The humble beginning of the Mini Gym is a story worth telling. It is a bit unique but also a story of how many products in our free country develops because individuals see a better way to do something. If you have the motivation to endure some hardships that usually come with an unknown product, have patience, and perseverance, because most success stories come to those who exercise their God given talents. I only tell this story of the beginning of the Mini Gym to encourage any individual who has a dream or an idea that he or she may think their product will sell if they can only design it and do the necessary things to get the product to the market place. My advices...don't give up the dream. In this country, with its freedoms and opportunities (like nowhere else in this world) it only takes an idea, lots of sweat and you can see that dream come to fruition...This is my story.

Almost 40 years ago, I came in contact with a new exercise device. This was a small tubular unit with a steel shaft inside with a rope wrapped around the shaft. As you added more wrapping of rope around the shaft, this made it harder to pull. You pulled on one handle until the rope pulled all the way thru, then pulled on the other handle until the rope all the way thru again. It was only $30.00, but the product was having great success throughout the country. It was a simple new approach to resistive exercise, but was a "Mickey mouse" method of resistance by wrapping the rope around a shaft, and with 2 handles. You could add even more resistance by dragging the 2nd handle across the floor. It was a total joke: but it was selling to schools and individuals. For the athletic teams (usually football) it was a bit of a change (most used the Universal type gyms to do their conditioning). But, one of the advantages of our economic system is that it rewards people who improve products that they see on the market. I knew there was a better way of doing exercises with this approach.

I called a friend, Woody Fisher who lived in Florida. I knew that he had engineering know how. I showed him the smaller exerciser and asked him, how can we beat this? After several hours of discussion, he agreed to come Independence Mo, and work on this new approach of exercise. We didn't have a shop or a place to work but my brother Bud, had a small workshop in his basement. Within a few weeks Woody had us the world's first accommodating exerciser.

We did not know exactly what we had, except, we knew it was a very good exerciser that you could do any number of reps, at your max effort, and as you fatigued it was always adjusting to you with every rep. This type of exercise or exerciser had never been done before. We had done it with a centrifugal brake. We knew we had something excellent, but now what do we do with it? We designed our first unit with 2 large lead brake arms and with the return torsion spring inside the rope spool. The device had to recoil the rope spool for every rep so one could do 10 or 20 reps in rapid succession, just as one would do with weights. We began manufacturing in the spring of 1968.

Continue