The Bottom Line on Exercise

even as Jane Fonda and other gurus of sweat were imprinting their leotarded images on the national consciousness, even as the home fitness business was beginning to rival the arms industry in annual sales, even as joggers were shouldering automobiles off the roads, even as more and more seemingly sane people engaged in such seemingly masochistic pursuits as the Ironman Trithlon, the rumblings were starting: Does this stuff really do any good?

And then, in the summer of 1984, Jim Fixx was struck down by a heart attack while jogging along a vermont byway. Fixx, author of The Complete Book of Running, was the man who had done the most to spread the ambulatory Gospel, and it had done him in. This was akin to Dr. Ruth's growing hair on her palms, to Bill Cosby's choking to death on a spoonful of Jell-O pudding.

Across America, one could hear the sound of jogging shoes being flung into the trash. Henry A. Solomon, M.D., wrote a book called The Exercise Myth, which warned, "Almost nothing you have been told about the benefits of exercise is true." Magazines ran articles with titles such as "Exercise: A Matter of Life or Death?," "Why Joggers Are Running Scared," "How Much Exercise Is Too Much?," "The Limits of Exercise," "Too Much of a Good Thing" and---summing up the backlash--- "Is Exercise Overrated?"

Is it? It depends on who's doing the rating. Everyone seems to agree that, all things being equal, exercise probably is better for you than no exercise; but beyond that, there's little certainty. Absolutes are in especially short supply when it comes to long-term effects: The masses simply haven't been doing this stuff long enough to enable researchers to judge its impact on life expectancy. Still, some facts are known.

The bad news

Fixx's death was a fluke. One recent study of cardiac patients found that the incidence of heart attack during exercise is the same as or less than its incidence in people "crossing the street, lying in bed or driving a car." Another calculated that Americans suffer only one death per 396,000 hours of jogging. Fixx had a family history of heart disease and had neglected his condition. For him, exertion was a trigger for a heart attack, not a cause.

However, it's now commonly agreed that exercise holds more perils than were perceived in the initial fervor of the fitness boom. Among the more obvious is wear and tear on bones and muscles. Half a century ago, Dr. Hans Selye of Montreal's McGill University subjected a group of rats to physical stress. He let some of them recover; they grew stronger. The rest were put through their paces again and they became weaker.

It's the same with humans. When you have an exhausting (concluded on page 180) Exercise (continued from page 112) workout, some muscle fibers may become worn, and it may take at least 48 hours for them to heal. Noted sports doctor Gabe Mirkin recently cautioned, "Your injury rate drastically shoots up when you exercise more than three times a week." Few fitness fanatics can restrain themselves that long, which is one reason there are an estimate 30,000,000 sports injuries a year.

Another reason is poor coaching, particularly hazardous in the heavy-metal Nautilus era. "I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits," says Jay Shafran, a former trainer at New York's one-on-one Sports Training Institute who runs people like Ed Bradley and Sigourney Weaver through their paces. "No states require certification for instructors, and few clubs do. How can they get highly qualified people when they're paying only minimum wage? In New York, clubs get out-of-work dancers or actors, people with nothing else to do."

Besides not overdoing it and getting training advice from someone who knows what he's talking about, there's one more thing to remember if you want to avoid exercise-induced injuries. "To get into shape, you have to be in reasonably good shape," says Dr. James A. Nicholas of New York's Lenox Hill Hospital Institute of Sports Medicine. "Otherwise, your susceptibility to injury goes way up. Say your legs are weak. Running puts a lot of stress on your body." Flexibility, cardiovascular efficiency and strength should all be relatively high before you start a rigorous training program, Dr. Nicholas cautions; he recommends swimming and walking as good, no-risk ways to build up all three.

Finally, a recent study at the Harvard Medical School found that when strenuous exercise is stopped abruptly, the level of certain hormones in the blood rises dramatically; these constrict blood vessels and raise the pulse rate, which can lead to a potentially fatal irregular heartbeat. After working out, cool down gradually.

The good news

People who exercise have always known that it makes them feel good. Ever since the days of Dr. Selye, scientists have been explaining that phenomenon with more research. Various studies have shown that working out is good for blood-sugar control, sexual performance, the immune system, the circulatory system, breaking down blood clots, reducing stress and, of course, losing weight and gaining muscle.

