Body Break products range from fitness equipment available through their Web site and on the Shopping Channel, to Body Break mattresses at Sears and athletic shoes at Wal-Mart.

Body Break is also involved with a Markham, Ont., restaurant called Fire and Ice that will soon open a second outlet and will be called the Body Break Grill.

The www.bodybreak.com Web site inspires more than 100 daily emails, 80 per cent of which are health-related. People tell Body Break how they’ve been teased at school and send in their “fat” pictures. “Their stories are very touching and it’s rewarding that people have so much
faith in us,” says Johnson.

“Keep Fit and Have Fun” – the ubiquitous Body Break motto was sparked by their own approach to fitness. “If it’s not fun, you’re far less likely to get off the couch,” says Johnson, a Canadian who played baseball for the University of Colorado and represented Canada in the World Championships in Japan. Although drafted in the seventh round by Cincinnati, he finished his business degree instead.

He’s an advanced golfer, skier and weightlifter, who cycles and plays basketball in his spare time. McLeod, a four-time national and seven-time provincial hurdle champion, also represented Canada at international competitions such as the World Cup, Commonwealth Games and Pacific Conference. Like Johnson, she now cycles, golfs, lifts weights, inline skates and plays basketball and tennis.

Their athletic backgrounds, combined with their respective TV careers, gave them a seemingly ideal starting point. Johnson had worked as an actor and had almost accepted a position as a network sportscaster. McLeod had been the resident fitness expert for several local cable shows and had been on-air with CityTV.

While McLeod had never even contemplated being an entrepreneur, Johnson saw it as an extension of the way he’d always worked. “I didn’t eat unless I sold,” remembers Johnson, who had just quit an eight-year commitment to selling mainframe computers.

While watching CNN, the pair saw “Body by Jake,” a series of vignettes disguised as fitness instruction. “It got us thinking,” says Johnson. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a man and woman promoting fitness as equals. But beyond that, we didn’t actually think about it. We had an idea and faith in each other.”

Today, Johnson realizes his sales background was the key to their success. He was used to people saying “no” to him 99 out of 100 times. “Without all the rejection I’d faced in sales, I would have been completely demoralized by the initial reaction to Body Break,” says Johnson.

McLeod could never understand how or why Johnson could come away from a meeting brimming with excitement after being turned down yet again. “They’d say no, but they’d also tell me they’d never seen anything like it before,” explains Johnson.

Even when broadcasters told them that although it was 1988, the public still wasn’t ready to see an “integrated” pair onscreen, Johnson saw it as an opportunity rather than as a sign they should quit. “I figured there had be to someone who would see the black/white, man/woman thing in a positive light,” says Johnson.

In fact, government, in the form of Participaction, liked them so much that Body Break, after being rejected by more than 40 organizations, had its first contract six weeks later. At that point, McLeod quit her job at a life insurance firm. “Participaction was the birth of Body Break. It really enhanced our professional credibility,” says Johnson.

For years, the public didn’t know that Johnson and McLeod were a real-life couple, although they hadn’t planned to keep it a secret. “Our message was ‘Keep Fit and Have Fun’ not ‘Dating is Great and We’re So in Love’,” says Johnson.

While Johnson doesn’t believe in asking personal questions, many Canadians have no such inhibitions. “Are you together? We think you should get married!” is but one variation on that theme.

Overwhelmingly accepted as a couple, there have been exceptions in the form of slurs and even death threats. For a variety of reasons, Johnson is reluctant to draw attention to such reactions and readers can only guess at how frightening and hurtful they must be.

“I’d rather change things through kindness and a focus on the positive,” says Johnson, who has gradually included more women, people of colour and people with disabilities in Body Break’s videos. “I understand what it is to be a minority,” says Johnson. “We all need to see ourselves reflected in the media and we’ve had hundreds of emails thanking us for including them.”

Johnson and McLeod continue to work from home as a company of two, but over the years, home has grown to reflect their success. They now have the luxury of their dedicated and separate home offices and schedules that maximize their time with Sierra.

As delighted as they are with their daughter, these parents admit that if Sierra had appeared in the late 1980s or early 1990s, Body Break probably wouldn’t be what it is today. They wouldn’t have been able to put in those 15- and 16-hour days for the first five or six years. They now spend so much time with her, “she’ll have a really screwed-up vision of what parents do,” chuckles Johnson. “She’ll think that all parents hang out at home with their kids all day. I’d like to say we planned everything because it makes us sound incredibly smart, but we didn’t plan a thing.”