Hang Ten

Flipping over Gravity Boots

Stephen Baron, 27, suffers from a ruptured disc that can cause him excruciating back pain. But Baron, an international management consultant in Washington, D.C., has found a topsy-turvy way to get relief. Four times a week he dons a pair of steel and foam-rubber Gravity Boots that each weigh three pounds and dangles from his heels from a chinning bar for five minutes. Says he: "It's a very restful, relaxing experience that eases the pressure off my lower back for hours. I can even hear my vertebrae clicking while I'm upside down."

As a result of such enthusiastic endorsements, Gravity Boots are now all but walking out of stores. The boots, which are actually ankle straps with hooks, sell for about $70 a pair. Optional support systems that hold people in a batlike position range from $250 to nearly $1,000.

Gravity Guidance of Pasadena, Calif., is the leading boot manufacturer. Its sales have exploded from less than $200,000 in 1979 to more than $12 million last year, and are expected to top $35 million in 1983. Total sales: more than 350,000 pairs.

Gravity Boots first started becoming popular after the 1980 film American Gigolo showed Star Richard Gere doing a heels-over-head workout. Subsequent features on the boots on television shows like PM Magazine further boosted sales. Says Gravity Guidance President Bryce Martin, 30: "The movie was really the first time anybody had ever heard of the boots, and we were swamped with orders from all over the country."

Gravity Boots were invented in 1965 by Dr. Robert Martin, 73, Bryce Martin's father. An orthopedic surgeon and onetime vaudeville acrobat, the elder Martin developed the boots to relieve the stress on spines and joints caused by standing and sitting. "I always told my colleagues that we'd all have better posture and no back problems if we could walk around on the ceiling," he says. "It was just a matter of figuring out how to do it."

Many physicians, however, doubt the therapeutic value of the boots. Says Dr. Willibald Nagler, chairman of the department of rehabilitation medicine at New York Hospital: "There is no evidence at all that they help, but there is also no evidence that they do any harm." He warns, however, that people with high blood pressure or circulatory disorders should avoid them. Nagler himself bought a parr of Gravity Boots last fall, and has been getting the hang of them three times a week. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.