The story of fortysomething fitness guru Jari Love.
Jari Love looks the part of a fitness video star. Dressed casually in a light-blue tracksuit and sneakers, it’s easy to imagine the 44-year-old causing most people to do a double take — she’s got blindingly blonde hair and a body that looks as if Michelangelo may have sculpted it.
Not bad for a mother of two teens, ages 15 and 18.
Love’s series of eight fitness videos and DVDs, aptly named Get Extremely Ripped! have sold more than 350,000 copies, racking in an estimated $5.25 million in sales. (By comparison, the ultra-popular Tae Bo exercise video series, which came out in 1998, grossed a reported $75 million in its first year. However, that came with the aid of marketers who shelled out $2 million a week to blitzkrieg TV channels with a 30-minute infomercial, a tactic Love has opted against.) Love is also hugely popular in the United States and has made appearances to promote her videos on local morning talk shows for ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, as well as CTV, Citytv, CBC and Global.
Love’s success is impressive, especially when you take into account how difficult it is to crack the saturated American workout video market, says Mitch Perliss, a former executive with Razor Digital Entertainment, which distributes the Get Extremely Ripped! series. “When you start talking about fitness DVD success, I’d say eight out of 10 don’t make it,” he says.
But Love’s road to fitness superstardom hasn’t been easy. When she was 16, she got a job as a receptionist at a health club in Calgary. After a few days, one of the fitness instructors didn’t show up for work, which left Love, who had never taken, let alone led, an aerobics class, as the only one who could fill in.
“I was terrified,” she recalls.
Back then, receptionists at the club had to wear black tights, high heels and a cheesy-looking jacket. Love, of course, didn’t have any workout clothes with her. The staff went through the gym’s lost-and-found and dug up a pair of green satin shorts, a sweaty, crust-ridden T-shirt and somebody else’s stinky shoes.
Like a deer in the headlights of a Mack truck, Love reluctantly made her way to the front of the class of 50 people and began flailing about the room like a contestant from So You Think You Can Dance who’s moments away from getting cut. “It was a complete bomb,” she recalls. “One by one, people left the room until only three people were left.”
Complaints from pissed-off people came filing in:
“If that instructors here, I’m not coming!”
“She’s too chatty!”
“She looks like Barbie and can’t teach!”
It was years before Love was given the go-ahead to run another class. Yet, despite the nightmarish experience, she made an important discovery: this was definitely something she could see herself doing.
Over the following few years, Love gradually turned into a fitness fanatic, a move that was spurred on, in part, by the need to combat depression. As a child, she had been part of the Huget Sisters, a local Christian pop-country group made up of Love and her four sisters.
The sister act sang on The Buckshot Show, a longtime local children’s TV series, and even had a brief cameo appearance in the 1988 Jack Palance movie, Ebenezer (the sisters played the part of Christmas carollers).
“We had been called by the media the up-and-coming Canadian artists,” Love says.
Stardom seemed to be a forgone conclusion for Love. “I had been singing since the age of three, so growing up that’s really where I thought I’d end up,” she says.
But in 1998, a record deal that could have rocketed the sisters into the mainstream musical scene went sour, and, with that, Love spiralled into depression.
“It really felt like I was sinking,” she says. “I had been a singer for so long; it had been who I was. When that deal fell apart, my identity fell apart. It made me think: who is Jari?”
To combat depression, Love began a fanatic obsession with running. She ran 12 hours a week, eventually becoming exercise-anemic from overtraining. She felt weak, chronically tired and was diagnosed with Piriformis syndrome, a painful nerve injury that can come from too much pounding of the pavement. “I went to go see a doctor and he said, ‘Jari, you’ve got to slow down,’” she says.
The injury prompted a layoff from running and Love began to look into other ways of working out. She was familiar with weightlifting, but was skeptical about getting into it because she wanted to stay lean, not bulk up. She knew running on a treadmill could burn up to 600 calories an hour, but wasn’t sure if pumping iron could yield similar results. So, she went to an exercise physiologist and got tested on a metabolic cart to see how many calories and carbohydrates lightweight training could burn.
