Mike Morrell

Hi all, many of you have asked how my ROM progress is going. I plan to update more regularly; here’s a sneak peek!

(To see my complete ROM health & fitness journey to date, go here!)

Right around the time I was pining away for my very own ROM experience in 2008, Entrepreneur Online did an informative writeup (originally in the Los Angeles Business Journal).

Highlights:

[ROM manufacturer Alf] Temme, who was born in Hamburg, Germany, and lived in Sweden before emigrating to the U.S. in 1963, spent years building up his sauna business. In the mid-1970s he also owned a now-defunct chain of 25 fitness equipment stores. Contacts he developed running the business led him to ROM inventor John Pitre, who initially asked Temme only to distribute the machine, but Pitre’s business failed after a year and half.

“I was asked whether I would like to manufacture the machine,” said Temme. “I was reluctant. If the inventor goes broke why should I be interested?”

But Temme, who has a structural engineering degree from the University of Stockholm, plunged in because he felt that extensive changes could improve the machine. The inventor retains the patent and receives a monthly royalty from Temme.

“I redesigned the whole machine,” said Temme, who in the early 1990s directed about $800,000 in profits from his sauna business into the project. By late 1992, Romfab was selling a redesigned version of the machine for $10,400.

Around that time, Temme’s machine began to get some recognition from a curious news media. The machine was twice recognized by Popular Science and years later ROMfab continues to gain exposure from journalists eager to try out the $14,615 apparatus, which only comes in one model.

According to Temme, the key to the machine is its flywheel, which regulates resistance based on a user’s strength and conditioning. The machine, which can be adjusted to a user’s height and weight, offers both pushing and pulling resistance to the upper body, exercising the major muscle groups, including the chest and arms. The legs are worked through a stairstepping device. Temme encourages users to alternate daily between the machine’s two exercise options.

Temme only consents to interviews about the ROM machine if reporters come to his office and try out the equipment. And, indeed, the workout is strenuous and challenging. A digital display shows a baseline of performance that paces the user–a pace that becomes particularly challenging to follow as the four-minute workout continues.

Despite a disbelieving industry, Temme has made some headway. About 10 percent of the machines are sold for commercial use. Clients include sports teams, physicians and even some gyms, including Quick Gym Los Angeles in Pasadena.

The gym is owned by Angela Kelly, a former Hollywood body double who first used the machine at a chiropractor’s office. She said it helped eliminate her health problems, and she fell in love with it. In 2007, she started the gym and installed five of the machines.

“I was using it at the chiropractor’s office and it left a lot of his patients wanting a machine,” said Kelly. “I thought it was a great opportunity to start a gym.”

For his part, Temme is interested in the possibility of getting the machines into more gyms. While he’s cut down on his advertising budget and reduced staff levels, he’ s confident that his business can ride out the current economic decline.

“Believe me, it’s not the price, it’s really the too-good-to-be-true aspect,” he said.

This is by far the most in-depth article I’ve yet encountered going into the history, science, and controversy surrounding the ROM. I recommend reading the piece in its entirety here.

Since I’ve been following Tom’s advice to ROM on a lower resistance setting and oscillating at 30-second intervals, I’ve lost five pounds in the past two weeks! I know that’s not a breathtaking figure in our quick-fix-mentality culture, but it’s steady change in the right direction. It’s sustainable. When I ROM now, I feel more ‘winded,’ more exercised. And my heart rate (which I’ve been monitoring lately) goes down shortly thereafter (which is a positive thing, cardiovascularly-speaking). I really appreciate the attentiveness and expertise of the ROM staff and other users who’ve spontaneously contacted me to check up on my progress. When you own a ROM, you’re part of a community.

See my full Fitness Challenge story here.

What a year it’s been. Just over a year ago, I received the fruits of what you demanded: a ROM at my house – a $14,000 piece of exercise equipment that makes an audacious promise: A complete workout in just four minutes a day. My plan was in one year – from age 29 to age 30 – to not only maintain the shape I was in from my on-again, off-again gym attendance, but to get in better shape: To lose about 50 pounds and, as I put it in the Fitness Challenge,

• Keep up with my growing little girl
• Think clearer
• Radiate peace
• Be the very picture of virility
• Attain body-mind-spirit health
• See God

So! It’s been a year and those results are in. What’s happened? Well, I’ve sustained about 10 pounds of weight loss, I managed to watch Jubilee solo for nine (!) days in a row last year, and I’m growing in the other areas incrementally. This is in switching from 45-minute – 90-minute workouts at the gym (when I could make myself go) to 4-minute workouts from home. To me, this is impressive. But it’s also, if I’m completely candid, a little disappointing. After all, 10 pounds is not 50 pounds; I am not Charles Atlas at the beach.

