‘Time Machine’ Finds Believers in Lost Exercise Souls : “We have no different a problem than Columbus had saying the world was round when everybody knew it was flat.”

He calls it a time machine.

Technically it’s a gleaming steel-framed exercise machine that retails for an energetic $10,400, but Bruce Thompson, its manufacturer and disciple, promises that if you use it just four minutes a day it will give you the equivalent of a 45-minute workout.

Trainers furrow their brows in skepticism, cardiologists say they doubt it, magazines and newspapers love to mock it. But at least 200 people believed enough to buy it in the last 2 1/2 years. And five more are cooling their heels on a waiting list. The Range of Motion machine (ROM machine for short), he says, has made its way into the house of a certain Laker Girl-turned-pop star and has been snapped up by a rock star or two.

But the true target customers are the lost exercise souls, the health club no-shows, the treadmill owners whose main exercise consists of moving the equipment from the living room to the garage. They are disheartened, disillusioned and busy. Also rich.

Most of Thompson’s customers “have considerable disposable income or assets, without question,” he said.

Still, Thompson and Alf Temme, his partner in the company they have named ROM--The Time Machine, insist that they are after just regular folks.

“What we’re talking about are average people,” Thompson said. “Here’s a new way to solve the biggest problem on the planet Earth: why people don’t work out. And that is: no time, whether perceived or real.”

The price, however, puts the ROM machine off the charts. A top-of-the-line stationary bike costs $2,000. It also puts Thompson’s machine in a category all its own. “You wouldn’t even be here talking to me if it cost $29.95,” he said, noting that the four months of engineering the flywheel and the other parts jack up the price.

Does it work?

“I can tell you there’s probably no benefit to the cardiovascular system,” said cardiologist Antoine Hage, director of UCLA’s cardiovascular rehabilitation clinic, who said he does not have any experience with the machine. “Most studies have shown brief exercises are worthless and sometimes harmful. You’re asking your heart to perform from a base line to a maximum level in a very short period of time.”

But there is that promise of a short workout. “It appealed to me because of the four minutes a day,” said Mollie Dunlap, a 34-year-old attorney with two young children. “I have a 1 1/2-year-old and a 3 1/2-year-old and I’ve constantly got someone on my hip. . . . Being the mother of two little guys, that kind of convenience really appealed to me and I was fascinated.”

Her verdict, after using it for two weeks on a trial basis: “I feel stronger. I feel like I’m standing up straighter.”

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Thompson, a lanky, 6-foot-4, 52-year-old former competitive volleyball player who grew up in Sherman Oaks and has a house in Marina del Rey, carries himself like the typical low-key exercise guru for the mid-’90s. “I know, it sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?” he ruefully tells prospective customers. Ensconced in the Van Nuys shop of his partner’s Nordic Sauna business, he demonstrates how the ROM machine works.

In his shorts and clogs, he is the opposite of his machine, which is flamboyant in price, promise and looks. With its steel flywheel so polished that it reflects like a mirror and its oversized curves, it has the lines of a Renaissance-era flying machine.

“People have said it looks like something Leonardo da Vinci would have designed,” Thompson said. (The machine was designed by Hawaii-based artist John Pitre.)

Thompson contends that the machine gives such a superior workout because it works 55% of your muscle mass (more than the usual exercise machine). Provided you work at a reasonably hard level, the machine supposedly gives the equivalent cardiovascular workout (as measured by oxygen output per kilogram of body weight) as running a mile in eight minutes, or walking three miles in 45 minutes, or swimming 700 yards in 15 minutes.

Let’s talk about what it does not promise: It will not make you lose weight, turn you into a triathlete or develop the muscles of a Mr. or Ms. Olympia. What it will give you, said Thompson, is “a good workout with adequate cardiovascular benefits. It will build good functional lean muscle mass and promote flexibility in four minutes a day.”

Right. We pause here for a word from our cardiovascular experts: “People call me about these things all the time. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in the Land of Oz,” said cardiologist Paul Thompson, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “I bring a high degree of skepticism to the table. I apologize to him because I haven’t seen the machine.” But Thompson finds the four-minute workout claim hard to believe.

Before anyone can bash his machine in print, he insists that they work out on it.

So here are my notes from the test drive.

OK, it is difficult. Thompson adjusted the resistance for my level of training ability so that four minutes on the upper body station left me sweating. Four minutes on the lower body station left me counting down the seconds on the computerized clock. Ergonomically well-designed, the machine caused me no nagging pains or aches. But do I believe four--even eight--minutes on the machine would replace 30 minutes on my Windracer? Not in this lifetime.

Thompson is used to dealing with his critics. He said everyone brings their own preconceptions to the machine.

As he is fond of saying: “We have no different a problem than Columbus had saying the world was round when everybody knew it was flat.”