Kranking It.(The Talk of the Town)

First, there was krumping, the spasmic, freestyle hip-hop dance out of South Central L.A. You probably weren't much good at it. It went global anyway. You might have it confused with crunk. That's hip-hop, too. Southern, thumping, also fast. Usher had a hit with it a few years back.

O.K. Now it's time to krank. This is not hip-hop. But it's going to be huge. To experience Kranking[R], you'll need a Krankcycle[R], and, for the moment, one of the few places you can find one in New York is at the Reebok Sports Club/NY, on Columbus Avenue. Avery Washington offers introductory classes. Picture ten Krankcycles in a mirrored room--they're stationary arm bikes, basically, with just a seat, a suspended front wheel, and hand-pedals where handlebars normally go. On a recent morning, half a dozen women were Kranking, hands whirling in front of them, while a mixtape of Danzel, Janet Jackson, and Miguel Migs pounded from Washington's pink-shelled iPod. Washington, an extensively muscled man wearing a red bandanna, and a certified Kranking instructor, was chanting, "Left, synch it, a little faster, come on, this is where you get the cardio, nice and smooth, right on, nice transition, left and right, both arms working together."

Why will Kranking be huge? Because, for a start, Johnny G invented it. The last fitness program he invented was Spinning[R] (stationary bicycling in a group, basically). Spinning went beyond platinum, worldwide, and Johnny G, ne Goldberg, rode the craze, which is still going, for all it was worth. He registered every Spinning-related trademark you can think of, did a licensing deal with Schwinn, and then sold it all, along with the instructor-certification program (a hundred and fifty thousand instructors in eighty countries), in 2005. Kranking is his comeback.

"It will be a slowish rollout," Johnny G said, on the phone from California. "We'll be in forty countries by March. I'd love to have ninety thousand units out there in the next three, four years. Then we'd be helping a lot of people."

Helping people is Johnny G's not-so-secret mission. As he writes in "Kranking[R] Trainer Philosophy," a brief essay for the Krankcycle Web site, "It is my wish that all teachers and students realize their importance as human beings and strive for health, peace, wisdom, and success." Johnny G is fifty-one, a former endurance cyclist, and speaks with a South African accent. There was traffic roaring ...