The Fitness Myth

In the Rich, winy days of heretofore, when the measure of envied achievement passed from Schweitzer to Schwarzenegger, the best that could be said of exercise was that it wouldn't affect your mind. Today, you'd better hope that it does.

For something dramatic is happening along the jogging paths and in the gyms of America. Exercise is losing its cachet. For years, the hype and hustle grew so remorselessly that exercise reached the point where it was using us; we weren't using it. Exercise became not a pastime but a tyranny, not a means to an end but an end in itself. It demanded not reality but an unswerving, unthinking fealty. And the faithful complied: They scooped up the latest exercise gear peddled by Madison Avenue; they jumped and pumped at noontime aerobics class; they banged their way along the indoor track; they sweated and grunted to the latest tapes. And, lo, it was good.

But was it healthy? Of course it was! It was exercise! And, until recently, few questioned its salutary effect. Few asked, Why run a marathon without building the strength to raise your own kid over your head? Why develop the strength to lift boxcars while having so little stamina that carrying a letter to the mailbox caused heavy breathing? An almost Nazilike belief in the virtues of exercise prevailed. For more than a generation, after all, the Gallup Poll had tracked the percentage of American adults into exercise as it rose from 24 (in 1961) to 49 (in 1984). Those were the glory years, when exercise was taken up by millions of people who'd previously believed that life should never have a dull moment, or at least a dry one. It was a conversion by immersion. In sweat.

Then something happened. At least, it did if you looked close enough. In 1985, the Gallup Poll reported that the percentage of adult Americans committed to exercise had dropped to 44, the first drop in a generation. Perhaps it was a statistical anomaly. But then the National Sporting Goods Association, which had triumphantly tracked the rise in sales of exercise-related (continued on page 140) The Fitness Myth (continued from page 82) equipment and clothing (everything from designer jockstraps to special bras), reported that, in 1986, sales seemed to have flattened (at 16 billion dollars). True, the N.S.G.A. could still "prove" statistically that three times the population of the nation exercised. But the exercise the N.S.G.A. did was juggling statistics. With very little effort, it converted one exerciser into two or three: A water skier was, of necessity, a boater and a swimmer. The N.S.G.A. tagged anybody who engaged in an activity more than once a year as an exerciser. It also included children as young as seven.

Maybe the N.S.G.A. needed the security of numbers. For, clearly, not everyone was getting well, or even fit, from exercise. Not a few of the hardy faithful were coming up sore or limping...or worse. Not a few who went into exercise also went into traction. Doctors began seeing a significant increase in exercise-related ailments, from shin splints to "tennis toe" (bleeding and bruising under the big toenail when it's repeatedly jammed against the shoe in sudden stops) to eyeball injuries (25 percent of the injuries it treated, reported one major eye clinic, were sports-related), from "runner's nipple" to "ischemic neuropathy of the penis"--a numb penis in bike riders caused when the saddle crimps off the blood supply to the public area. Admittedly, not every individual was going into hock to Blue Cross. But suddenly, the question was unavoidable: If exercise is so good for you, how come so many people are getting sick doing it?

The retort was ingenious: "No gain without pain." You had to feel really bad before you could hope to feel good. But does that make sense? Is it rational to fight through pain in exercise when every other precept of medicine holds that pain is a primary signal, a warning that something is wrong and that you'd better stop what you're doing? Suppose pain were a precursor not to pleasure but to more pain. Or to death. The death of one athlete had a traumatic effect.

In the tragic figure of Jim Fixx--arguably the most celebrated runner in American history--one can find everything that is rich and bewildering in the crisis that faced the so-called fit. For if Fixx had ever asked himself the critical question (Why am I doing this?) and received a candid answer, it might have saved his life. The truth is that he was not running so much as fleeing. He was fleeing his family-health history: His father suffered a devastating heart attack at 36 and died of another heart attack at 43. Many experts believe that such a history is the single most important factor affecting longevity. Fixx knew that and began running at the age of 36, but it didn't save him. Indeed, it might have made him more susceptible, for he suffered from continuous stress, perhaps further stimulated by his growing celebrity as the apostle of running and the best-selling author of The Complete Book of Running and Jim Fixx's Second Book of Running. (He was known to take Valium before his TV appearances and public speeches.) Fixx became mesmerized, a willing victim of running. When he suffered his own series of heart attacks--he kept them secret, telling neither his family nor his doctor--he surrendered to the canons of exercise instead of the canons of common sense: He ran through pain. In eight weeks, he ran through four heart attacks--and made it three times.

