Katrina Barillova’s Elite Forces Workout
INTERNET COVERAGE

Videobusiness.com	Friday, September 12, 2003
It's fitness, should you choose to accept it	by Mike Barnes

Woman uses secret agent skills in a new line of workout videos.

A woman trained in her native Czechoslovakia to become a secret agent (seriously) is coming out with a new line of fitness videos that adds a touch of role-playing, movie-style entertainment.

Katrina Barillova, 30, and her company, Why Not? Entertainment, are negotiating With potential distributors With the help Of home video veteran Harold Weitzberg, who has supplied marketing expertise for the fitness line from Jane Fonda and others. He has also worked as an executive with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's Dualstar Entertainment.

Barillova said it cost $500,000 to make the initial three Elite Forces: Rapid Readiness Workout DVDs and VHS tapes. The first is expected to hit stores in January. (It has been available on Amazon.com since June.)

Each workout begins with Barillova encountering trouble in the guise of a secret agent or defenseless victim. She uses punches and kicks to take out her attacker, then leads 45-minute workouts using those skills (as in a shadowboxing routine).

"We make it like a mission, where you feel like you are part of the secret agent team," she said.

Viewers can identify which muscles are being worked through a 3D "Muscle Activity Sensor Scan" in the corner of the screen.

The DVDs include director's commentary, behind-the-scenes looks at the production and an option to omit or combine voiceovers and music.

The statuesque Barillova, who has posed for Playboy magazine, has been called a Czech Femme Nikita. Trained in the martial arts (not to mention weapons use, evasive driving and skydiving), she said her workouts stress endurance, precision, power and the small muscles. You can't be musclebound when you're posing as a model and you're really a spy, after all.