
In 1988, they formed a company, Step N Motion Videos. As the workouts found an audience, Ms. Friedrich began to hear that they were popping up in libraries. Then, as her tape sales increased, she realized something: "The mainstream was changing."
She no longer appealed just to the extreme exerciser. Women across the country were buying her tapes – and begging other instructors to move up to her level.
Ms. Friedrich, 41, an American Council on Exercise and Body Pump certified instructor, now shoots and distributes her videos from her gym in Glassboro, N.J., where she lives with her husband, a state trooper, and two sons, 3 and 5.
Thanks to regular exposure on Fit TV – as well as a deal with Target, which will soon sell new Cathe videos for beginners and intermediates – her life has become a mixture of fame and obscurity.
"That's the beauty of teaching here; it's my own little oasis," she says of her gym, where she's treated like an instructor, not a star. "Some of them found out I do videos just in the last year. They don't look at me that way."
She has about 60 regulars in her class, which she teaches three times a week when not traveling or working on new products. (She tries out new moves on her students, using their body language as a barometer to decide how toughly to push her video-buying audience.)
Still, she does get recognized around town.
"I actually think it's kind of cute," she says. "They start explaining why they're putting something in their shopping carts. I say, 'I don't care – eat your Cheese Doodles!' "
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12:00 AM CDT on Tuesday, August 23, 2005
By DARLA ATLAS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
When she was 16, Cathe Friedrich found her calling.
It happened the day her friend asked her to tag along for a class at an Elaine Powers Figure Salon.
"It was the days of this," says Ms. Friedrich, now 41, her arms outstretched and moving in tiny circles. During the class, "my friend was burning out, but I felt something change in my body. I thought, 'This is great!' "
After class, Ms. Friedrich wanted to hang around, look at the equipment and learn all she could about the place. Her friend was ready to go.
"So my mom picked me up later," Ms. Friedrich says, adding that she got a membership that day. "Within three weeks, I asked to start teaching."
It was there that she met Chris Williams, who was the club manager. The two, who have been business partners for 23 years, decided they could produce workout videos that were more intense than most others on the market.
"That was my niche," she says. "Whoever the real diehards were."
In 1988, they formed a company, Step N Motion Videos. As the workouts found an audience, Ms. Friedrich began to hear that they were popping up in libraries. Then, as her tape sales increased, she realized something: "The mainstream was changing."
She no longer appealed just to the extreme exerciser. Women across the country were buying her tapes – and begging other instructors to move up to her level.
Ms. Friedrich, 41, an American Council on Exercise and Body Pump certified instructor, now shoots and distributes her videos from her gym in Glassboro, N.J., where she lives with her husband, a state trooper, and two sons, 3 and 5.
Thanks to regular exposure on Fit TV – as well as a deal with Target, which will soon sell new Cathe videos for beginners and intermediates – her life has become a mixture of fame and obscurity.
"That's the beauty of teaching here; it's my own little oasis," she says of her gym, where she's treated like an instructor, not a star. "Some of them found out I do videos just in the last year. They don't look at me that way."
She has about 60 regulars in her class, which she teaches three times a week when not traveling or working on new products. (She tries out new moves on her students, using their body language as a barometer to decide how toughly to push her video-buying audience.)
Still, she does get recognized around town.
"I actually think it's kind of cute," she says. "They start explaining why they're putting something in their shopping carts. I say, 'I don't care – eat your Cheese Doodles!' "
This text is invisible on the page, but this text is affected by the invisible item's flow. This text is invisible on the page, but this text is affected by the invisible item's flow.
More headlines...
Hard Corps: A weekend of workouts
Slaves to the sun