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App includes 200 functional fitness routines SITTING • from Page 8 treadmill desk. Grazen points to the book, and studies on extended sitting, as he urges his patients, and now app users, to get up and move. A 1989 graduate of the National College of Chiropractic in Chicago, his office protocol includes spinal manipulation and other chiropractic adjustments, then sending patients home with a set of exercises. “I tell them, ‘You’re going to learn how to control this problem yourself, and you’re going to rehabilitate and not become dependent on someone else to take care of you,’ ” he said. The idea for the Well Fit Plus app bubbled up after a female patient with a busy desk job – suffering from neck, shoulder and upper back pain – wanted a better sense of the exercises Grazen recommended she do at home. He asked her to record him on her cellphone while he showed her the proper form. Grazen then approached two other patients – financial planner Bob Florian and medical supply company owner Joe Manzella – with the notion of creating an app to do the same for others. They agreed to invest, brought in the Applied Science and Helms tech groups to build the app, and asked Michelle Bulan, Lisa Collins and other fitness enthusiasts to help him record short exercise routines. Florian came to Grazen with a bad back a quartercentury ago. “He has been instrumental in steering me on the right path,” including providing exercise and stretching routines, he said. The principal owner at Florian Financial Group in Williamsville sees the app as a perfect tie-in with retirement and other advice he gives clients. “Taking good care of yourself has a direct connectivity to your financial wellbeing,” he said. There are thousands of fitness apps, Grazen said,
Program creators include, from left, Bob Florian, Michelle Bulan, Jeff Grazen, Lisa Collins, and Joe Manzella. Angela Liptak and Brian Lorenz, not pictured, also help.
Photos by Shuran Huang/Buffalo News
Well Fit Plus works on a desktop, flatscreen or smartphone. Warren Clark, left, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Upstate New York, is among those who use the app in his office in Amherst. Clark said it is helping him prepare for knee replacement surgery.
but precious few that are practical on the job. “Who’s going to do Bulgarian pushups or Yugoslavian squats at work – in high heels or their suit coat and tie?” he said. About 200 functional fitness routines, each about 90 seconds long, now grace Well Fit Plus. Used over time, they are designed to hit important points across the body. Users can pick their favorites for troubled body regions. Some routines were shot against familiar regional backdrops that
include Canalside, KeyBank Center and Buffalo Naval Park. Many have been shot in front of a green screen in a warehouse owned by Manzella, which has allowed technicians to slip a company logo into the background. “The app reminds you to exercise, it holds you accountable, and it shows your statistics,” which you can share with your health care provider, Grazen said. “Everything we do in the app is stabilization and rehab-based movement:
back, neck, shoulder, sciatic, low back, hip.” Warren Clark, another chiropractic patient, was among those who helped the start-up work out the kinks in recent months before introducing the application to a wider audience. “We have a lot of folks who sit a lot, so it made sense to buy enough so that everybody in our office could have it,” said Clark, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Upstate New York. There are 30 employees
in the Amherst office. Five other BBBs also have been using the app since Grazen told leaders about it during a conference in Buffalo two months ago. Clark said about one-third of those in his office – including himself – continue to use the app more than three months after they started. “If you walk around and see somebody standing up using the app, good for them,” said Clark, 68, who is in the process of scheduling a left knee replacement. As he prepares, he has started to bike and do more moving at home on weekends, and has set his app to prompt him to exercise every workday hour, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. “If I sit or stand too long, I’m very uncomfortable,” he said. “This gets me up once an hour and I feel better. I stretch. There are some exercises I can’t do, so I do something different.” The app costs $29.99 per year for corporate use; individuals can pay the same rate, or $3.99 a month. It is available at Google Play and the Apple App Store, as well as wellfitplus.com. Grazen touts the “side effects” of regular use as more energy, better metabolism, and lower blood sugar and cholesterol readings. Consistent users also have lost weight, he said. Corporate wellness programs promote similar goals. Most programs include annual physicals, blood work and lab assessments, gym memberships or in-house fitness centers, team weight-loss challenges, nutritional education, maybe even employee fitness trackers. Much of that is reactionary, said Grazen, who’s helped several companies with corporate wellness plans during the last two decades. “The problem in industry today is that we all sit, so how does your wellness program address the elephant in the room? Now, I come in and talk about the bull’s-eye, which is plain and simple: Get ’em up.”