She discovered that, by combining lots of reps with high-intensity compound moves — such as doing bicep curls while pumping out squats — she could burn the same, if not more calories then if she’d been on a treadmill. Armed with that information, she began designing a workout routine.
In 2005, Love took that workout out of her basement and into a gym. “I went to Talisman [Centre], the largest fitness facility in Canada, and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to do this class,’” she says.
Everyone thought Love was crazy, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “‘No’ just means, ‘not this way now,’” she says.
For three months, Love harassed Talisman’s program coordinator until he finally caved. Five people showed up for Love’s first class, which she named Fit For Life. Within months that class grew to 150 people, a number that continued to swell as word spread about the results people were seeing from Love’s class. “People liked the class because it was easy to follow and it worked,” she says. “It became so popular that people were showing up an hour before the class.”
That popularity prompted the move into the competitive market of fitness videos and DVDs. One of the class’s regulars, who couldn’t take the time out of her day to stake out a spot in line, suggested Love make a video so other people, like her, could do the class at home.
At the time, Love had been quoted a price of $1,500 to make the video. The final price tag, however, turned out to be $35,000 and initial response to the video was lukewarm, at best. Love sent out 30 DVDs to potential distributors and was rejected by nearly all of them.
“I talked to a marketing expert who told me that I was crazy, that no one was going to buy it because I look like a Barbie doll and the Get Ripped! title was too intimidating,” she says.
Apparently, blonde fitness video stars are much less likely to strike it big compared to brunettes because they’re perceived as less serious, according to a New York Times story that quoted Jill Ross, director of product acquisition at Collage Video, a fitness video clearing house.
Despite the initial feedback, Love stuck with the video’s edgy name, and went with a cover that showed off her bullet-deflecting body and dyed-blonde hair. When the video came out in 2005, Love says it was ranked in the top 10 by Fitness magazine, which helped to spark an onslaught of sales.
“It was crazy. I remember waking up and turning on the computer one morning and there it was — ding, ding, ding,” she says, imitating the sound of a slot machine paying out. “It was like I had won the lottery.”
Within the first month, Love had recouped the entire $35,000 needed to make the initial video. Today, that video has spawned an entire series of seven workout videos, and another incarnation, Get Extremely Ripped! Rock Body, came out earlier this year.
Such success comes from sticking to a demographic Love, who turns 45 this June, knows well: boomer-aged women who prefer to work out at home, rather than in a gym filled with ogling eyes and tight-bodied 20-somethings who can burn calories simply by sneezing. Catering to this demographic, Love has made sure all the videos use women who’ve gotten results in her class.
“The distribution company wanted me to use 20-year-olds, but I said, ‘No way, that’s not who goes to my classes,’” she says.
That move has been dubbed the “Fonda Factor” by The New York Times, which once mentioned Love in a story about exercise videos put out by older, buff women that target female boomers — Fonda Factor, of course, references actress Jane Fonda who became a fitness guru in her mid-40s. The fearless leaders of this trend, the story noted, “are less pretty young thing and more yummy mummy.”
According to Perliss, who now owns the Los Angeles-based consulting firm MHP & Associates, it’s easy to see why the videos have been a hit. “It’s that whole MILF thing,” he says. “There is no question that there was an opportunity to target woman who had their two or three kids and were now trying to get back into the same shape they had been in when they were younger.”
Keeping with that strategy, Love plans to put out four more fitness videos for the same audience. Eventually, however, she’d like to move into reality TV and do a show with her husband, Ray Love, about running Fitness Plus, a two-gym location in Calgary the couple co-owns.
“My husband and I have got interesting chemistry, we’re both Type A personalities, but have two different ways of running things,” she says. “It would also make for good TV because of the variety of people on staff, as well as those who come in to work out.
“I just think it would be really neat.”
Visit her website at jarilove.com
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