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Weightless workout
Local brothers invention uses body’s own resistance instead of weights
| Friday, Aug 3 2007 11:07 AM
Last Updated: Friday, Aug 3 2007 10:48 AM
It is an exercise machine without weights.
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Mike Lopeteguy shows Paula Conston how to do one of the exercises on the IsoCiser at American Health and Fitness on Niles Street.
Joe (seated) and Mike Lopeteguy demonstrate the new IsoCiser workout machine, which does not use any weights but rather depends on resistance from the user's body to supply the necessary resistance.
No, seriously.
Local brothers Joe and Mike Lopeteguy claim their invention, the IsoCiser, can deliver a total body workout using a person’s own body as resistance instead of adjusting heavy weights and using clunky cables or pulleys.
“The machine is unlike anything you will see on the market today,” Mike Lopeteguy said. “There are no weights, no rubber bands. You supply the weight with your legs. You don’t need weights.”
Bakersfield-based IsoCiser Systems Inc. has shot an infomercial, which is expected to air soon. There are also plans to market the product — more than a decade in the making — to sporting goods companies, schools and prisons.
The IsoCiser — which combines the words “isometric,” or contracting muscles without moving joints, and “exercise” — works by users in a seated position straightening their legs away from their body to provide as much resistance as desired while pushing or pulling on a bar or curl attachment.
Skeptical?
Dominick Di Betta, owner of American Health & Fitness Spa on Niles Street, wasn’t quite sure about the machine when he first heard about it about five years ago.
Di Betta, 60, has been in the health club business for 40 years and has lifted weights since he was 14. He said he had never heard of any machine that worked the way the IsoCiser does.
But Di Betta was so impressed that he started using it at his health club and is now marketing director of IsoCiser Systems. He has had one of the machines in his health club for the last four and a half years and said he uses the IsoCiser every day in conjunction with workouts using traditional weights. Di Betta also recently introduced an IsoCiser class at American Health & Fitness.
Di Betta estimated the IsoCiser can do the same exercises as “at least a dozen machines” at most health clubs, possibly replacing $30,000 or more of equipment.
“Whatever I can do on any other machine, I can duplicate on the IsoCiser,” he said.
There is of course one large caveat.
Di Betta said the IsoCiser is more suited to toning the body or using in conjunction with other weights as part of a complete workout plan and is not the ideal machine a serious bodybuilder would use on its own to build large muscle mass.
“It will shape and tone your muscles, but it’s not going to make you into Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Mike Lopeteguy said.
The Lopeteguys said they hope it can help the obesity problem in America, especially among children. To that end they have started marketing it to schools — they say Wasco High has agreed to purchase 30 of the machines for its revamped weight room.
Mike Lopeteguy, who works as secretary and treasurer for the company the brothers set up to produce the IsoCiser, said since leg muscles are stronger than arm muscles, there is no limit to the amount of resistance that can be placed on the machine.
To prove that point, former World’s Strongest Man competitor Mark Philippi, who endorses the product, has tried unsuccessfully to break the IsoCiser.
Philippi said he has a machine at home and two at the Philippi Sports Institute training facility he runs in Las Vegas. He said it is best suited for toning the body and helping to shed extra weight, but can also be used with weights to help build muscle mass.
“For the average person it is a great product,” he said. “If you are trying to get in shape and burn fat, it is great. Can it do everything? No. I use it If I am looking for a quick workout or between competitions. Can I pull trucks on it and do stuff like that? No.”
The IsoCiser is set to a standard size so most people regardless of height or weight can use it, switching between as many as 60 exercises by adding attachments or adjusting it by moving bars and a pin.
“We had a 90-year-old woman on the machine and she loved it,” said Joe Lopeteguy, IsoCiser Systems’ president and CEO. “She can get off it and Mark (Philippi), one of the world’s strongest men, can get on it, change nothing and work out. That’s how versatile it is.”
Joe Lopeteguy dreamed up the idea for the IsoCiser in 1992.
He had an idea and sketched out complicated diagrams for a machine that he says “looked nothing like what it looks like now.”
That night he woke up in the middle of the night with an idea to work around one pivot point and use a single pin to switch between positions, going from pushing to pulling. The idea — not the product itself — has since been patented.
It has taken more than a decade for the Lopeteguys to refine the machine, working mostly on weekends, but the idea appears to be finally ready for the marketplace — now all it needs is some customers.
“This is the only machine that whatever fitness level you are you can work on it,” Mike Lopeteguy said. “You don’t have to worry about adding weights.”
For more information about the IsoCiser or to purchase one of the machines, which retails for $499 including attachments, call 703-4112 or visit www.isociser.com.