Once upon a time (specifically, the late eighties to the mid-nineties), there was one gig available to any person with even the smallest modicum of fame: releasing a workout video. You didn’t need to have any particular background in exercise; all you needed was a really loud spandex outfit (or, if a senior citizen, a roomy sweat suit), a camera crew, and a very cheap set, and you had yourself a VHS release.
This was a glorious era that reveled in the complete and total absence of irony, a notion readily apparent in the collection of these vintage tapes we found on the YouTube channel of Aaron Valdez. Valdez tells us he amassed his collection through “eBay but also at garage sales, thrift stores, and from friends, and after about a year, I had over a hundred.”
What makes the collection particularly delicious is, as Valdez puts it, that “[you] can tell who really works out, who was receiving instructions off-screen or put in a few practice sessions, and who had no idea what was going on until they showed up on set.”
We’ve sifted through Valdez’s collection in search of, for lack of a better term, the craziest ones, and believe us when we tell you that they are, indeed, bananas (a journalistic term we reserve only for situations like this). Click on and soon you too can have the rippling physique of Milton Berle, Sally Struthers, Dustin Hoffman’s dad, and many others.
