John Basedow

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John Basedow is a bodybuilder and self-proclaimed "fitness celebrity" known in the United States for his Fitness Made Simple home workout videos and the ubiquitous television advertisements for them. In his commercials and workout videos, John Basedow emphasizes that quality workouts require "no tricky dance moves and no high impact gyrations."

Basedow got his start on a TV show called IMAGES. He set a goal to be in good enough shape to be in a fitness magazine. After frustration at different exercise routines, he sat down and invented his own, which came to be Fitness Made Simple.

John is known to be very modest about his status as a fitness celebrity. In an article with the Iowa State Daily, he says:

...it's so hard to believe - that I'm a popular icon. The New York Times was funny. Not too long ago I was on the front page. It wasn't even a story about me, it was about celebrity poker. The first line of the story said "If you thought the next great television phenomenon after Nascar, figure skating and fitness celebrity John Basedow would be celebrity poker, people thought you'd be crazy." The fact that they grouped me with those things blew my mind. ^[1]

[edit] Tsunami disappearance hoax

In January of 2005 Basedow was the subject of an Internet hoax that claimed he had expired as a victim of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake that had recently ravaged southeast Asia. This originated on January 2, 2005, when PRWeb, a press release newswire, published an apparently fraudulent press release attributed to Manta Communications, the publisher and distributor of Fitness Made Simple, stating that Basedow had died while vacationing in Phuket, Thailand with his model wife Mary of Los Angeles. This was refuted later when the Fitness Made Simple website added a message which denied that Basedow had been missing or injured as a result of the tsunami, or even that he had ever been to Thailand. Further proof (and also an answer to critics who alleged that Manta Communications was simply covering up his death so as not to disrupt sales of videos) is contained in a radio interview [1] in which Basedow discusses the rumor and verifies that he is doing fine and finishing up his new exercise infomercial.

[edit] External links

• Fitness Made Simple - Official site
• PRWeb.com - The press release regarding his falsified disappearance
• [2] - John Basedow's Myspace page with John Basedow Fitness Made Simple Theme Song