The exercise products market is heating up! One clear evidence is that even Walgreens is joining the bandwagon.Perhaps the last place a fitness buff would shop for exercise machines is Walgreen Co., the country's largest drugstore chain.

But click onto Walgreens.com, and you'll find listed under merchandise "as seen on TV" in the "Household and Hardware" section a $99.99 fitness bike, a $159.99 rowing machine and a $629 Elliptical trainer, among other machines.

The Deerfield-based drugstore giant is in the enviable position of benefiting from baby boomers' desire to stay young and healthy, and their need for more drugs as they age.

President Jeff Rein predicted that Walgreen will evolve in the next 10 years into what he called the "preservation" business.

"As we baby boomers age, I see our desires changing from acquiring stuff to staying healthy and finding solutions that make life easier and more enjoyable," Rein told shareholders at a recent annual meeting.

Here’s a short inventory of exercise products:

Exercise/Equipment Mats
Bike/Stepper Mat
Treadmill Mat
Fitness/Aerobics Mat
6-Piece Equipment Mat
Clear Equipment Mat
Pilates Mat
Exercise Ball
Core Exercise Ball
Workout Gloves
Heart Rate Monitor-Profile
Heart Rate Monitor-Imp12
The Whale Exercise Bench
Inversion Table
Pilates Power Ring
Pilates Band
Resistance Tubes
Gymnastics products
Yoga Products
Other Products

A typical store specializing in exercise products would have a dizzying inventory like http://www.comforthouse.com/comfort/ex1.html.

If all this array of exercise products doesn’t strike you as an indication of a very lucrative and healthy market, we don’t know what you’re thinking! Throw in the conundrum the soaring prices of these exercise products and the fact that they vary with widely from one online store to another and from one brick-and-mortar store to another—and you will realize how very important it is to shop around before you open your wallet!

Truly, the media and advertising have been pretty effective in selling the importance of a sexy, lean body in infomercials and the movies. And judging from the way things are showing, there’s no end in sight for the robust exercise products economy. Consider this very popular news:

The news that half of the total population of the United Sates is obese, trumpeted by no less than CNN, hit the ground like a tsunami. Craig Lambert in his article The Way We Eat Now in Harvard magazine seconds the motion: "Many foreigners already view Americans as rich, greedy over-consumers, stuffing themselves with far more than their share of the planet's resources, and obese American travelers waddling through international airports and hotel lobbies only reinforce that image."

Two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and half of these are obese. (Overweight means having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or greater, obese, 30 or greater." To calculate BMI, take the square of your height in inches and then divide your weight, in pounds, by that number; then multiply the result by 703. You can do the calculations on-line at http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm.

Evidently, the sequel to this obesity phenomenon is the astronomical rise in gym memberships, as well as a confusing strain of diet fads mutating like bacteria. Ironically, despite the Abs and the Carbs images portrayed ever so repetitively on our television sets during sitcoms and soap operas, the obesity phenomenon persists. It is a truly stubborn virus, immune even to the Baywatch culture!

And for as long as this situation remains, exercise products will continue to multiply and rise in prices. Luckily, the American Council on Exercise (ACE) exists! ACE, the largest nonprofit fitness certifying organization in the world, recently called upon more than 3,000 ACE-certified fitness professionals across the country to get their take on the best (and worst) exercise essentials for under $20. To save yourself from the tyranny of exercise products manufacturers, go to http://www.acefitness.org/media/media_display.cfm?NewsID=15.

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