Anatomy of a Motion

Computer programmer Gideon Ariel's

digitalizing screen shous athletes hou'

to shatter world records  BvPaulBernstein

YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT YOU HAD EVERYTHING you would ever need to get in shape-your polypropylene knit sweatsuit, your glow-in-the-dark, perforated, nylon-and-mesh running shoes with the ankle stabilizers and podiatrist-approved insoles, your battery-powered, anti-dog safety stick with special compartment for keys and ID, your predigested aloe vera drink and your high potency vitamins with bioflavinoids all amino-acid chelated, whatever that means.

And then along comes Gideon Ariel to tell you it's not enough. What's worse, he has the computer print-outs to prove it.

Gideon Ariel is a computer whiz and former Olympic discus thrower who can tell you how much farther you could hit a golf ball if you dropped your left shoulder two inches. He can tell a high school swimming champ not to waste five years training for the Olympics because his body build would never allow him to swim .fast enough. He told Olympic shot-putter Terry Albritton to change the position of his front leg, a month later, Albritton broke the world record. Discus thrower Mac Wilkins, also following Ariel's advice, broke a world record, too-by six feet. Ariel started giving pointers to the U.S. Olympic women's volleyball team two years ago when they were 45th in the world. Now they are in the top three, and they have moved in next door to his southern California research center fulltime.

How does Ariel know so much? Give the credit to the computer program he worked out over some 10,000 hours. He can take a high-speed film of a race horse, a baseball pitcher or a longdistance runner, transfer it frame-by-frame to a computer screen, turn the image around to look at it from above, below or anywhere

in between, and calculate the physical forces at work on any joint or limb. Besides giving advice to athletes, he has been using his computer to turn out one new exercise toy after another. The latest is a running shoe with a computer chip in the heel. Once a week, you take out the chip, stick it in your home computer, and get a full report on how far you ran, how fast, how efficiently, how many calories you burned, how much force you exerted on your knees, ankles and back and how much progress you have made since last week. Then you get on another of his inventions, a computerized weight machine Wilson Sporting Goods has agreed to market. Instead of depending on some over-muscled, over-sexed college kid to tell you how much weight you need on the Nautilus machine, you will be able to slip your personal diskette into the weight machine and get a personalized prescription automatically-exactly the force best suited to you, based on your physical characteristics, your goals and your exercise history.

If you think Ariel's computer is just the thing to improve your golf swing, you're probably right-if you happen to have a spare $5,300 lying around. It may sound like a lot, but Ariel suggests that, playing for $500 a hole the next time out, you could easily recoup the investment.

IT's NOT EASY TO FIND Gideon Ariel. YOU HAVE to get off the freeway at an Orange County shopping mall and drive past the McDonalds and the Thriftys and the Alpha Betas until even the tract houses start to disappear. You find yourself in the middle of the kind of open land you thought no longer existed in southern

PASSAGES 1982