Written by: Gan Chee Kiam (Founder of Gym N Care, Diploma in Journalism)

31-21-2020

A Physical Exercise Full of Fun

Fit Ball has become very popular in Malaysia due to its efficiency in physical exercise, athletic training, physiotherapy and back care. Most significantly it is a tool full of fun to the user during exercise.

But little do people know about the history of Fit Ball and how it made its way into Malaysia and become such a popular product both in therapeutic and fitness fields.

As the pioneer, we would like to bring you a brief walk through the development of Fit Ball in Malaysia.

A brief history of exercise ball

In 1950s, Mr and Mrs Bobath using big ball to treat Cerebral Palsy children and received good results. The method was developed in England and is widespread throughout the world nowadays.

Swiss Doctor Elsbeth Kong and English Physiotherapist Mary Quinton introduce Bobath big ball method into Switzerland in 1958. 

In 1963 big balls of superb quality made by Aquilino Cosani were introduced into Switzerland and the big Italian balls became very popular among physiotherapeutic field in Switzerland and got the nickname “Swiss Ball”, later these balls begin to spread widely into Europe and the USA and now it is known as gym ball, exercise ball, fitness ball etc.

The company Ledraplastic SpA runs by the Cosani family started to introduce these big balls made in diameters of 55cm, 65cm and 75cm, with the name of Fit Ball to fitness fields in 1992 and was officially registered as a trademark. Fit Ball® concept became the first fitness activity that successfully imported from Europe to the USA.

In 1996, Reebok Malaysia firstly introduced Fit Ball into Malaysia and two years later Gym N Care was officially authorized as the sole distributor of Fit Ball in both Malaysia and Singapore, and the outstanding aerobic pioneer of Malaysia, who was also the Reebok Master Trainer Sim Lee was appointed the Master Trainer of Fit Ball.

In 2001, Gym N Care was officially authorized as the sole distributor of Fit Ball in South East Asia.

Since authorized the distributor of Fit Ball in 1998, Gym N Care carried out aerobic presentations in shopping malls, interviewed by local newspapers, magazines and televisions to make it known to the public. Later when Fit Ball became popular, we organised courses such as Ball Gym Kiddy to train Kindergarten teachers the use of the ball for children, Fit Ball Instructor Course for personal trainers and physiotherapists.

With the effort from Gym N Care, these big balls which used to be unfamiliar among Malaysians are now becoming general fitness and wellness equipment.  Attracted by its popularity, more and more of other gym ball brands started to enter the market and together we build an active ball market in Malaysia that benefits both the buyers and sellers.

Moving towards new era with Fit Ball

All these years, we have been keeping ourselves up to be a reliable company that provides the best products and services we could to our customers, but while stepping towards the end of 2020, we found that to be reliable alone is not enough to stand up well in this Information Age. Although we found ourselves to have reliased the importance of this changes a bit too late, we still value reliability as our top priority but decided to move into 2021 in a new appearance.

We have updated our website to make it user-friendly to users of all screen sizes and we have created an e-commerce platform for our customers who either would like to buy directly online or would like to visit our showrooms personally after browsing through the website.

For Fit Ball, in order to keep up with the pace, we started the blog with this article that introduce a bit of its history and background. Than later we shall follow up with more blogs and videos about the usage and benefit of Fit Ball.

Fit Ball is a simple exercise tool that can provide the most variety of exercises. You can easily sort out more than a hundred available exercises on the ball and that is the reason why Fit Ball is being used in many fields including fitness, pilates, yoga, physiotherapy, pre and post natal, chiropractic, back care and many more.

We wish those thousands of customers who have bought Fit Ball from us during these 20 long years have been enjoying exercise on it,  as well as been benefited from it.

We hereby wish you a Happy and Healthy New Year.