Whenever our goals are not met, we quite naturally ask “Why?” Taking an inventory, it’s difficult to determine precisely why, in this case. Was I not ROMming diligently enough? That’s a possible explanation, but I pinky-promise that I’ve been way more diligent in hopping on the ROM than in driving downtown to work out. More likely is that I’ve not been ‘pushing it’ enough. An outside observer into my life might initially conclude that I’m a hypochondriac; while I’m in basically excellent health I do have occasional concerns about my heart health. This is tied into a decade-long struggle with anxiety and phobias – something I want to blog about more this year, as I think many of you could probably connect. All this to say, working out doesn’t always make me feel good. Maybe I’ve just been lazy from my youth, but feeling an elevated metabolism is deeply uncomfortable for me at times; I think I’m having a heart attack or something. All this to say, this past Fall I underwent an extensive battery of tests at a cardiologists’ office. I’ll probably have more to say about this in the anxiety/phobia posts, but suffice to say for now that my Doc gave me a clean bill of health in the exercise department. When I told him what I was doing, he said “ROM away.”

I am now resolved to accomplish in my 30th year what I’d hoped to in my 29th. I know more about the ROM and my own body than I did last year. With this in mind, I had a phone consultation with a ROM coach, Tom. (When you own a ROM, you have lifetime phone and in-person access to the ROM family of coaches in California. You also end up discovering other ROM enthusiasts nationwide – like my new friend Jeff.) Tom listened to my breakthroughs and struggles, and made three very practical suggestions:

1. Put my ROM on lower resistance settings. I wasn’t scoring too high – typically around 80 when I should be around 110. I’ve had my resistance set at 220 pounds, which in retrospect is a bit he-mannish and macho. Not to mention futile, as it’s the motion that generates resistance ultimately – the faster I can turn that flywheel, the more results I can get. So I had it as 200 over the weekend, but my score still isn’t as high as I’d like; I’m dialing down to 180.
2. ROM interval-style. It’s only four minutes so you’d think it’d be easy to just go all-out for the entire duration. But oh, no – not necessarily. Plus even if you do, your muscles and metabolism get used to that, so it could have diminishing returns. Better to vary it up a little, going (say) 30 seconds at a brisk-but-stable pace, and then 30 minutes b@lls-to-the-wall. That’s what I’ve been doing these past few days…and I can feel the difference.
3. Do an additional nighttime ROM workout. I usually ROM in the mornings, which is a great way to start my day. But Tom noted that I have, essentially a desk job for a living – and a desk-job at home, at that. (My commute is about 50 feet from bedroom to home office!) Which is lovely in all kinds of ways, but fighting sedentary-ness is not one of them. Since I’m not digging teaches, plowing fields, or wrestling wooly mammoths, a later ROM session could be beneficial to jump-start my metabolism later in the day. This latter ROMming, Tom stresses, should not be a super-strenuous one…that could interfere with sleep for a sensitive lad like me. But a ‘light’ ROM session would be helpful. So be it.

So here we go! Following this already-helpful fitness advice, I still hope to meet my fitness and well-being goals, and see if the ROM is a good solution for people with less time and perhaps less of a discipline threshold than career gym-o-philes. I thank you for joining me on my ROM fitness journey last year, and I hope you stay tuned for my updates in 2010!

I just finished my morning ROM – whew! It always leaves me gasping & panting. And no wonder – after four minutes on the ROM, your body is gasping for oxygen. This helps burn fat. As ROm distributor Alf Temme puts it:

Most everyone believes (incorrectly so) in the myth that a cardio workout requires at least 20 to 45 minutes per day. The truth is that if you want to improve strength, flexibility and cardio vascular endurance, that you must do slight damage to each of these systems by putting a slight overload on them. An overload on the muscles will create micro tears in the muscles that will in the repair process cause the muscles to become stronger. An overload on the tendons will create small damage by creating a very mild tendonitis and that will create more flexibility during the healing process of the tendonitis. An overload on the cardiovascular system is measured by way of total oxygen consumption during an exercise period. It can be low oxygen consumption during a long period of time or a very high oxygen consumption during a short period of time to reach the overload. An added advantage of a high oxygen consumption during a short time is that the length of time required for a cardiovascular workout becomes exponentially shorter with a linear increase of oxygen consumption. Oxygen consumption is expressed in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (mlO2/kg/min). With conventional forms of exercise it is nearly impossible for the untrained general public to reach the high levels of oxygen consumption required for a short and effective cardio workout. With the ROM machine untrained individuals will easily reach the very high levels of oxygen consumption that require only minutes for an effective aerobic workout that yields the same or better cardiovascular benefits than the conventional 20 to 45 minute aerobic workouts practiced by the general public.

This is certainly the way my body feels it. Particularly after the lower-body ROM workout. On those days if I’m especially gasping, I’ll drink a glass of water infused with ChlorOxygen – a chlorophyll concentrate that brings oxygen to the blood. I hope this isn’t cheating, because it feels great – it’s like the liquid is breathing within me. I also drink copious amounts of ChlorOxygen-infused water whenever I’m in the mountains of Colorado.