get a grip; The solution to improving your workout could be in the palm of your hand.

Byline: Robert Sullivan

The trend in fitness right now is a kind of retrenching. This is not to say that we won't see the continued proliferation of "new and improved" exercise regimens and devices that promise to "boost your burn," so to speak-inventions that will replace, for example, the giant, partially ribbed translucent exercise balls that I see people toting down the streets of Manhattan like obedient Teletubbies. But, as I recently discovered, most personal trainers will tell you that taking your workout to the next level is less about changing what you do and more about changing how you do it. And, thankfully, the how turns out to be pretty basic.

My revelation started on a jog a little while ago. I was experiencing many of the things that I've come to expect and accept while running-creakiness, occasional knee pain, and a general feeling that I am not so much running a la the ancient Greeks, who, granted, ran nude, as running a la giant Amazonian sloths, creatures that are sometimes mistaken for hairy Bigfoot-type monsters and are, needless to say, plodding. As luck would have it, it was around this time that I happened to talk to world-class discus thrower Suzy Powell, who happened to mention that she had been able to significantly improve her throw-we're talking yards and yards-by merely changing the way she held her hands.

Inspired by the idea that something so simple could help Powell, I got in touch with the man behind her new technique, Stephen Tamaribuchi. The 53-year-old Shiatsu practitioner/consultant and repetitive strain injury expert invented a little device that you have most likely never heard of, and most likely doubt could ever work-the e3 fitness grip. The theory goes something like this: Simply by holding these ski pole-handle-like grips, you correct your alignment and, without further thought or effort or anything, improve the way your body functions. "People probably still think I'm nuts," Tamaribuchi says.

Tamaribuchi didn't grow up dreaming about grips. He imagined becoming an artist, and in the seventies, he studied under Joseph Raffael, the great California painter. He even had a job lined up to teach art in a California public school, but the moment he graduated from college, the arts programs were cut and his job evaporated.

But it was actually the bad luck he had before losing his job that turned Tamaribuchi on to nontraditional physical therapy. In high school, he broke his neck playing football. "I showed up for six practices with a broken neck, and everybody thought it was a pinched nerve," he recalls. After college, he was hit broadside by a bus while in a sports car. And as if that weren't enough, he's endured several injuries since, so many that you'd never believe it if you saw him in his Sacramento office today. "I play golf, I play tennis," he says.

o avoid the surgeries his doctors were recommending to treat his various ailments, he turned to Eastern medicine, recalling the Shiatsu and acupressure that his old kung-fu teacher had used on injuries. Nontraditional treatment was so effective that he began to study ...