Like most of her female colleagues at Genmar Holdings Inc., Cindy Warren had every minute of her workday scheduled. Lunch was less a time to decompress than an extension of an already overcommitted day.

Squeezing a fitness regime into her schedule seemed impossible, if not a little selfish.

So the accountant mentally rolled her eyes when Genmar's vice president for operations, Marcia Kull, appeared at her desk last year, suggesting that Warren volunteer for a pilot fitness program that the Melpomene Institute was starting at Genmar. Classes would be held at noon on Fridays for 12 weeks at the downtown Minneapolis office.

"I've got three kids and a dog," wailed Warren, 37. "My life doesn't offer a whole lot of time for an exercise class."

But Warren wanted to lose weight. And she had been feeling sluggish. She cautiously signed up. Today, she says the program changed her life.

"Women need permission to do things for themselves," Kull said. "Exercise is one of those things. It's not like getting your kids up every morning or making dinner every night. It's optional. And optional activities -- especially one that is so personal -- tend to get pushed aside."

Exercise ingenuity

Starting a fitness program is hard enough. Sticking with it is worse. And Susan Hadley, Melpomene's program director, knew that was doubly true for her target audience: inactive working women.

"Cindy is Exhibit A," Hadley said. "Exercise was foreign to her. It wasn't even on her radar screen. Intellectually, she and many other women know that they should be exercising. But they were reticent or shy or were afraid of making fools of themselves."

And, if fitness trainer Sandra Swami had walked into that first session at Genmar looking like some skinny, 22-year-old aerobics nazi, Warren and her co-workers might have bolted from the room. But Swami, a personal trainer at the Sweatshop in St. Paul, was a 40-year-old mother of three with a stocky build.

"People could say, 'Gee, she looks like me,'" Kull said. "She's so real and was a great cheerleader. Little victories were incredibly important. She didn't expect anybody to go run a marathon, but if you climbed an extra flight of stairs a day, that was great."

Flash back to 1997. The Cigna Corp. in Philadelphia had hired Melpomene, a St. Paul nonprofit group known nationally for its research into women's health and fitness, to find out why female employees didn't use the company gym. Like many health-conscious corporations, Cigna had invested a bundle in a slick on-site exercise center. It was gorgeous, cheap and convenient. Men used it. Most women didn't.

They had their reasons, Melpomene learned. Unlike their male colleagues, most female employees didn't have wash-and-dry hair. Wiggling a damp body into pantyhose and slathering makeup on a misty face was miserable.

After years of inactivity, the women were embarrassed to have co-workers, especially men, watch them work out. They knew that their managers became miffed if employees spent too much time away from their desks. Add to that family commitments and long commutes.

"Many were single moms. That was an added disadvantage for them," said Melpomene founder and CEO Judy Mahle Lutter. Flexible work hours didn't help much. Women could start and finish their workdays early but they still had to negotiate -- and pay for -- any extra hours their kids spent in day care.

Taking all that into account, and with a three-year grant from the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota, Hadley and other staff members developed the 12-week program called "Taking Time to Move." Kull promoted the program at Genmar, which was one of four test sites.

The program stresses a healthy diet, stress management and increasing activity levels at work and home.

"Years ago, we were told that everybody should exercise three times a week for 30 minutes," Hadley said. "Until recently, we thought that had to be at one setting. Now we know it can be spread throughout the day."