07/29/02

Berei Brandenstein, 74, and suffering from osteoporosis, lost 50 inches from her body and gained 1½ inches in height after 18 months of following a video exercise system.

Today, she stands with her shoulders back, while she shares photos of how her curved upper back used to look only two years ago, costing her height and creating pain.

Denise Hentze's results following the same program, known as "T-Tapp" for its creator, Teresa Tapp, also were dramatic. The 54-year-old Florida woman lost 70 pounds off her 4-foot, 11-inch frame and went from a size 24 to a size 12 in less than a year. "And I did not diet," she says.

Sherry Richard, 45, vice president of human resources for a petrochemical company in Houston, attributes the loss of three clothing sizes and the absence of once-chronic neck pain to the T-Tapp workout.

Other T-Tapp regimen followers also report reductions in chronic pain, especially of the back and neck, and dramatically lowered blood sugar for diabetics. Many of them are women in their 40s and 50s, who note that the weight loss they achieved came at a time in their lives when most women easily gain weight.

T-Tappers, as the devotees of this fitness program call themselves, offer testimonials that sound like infomercials. Actually, the program's founder, Teresa Tapp, has declined offers to do infomercials.

Instead, she has let word-of-mouth promotion, fed by her Web site and seminars that she holds around the country, fuel the popularity of T-Tapp.

As an exercise program, T-Tapp doesn't fall into a particular category. It is a low-impact video program that incorporates elements of resistance training, isometrics, yoga, tai chi and Pilates; it requires no equipment, yet doing the 35 to 55 minute program increases the heart rate to what physicians consider a cardio-training level. It can be done in an area no wider than 3 square feet.

Seeing the need

The T-Tapp system was created nine years ago by Tapp, a former scout and "den mother" in the modeling industry, who has a bachelor's degree in exercise physiology, with an emphasis on public health and education.

The Evanston, Ind., native created a series of exercises for models to do in the space of the hotel rooms they were living in. She also relied on her background as a rehabilitative trainer and her own rehabilitation from having chipped two vertebrae.

She worked with models such as Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell. The exercises were created to strengthen models' backs, which became sore from 14-hour catalog photo sessions; increase models' energy; and target areas of fat around the thighs, back and arms.

Models told her the exercises worked.

After Tapp retired from the modeling business, she began sharing the program with women from all walks of life who had problems with weight, illness or chronic pain.

Tapp's workout involves the entire body, starting with what is now popularly known as the "core": the abdomen and areas near the spine and rib cage. The program works the full length of muscles, Tapp says, and helps the body with balance.

Tapp puts it this way: "T-Tapp approaches the body as a machine, dividing the muscles into layers and systematically fatiguing each layer. The movements are designed to give maximum results for minimum effort, but they also keep the body in proper spinal alignment."

In some ways, the movements look deceptively simple, though following proper form is important. There are only eight repetitions or less of each exercise. Still, it is challenging, particularly when it comes to doing the balance exercises. Exercisers say they begin to notice how they improve in the balance sequences within one or two days.

Noticeable results

Tapp, who lives in South Florida, came to Canton in June to conduct one of the seminars she does around the country almost weekly. Sherry Dial drove up from Cincinnati to attend; other devotees came from as far away as Philadelphia and Missouri.

Dial, who is 32, carried with her a small photo album of Polaroids that her husband took of her posing in a bikini. Her pre-workout body featured, as she showed, lumps and bumps and saddlebags. Women attending the seminar oohed and aahed as they saw the pictures of Dial that her husband took seven weeks later (in the same position, wearing the same bikini.) She said she lost 39 inches from all over her body, and her saddlebags and other lumpy parts seemed to have vanished.

Tapp has had the program she refined over the past nine years analyzed at the Cooper Institute in Dallas, a nonprofit research center that focuses its efforts on the effects of exercise. She paid for the research herself, says Conrad Earnest, director of human performance at Cooper.

Earnest says that T-Tapp does what many, but not all, exercise programs do - "It raises your heart rate to an appropriate level to get a fitness response. It will likely improve cardiovascular fitness in the long run, as well as increase flexibility and strength.

"It's a high-calorie-expenditure activity, which is indirectly associated with fat burning . . . I would also call it a high-carbohydrate-burning workout."

The workout is not just for fitness novices.

Laura Brown, 45, who has a doctorate in psychology and travels the country as a stress management consultant for corporations, already was fairly fit when she started doing the T-Tapp workout. She had been lifting weights for 15 years and had done regular cardio workouts, like hiking.

"Yet I went down two clothing sizes in the four months after I started this workout, and I can do this in 35 minutes instead of spending two hours at the gym," Brown says. Also, her bulked-up body trimmed down.

"At 5 feet, 10 inches and lifting weights, it's hard not to look like a lumberjack," she says. Now, her muscles look longer and leaner. "I feel my torso has been elongated - I've got the flattest stomach I've ever had in my life, even as a kid."

She also says it is not a coincidence that the hot flashes and mood swings related to menopause have disappeared since she started T-Tapp.

Tapp says what it comes down to when it comes to health and fitness is this: "We need to treat our bodies as machines. They were made to move.

"What I really want to do is to educate people, to make a difference in our approach to fitness," she says. "I want people to understand the basics of a well-functioning body. They are digestion, assimilation and elimination, and all of those processes break down when you don't move your body."

One of the advantages of T-Tapp, say Tapp and T-Tapp exercisers, is that the better they get at the workout, the less they have to do it. Eventually, three times a week is sufficient to maintain results.

Detailed exercises and descriptions, as well as videos that may be ordered, may be found at Tapp's Web site, www.t-tapp.com. For information or to order videos, call 1-800-342-0717.

Theiss is the Plain Dealer's fashion editor.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

etheiss@plaind.com, 216-999-4542