The list of benefits continues to grow. According to a study recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, people with "low levels of physical fitness" are much more likely to develop hypertension than are "highly fit persons." In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Norman M. Kaplan of the University of Texas Health Center in Dallas observed that "the study provides some suggestive evidence that physical fitness provides protection against the development of hypertension.... Like my mother's chicken soup, regular isotonic exercise should not hurt.... Joggers may even live longer."

It now appears certain that they do. Current research is focusing on the ability of exercise to help forestall or even prevent heart disease---the biggest killer around---and it looks pretty good. A joint Harvard-Stanford study (released, ironically, the week after Fixx's death) found that sedentary men were more than twice as likely as active ones to die from cardiovascular disease and gave up the ghost an average of four to five years earlier. Subsequent studies have bolstered those findings.

Regular and habitual exercise seems to have a protective effect on the heart and the cardiovascular system. And studies have indicated that vigorous exercise increases the level in the blood stream of high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.) cholesterol, which slows the build-up of atherosclerosis in the blood vessels.

The Consensus

The really good news is that you don't have to go through as much hell as everybody used to think to get all these benefits. An integral part of the fitness booms was a self-flagellating "no pain, no gain" mentality. Current thinking is more civilized.

Exercising strenuously more than three or four times a week can be harmful, and you're probably not giving anything up by limiting yourself. To experience the benefits of working out, men apparently must burn just 2000 extra calories a week, which they can do by playing an hour of racket sports every other day.

Kenneth Cooper, the doctor who coined and popularized the term aerobics, has probably made the most dramatic flip of all. Dr. Cooper now says that walking three miles in 45 minutes, five times a week, is all the aerobics conditioning anybody needs. Exercise more than that, he said recently, and "you are running for something other than fitness."

The bottom line

Now that we are beginning to realize so precisely what is good for us and how much of it is necessary, you'd think that we'd be doing it. You'd be wrong.

Despite all the talk of the fitness boom, this country is in woeful shape. A study released this spring by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that 80 to 90 percent of all Americans don't get enough exercise. A little less than a third of American men and more than a third of women are obese---just as they were a decade ago. According to a recent poll, swimming is the country's most popular sport, but it's practiced by just 41 percent of the population. In second place is the less-than-exhausting ordeal that goes by the name of fishing.

The situation among kids is particularly depressing. The Amateur Athletic Union recently reported that a mere 36 percent of U.S. youngsters meet its standards for various exercises; a few years ago, the figure was 42 percent. Kids spend an average of 13 hours a week in sports and other exercise (much of that time taken up in standing motionless in right field). That's only a third or less of the time they spend watching TV and playing video games.

This is not to suggest that the fitness boom is merely a media creation. Just look at the bottom line. The home-exercise-equipment industry, which passed the onebillion-dollar mark in annual sales in 1984, is growing at a 20 percent clip; not far behind is the fitness-apparel industry. Each year sees a new fashionable device---at the moment, the rowing machine, with sales increasing more than 100 percent in each of the past two years. Each month sees a new fashionable exercise (have you heard about running backward, or retro running, as it's called?). And each week sees a new expensive exercise toy (for bored stationary cyclists, a 60-minute video tape that sells for $50 and simulates a cycle tour of Yellowstone National Park).

Nor are fitness centers suffering because of the home-equipment trend. Singles health clubs such as New York's Vertical Club ($750 for initiation, $60 monthly membership fee) have no trouble filling aerobics-dance classes. Even more pricey are one-on-one fitness centers, such as New York's Sports Training Institute ($20 a session), and the ultimate, personal trainers. They're not hurting, either.

Who's doing all this stuff? It's not kids, and it's probably not old people or poor people. That leaves---you got it---Yuppies.

The fitness boom is becoming the sole property of the young urban professionals. The only question that's left is, Will they stick with it as they become middle-aged Mauppies and senile Suppies? It says here that they will. This is a generation for which self-preservation, and self-perpetuation, is paramount; it has embraced fitness less because it is "in" than because it works. Author James K. Glassman, recently musing on the same issues, put the explication for exertion well: "Yuppies don't want to die; they want to keep their options open as long as they can."

With the first of the crew just reaching 40, there's a lot of option keeping left to go before the Yuppies hit the wall.

" 'No states require certification for instructors ... clubs get out-of-work dancers or actors.' "