Fitness Without the Flaws
Several years ago I watched a man kill himself in the name of fitness. I was living on Manhattan's lower West Side at the time and, morning and evening, I couldn't fail to notice the grueling exercise program of one of my neighbors. Throughout nine months of a bone-chilling New York winter, a regenerating spring and a hot, sultry summer, he jogged through city streets, congested with people, cars and pollutants. I heard from his wife that he had suffered a mild heart attack two years before, and after recovering decided to exercise regularly. He had read somewhere that jogging would keep him fit.
What fascinated me most about his exercise regimen was how uncomfortable he looked. Almost running, rather than jogging, his movements has a frantic and desperate quality to them. His head was pulled tightly back on his neck and his shoulders were raised, as though he carried an enormous burden. His fists were clenched rigidly at each side, and he always wore a painful expression on his face.
It was one morning during the second winter of his program that he collapsed while jogging and died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital - he had suffered a massive coronary.
After what had happened to my neighbor, I was particularly struck a few weeks later by an item in the local community paper. A middle-aged fitness buff, who was a regular at the neighborhood gym, had begun shoveling his car out of a snowdrift. Ten minutes later he was dead of a heart attack.
Why, I wondered, had these two men, who apparently were doing all the right things, been betrayed by their bodies? This is the kind of question which today is being voiced with increasing frequency. Cases proliferate of exercise leading to injury - and even death - instead of health and well-being. More and more fitness participants are asking if there are safe - and unsafe - ways to get fit.
What we really need is a completely different approach to fitness, one which shifts the emphasis away from today's almost total preoccupation with the quantity of exertion. It isn't only the number of miles run, the time spent doing aerobic exercises, or the heaviness of the weights lifted that matters. Far more important is the quality of our movements - our balance and coordination and our ease of breathing. The crucial importance of the way we use our bodies is beginning to be recognized in other fields. Take, for example, our understanding of back pain.
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