The Jane Fonda of the Couch Potato Set

She might be called the queen of the Barcolounger Boogaloo. When Jodi Stolove broke her foot several years ago, the energetic Los Angeles dance instructor could not have known it would be the first step in a career move that would take her from the pas de deux to the Danse Derriere.

Chair Dancing, as Stolove, 31, has christened her rhythmic exercise program that is performed in a seated position, has been been featured at recreational centers around Southern California. Kaiser Permanente’s Panorama City medical center is now offering classes through Stolove for patients suffering from arthritis, diabetes, and other ailments that limit their freedom of movement and the corporation is planning to pick up the program for distribution to its other centers nationwide.

The man who produced Jane Fonda’s Workout series thinks Stolove might have hit on something big for an aging population of Americans, who might like to take a seat after years of jogging and the injuries it can cause.

“I could make Chair Dancing into the next popular and profitable exercise fad,” Sidney Galanty wrote recently to Stolove.

Chair Dancing consists of exercises and dance-like movements performed in a chair. Both the legs and arms are used in repetitive movements that simulate playing a trombone, swimming the crawl stroke, flapping the arms like a bird, and tapping the toes. Stolove says the regimen can boost an exerciser’s heart rate to 140 beats per minute, which she explains is high enough to achieve aerobic benefits.

“For me, it has been an absolute miracle. I had become extremely sedentary,” said Cara Mitchell, 59, of North Hollywood. A hundred pounds overweight and suffering from arthritis, Mitchell once needed 20 minutes to climb stairs.

Now, although she must still pause on each step, the trip takes only five minutes and she has lost 40 pounds.

While Stolove says her techniques are used “in both hospital and out-patient programs,” she contends her exercises are not designed solely for the infirm. Executives at Kaiser take breaks from high-level meetings by flailing their arms around, according to her instructions.

Raised in the other Hollywood, the one in Florida, the outgoing Stolove took dance lessons as a child. Though she now stands 5 feet 7 inches and weighs a lithe 122 pounds, when young she was ridiculed for being overweight. But she kept dancing, especially tap and ballet, and eventually shed the pounds. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in the dance program at the University of Michigan, where a fellow ballet student was Madonna, whom Stolove recalls as “kind of a wild character.”

She stayed long enough to obtain degrees in psychology and dance, then headed west to California, where she began teaching ballroom dancing at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Then in 1983, she broke her foot.

“What does a dance teacher do with a broken foot?” she asked in an interview in a San Fernando Valley restaurant, where she demonstrated her techniques to the interested amusement of other diners. “I began out of necessity teaching my class sitting down.”

But she did not turn her serendipitous discovery of dance by the seats of the pants into a vocation until after she was hired by a cruise liner to lead an exercise class during a month-long ocean voyage to Australia. Because it was difficult to stand and exercise on a rocking boat, she sat down once more.

“Each day the class got bigger,” she recalled.

When she returned to the United States she commissioned a friend to write original Chair Dancing music and recorded an audio tape that she still sells. From its beginnings two years ago, the program has grown to the point where there are now a dozen classes each week taught by 10 teachers at synagogues, at homes for the elderly, and at the hospital.

She has even led some of Kaiser’s top executives, including the heads of medical departments. “I always ask people to play,” she said. “I thought they would stare at me like I was from another planet.”

Instead, the executives in three-piece suits broke up in laughter and joined right in.

The contract with Kaiser could be a big break for her growing business, she said. The medical corporation has even allocated $40,000 to shoot a videotape of the 45-minute exercise program. If Galanty is right, she could even become the Jane Fonda of the sofa set.

Mei-Ling Scwartz, the administrator of the Health Education department at Kaiser’s Panorama City facility, extols the program for its simplicity and its application for people with all sorts of medical problems.

“You can get aerobic activities without going to a gym,” she said.

“All you need is your body and your chair.”

Kaiser offers a six-week series of classes at its Freedom From Fat center. Among the most impressed by the results is Mitchell, the woman with arthritis, high blood pressure and a weight problem.

She wanted to exercise but could not leap around in a shiny leotard. Despite her weight, she had always looked younger than her years, but felt “like a woman of 80.” Since exercising every night, her tendinitis has eased and her joints have loosened. “Now my insides are beginning to feel like my outside,” she said.