"Are health clubs risky?" "How fit is your fitness instructor?" "Is exercise harmful to your health?" These are a few of the many newspaper headlines that have appeared in recent years.
For people like myself who grew up in America during the 1940's and 1950's, today's emphasis on fitness came as quite a surprise. In those days, most people hated exercising. By the time we got to high school, we spent far more time in a car than on our feet, and our interest in athletics consisted mainly of watching football and baseball on TV.
About forty years ago, Air Force doctor Kenneth H. Cooper began conducting tests on airmen to learn more about cardiovascular capacity. He measured their ability to absorb oxygen, to distribute it to different parts of the body, and convert it, along with food, into energy.
Dr. Cooper's pioneering work, and his widely read books on aerobics, made a major contribution to our understanding of how the body functions. Further, he alerted millions to the need for more physical exercise in their lives.
But as so often happens with new discoveries, heavy commercial promotion set in and the aerobic conditioning processes he developed have not always been wisely used. Sometimes, we have been misled into confusing aerobic capacity, which almost exclusively emphasizes the operation of the cardiovascular system with the much broader concept of total fitness.
What should we expect from a fitness program? I believe it is the ability to carry out our daily activities, including sports and other physically demanding tasks, in an enjoyable, easy, and efficient way. It should include the ability to cope with unanticipated crises calmly and effectively and the ability to get a good night's sleep so that we can awake refreshed and alert the next morning.
Our bodies, after all, are a lot more than heart, lungs and blood vessels. Aerobic capacity is just one of many important indicators of good health. The ability to pass an aerobics test doesn't in any way guarantee that you can go through life without pain, discomfort and fatigue.
A large part of the problem is that exercise is frequently carried out in a manner which fails to take account of the way we, as individuals, actually use our bodies. In fact, some programs encourage an unconscious exaggeration of our worst habits of movement. You can see this for yourself the next time you watch a group of joggers or an aerobics class. Chances are many of the people you see will look awkward and uncomfortable, with excess tension and strain showing in their faces and in their bodies.
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