ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602020042
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ALEXANDRIA
SOURCE: MEGAN ROSENFELD THE WASHINGTON POST
``Here, feel my tummy.'' Denise Austin, 38, proffers her bare midsection, a tanned rectangle between the top of her neon-orange exercise shorts and matching bra top. It feels like you could drive a car over it and she'd still be breathing.
``That's my trademark,'' she says. ``Everybody's felt my tummy.'' George Bush has felt her tummy, and Colin Powell and Phil Donahue and Kathie Lee Gifford.
It's a very impressive tummy.
Indeed, Austin is impressive all over. She produces a daily half-hour exercise program on ESPN and two videos a year, and sells huge quantities of her name-brand workout equipment on the QVC television shopping channel.
She has now produced a book: ``JumpStart: The 21-Day Plan to Lose Weight, Get Fit, and Increase Your Energy and Enthusiasm for Life.''
She has two little girls, a mane of streaked blond hair, seemingly hundreds of teeth, a husband who's a successful sports attorney and a five-story town house in an exclusive section of Old Town Alexandria.
On top of that, when it comes to energy and enthusiasm for life, Austin has few peers. Depression dare not furrow her brow, or laziness infect her 110-pound frame. She is up, and so full of vim and vigor that even her conversation is underlined and full of exclamation points!
The telephone rings. She jumps out of her beige leather chair and opens the door of a built-in cabinet. A phone rolls out on a shelf. It's her publicist. ``Hi, honey!'' Austin says. ``Call Laurie or Pat at the 800 number and tell them to Fed-Ex it to you. ...''
If Austin were alone and the conversation had gone on longer, she would not have just stood there talking, as most of us do. She would have done some leg lifts or jumped on her stationary bike. Austin believes that a person should never be idle for long.
If you read Austin's book, it is hard to imagine a place where or time when you should not be exercising. She wants you to do squats while blow-drying your hair. She wants you to do saddlebag-slimming side kicks while you are cooking or leg stretches along the kitchen counter while you wash dishes.
And you should exercise at the office, of course, stretching and toning at your desk every hour or so, even if your boss thinks you should be typing or your colleagues are giving you weird looks.
``It's your body,'' Austin says firmly. ``It's your responsibility.'' Her role is to hunt down your every excuse and torpedo it.
And she is prepared to be your inspiration.
She has always been a positive thinker, she says. The middle of five children, four girls and a boy, Austin was raised in Southern California. Her parents divorced when she was 8, and after that her mother took a job as a social worker in Los Angeles and raised the kids and never complained. Her father, a onetime baseball player with the St. Louis Browns, was a salesman for M&M/Mars, another person full of energy and enthusiasm. Austin can remember going with him at the age of 4 on sales calls, helping him carefully arrange the displays of M&Ms to best advantage.
``I honestly believe in myself,'' she says. She started gymnastics at 12 and went on to win so many awards that she had 21 offers of athletic scholarships to college. She went to the University of Arizona and graduated with a degree in exercise physiology from California State University, Long Beach.
She started her own business in Los Angeles immediately upon graduation, setting up corporate fitness programs. In 1983, she married Jeff Austin, a nationally ranked tennis player-turned lawyer, and the brother of tennis star Tracy Austin. Denise led her wedding party in aerobics. Shortly after, they moved to Alexandria when he went to work for ProServ, a sports management company that subsequently split off another firm for which he now works, Advantage International.
Her chutzpah is awesome. When she was just an aerobics instructor in Los Angeles, she read about a banquet being held in Washington for the President's Council on Physical Fitness. She was 23, but she talked her way into an invitation, and at the party walked up to Jack LaLanne and asked if she could be a guest on his show. He said, ``Sure.'' That appearance led to her own local show in L.A.
After she moved here, she peddled herself to every network she knew of, even waiting in parking lots for television executives to hand them tapes. One of them, Steve Friedman, hired her for a monthly gig on the ``Today'' show. From there it was a short hop to a daily on ESPN.
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Workout guru and mother Denise Austin exercises byby CNBrunning in place as her oldest daughter Kelly, 5, runs out of place
in the living room of their home in Alexandria. 2. Austin, 38, keeps
busy and fit producing a daily half-hour exercise program on ESPN
and two videos per year, and sells huge quantities of her brand-name
workout equipment on the cable shopping channel QVC.