FUTUREHUMAN® Publishing. Learning from the Athletic Experiences.
Team Director, Karen Rudiger
KAREN RUDIGER, founder of FUTUREHUMAN®. Karen's career path follows a vision of bridging athlete knowledge with science to correct false interpretations and improve fitness education. Karen has been known as a renowned BodyTeacher™ for forty-four years. She is an expert in muscular mechanics, a world-class trainer, and a retired world-class extreme athlete in snow skiing, winter mountaineering, and more. Throughout Karen's career, she has influenced thousands of people by giving exercise training a new definition.
Karen is a fitness pioneer and visionary whose curiosity about the human body began in childhood. In her teenage years, she worked as an illustrator of human cadavers and studied human form as an artist and scientist. She trained her body for sports and strength as a bodybuilder when muscle definition was not fashionable for females. Karen's knowledge of developing muscle mechanics comes from extensive studies. She was ahead of time and sculpted a skeleton from hard wax and attached rubber bands to study each muscle's movement. Karen teamed up with a friend for a gym start-up business, Image of Fitness in NJ. She became known as the 'Slimnastics Instructress' for her extensive anatomy, exercise physiology, and movement background. She taught weightlifting, created a strength-stretch class called 'Stretchercise,' and developed the first calisthenic class with 3-pound hand weights 'Body-Works. The buzz around Karen's ideas and leadership became featured in local and state newspapers, including the Herald News. In her early years, Karen created the Futurehuman® brand name to initially pitch ideas, share research, and exercise training philosophy, which dates back to 1977.
In 1982 the fitness boom snowballed, and Karen developed a program makeover for the Woman's World Health Spa franchisees. She retrained the staff, implemented the first resistance training program for women, introduced weight training, discarded all vintage workout machines (i.e., wooden roller machines and vibrating belt machines), and updated the woman's spa experience with training utilizing weightlifting machines and dumbbells. She visited schools, hospitals, and community recreational centers advocating fitness for everyone.
In 1984 Karen launched the first personal training service in NYC and was published in international newspapers and fashion magazines, i.e., Elle, American Express, and American Express Signature magazine, to name a few. And famed as the Mother of "Personal Training" for launching the first 'pay-per-service' where members could hire an athlete as a trainer at Manhattan's former Jack-La-Lane Vertical Health Club. She has worked with Olympians, models, professional athletes, circus performers, contortionists, dancers, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, people of all different ages and cultures, and A-list movie stars, Liza Minnelli and Mary Tyler-Moore, to name a few. Karen likes to keep her clientele private, and you won't find her dropping names of people without asking for permission.
In 1986, Karen moved from New Jersey to New York City as her popularity grew. The dream she works the hardest for is body education in public schools for every child. Karen is a fitness advocate who volunteered time, worked in communities and shared her ideas with influential politicians, doctors, and scientists. Karen was ahead of her time and discovered the disappointments of trying to bridge with the wrong people. Karen decided to devote her work to developing an exercise training method that she has been working on for three decades, the RudigerMethod. She has aspirations to publish her job one day.
People who know Karen know her as FUTUREHUMAN®, BodyTeacher™, and the Rudiger Method™, a new exercise science paradigm 'for all ages and skill levels. The RudigerMethod™ provides a framework for exercise advancing physical training, therapy, and respiratory conditioning. Today, Karen maintains a small private practice and has aspirations since the pandemic to build an online community where she can openly pass her experience and knowledge on to a younger generation of athletes. Karen enjoys mentoring athletes with plans to collaborate with and produce workshops and seminars.
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