On the hot summer evening when Fixx died, he was fleeing celebrity. In the process of writing another book, he had rented a lakeside cabin in northern Vermont to be alone and concentrate. During the long, hot drive to New England, he apparently decided to stop a few miles short of the cabin and check into a motel, go for a run, then get a good night's sleep. He may even have felt congestion or a pain in his chest as he decided to stop. An autopsy revealed that one of his coronary arteries was 99 percent obstructed; another was 80-85 percent obstructed; a third was 70 percent obstructed. And yet there is a feeling among many runners that running resuscitates them, that they cannot live without running.

Roughly two miles into his usual tenmile run, he turned and headed back to his motel. Yet he didn't stop running; he didn't seek help. The irony is that he could not make the last and most important 40 steps of his life. He dropped to his knees and rested his head and upper body on the soft grass of a sharply rising slope beside the road within twoscore steps of his motel and help. He died there. On his knees. Just as martyrs to a faith have done all through history.

The lonely death of the long-distance runner perhaps did more to trigger the crisis in exercise than any other event. For the first time, people stopped and asked, Shouldn't exercisers handle pain the way normal people do--as a signal to stop what they're doing, because they're hurting themselves? In the risk--benefit ratio, risk was suddenly looming large, and not a few were questioning the benefits from mindless exercise.

Item: At the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of California, Dr. George Brooks, the director, argued that the best in athletic performance was not achieved by ceaseless exercise by rote but by taking well-calculated periods of rest during the periods of exercise. Too little rest, he said, could do as much damage as too much running. For the fibers in the overstressed muscles break down and are destroyed if stressed without rest. "The key to training is to apply stress and wait for a response," he said. No longer was there an inviolable rule--so often cited in old-guard exercising--that 72 hours without intense exercise was the road to perdition.

Item: David L. Costill, director of the prestigious Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, declared that there are points beyond which exercise is of very limited use. That was a startling concept; the longtime view of the old guard was that it was difficult, if not impossible, to reach such a point. But in Costill's research, the useful limit of exercise comes before or when the individual expends 5000 calories a week (or 50 to 60 miles a week of running, depending on the individual). Beyond that level, he asserted, there is a fall-off in performance and in aerobic improvement. Costill analyzed swimmers and found that they improved on a workout discipline of 5000, rather than the oft-accepted 10,000, yards a day. He analyzed two marathon runners who'd taken a sixmonth hiatus from running and found that they showed "dramatic improvement in aerobic capacity" on a retraining program of 25 miles a week, but that the rate of improvement dwindled as their workout routines edged up to 50 miles a week, flattened out as they increased to 75 miles a week and disappeared above that.

Item: Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the famed guru of aerobic conditioning, cited an even more moderate standard. He said that after a person has run 15 miles a week--slightly more than two miles, perhaps 15-20 minutes, a day--"you do not see much further improvement [in aerobic conditioning]. It takes tripling of the number of miles to get any minimal improvement in oxygen consumption. And there's an exponential increase in injuries."

All that was quite a different attitude from the one espoused by the swamis of sweat and their loyal army of researchers. Until the current crisis, every claim about the value of exercise was supported by an "inviolable" statistical proof. Suddenly, (continued on page 160) The Fitness Myth (continued from page 140) though, both the proof and the statistics began to look as though they were as reliable as a Devil's smile. It's not just that specialinterest groups played manipulative games with statistics. It's that respectable researchers undertook to prove that exercise could save you from everything from terminal dimpling to meteor splat. And the flaw was not so much in what they said as in what they didn't say.

Consider pioneering research in the field, published in the early Fifties, that "proved" that exercise lessened the risk of heart disease and extended the life span: The study compared longevity for drivers of London buses with that of their conductors. The fact that the conductors did far better statistically than the drivers was attributed to exercise alone. Certainly, the drivers did little but sit behind the wheel, cursing gently, while the conductors were in aerobic action, bouncing up and down the stairway on the two-level buses, hustling for money and tickets, hopping on and off the buses at stops to shepherd passengers aboard.

But what about other differences between the two groups? A difference in their ages? In obesity? In the family-health histories? (Workers who are older, obese and aware that their fathers and grandfathers were immobilized or killed by heart disease may actually choose sit-down jobs when they apply for work--they may prefer to be drivers.)

How about smoking habits? And eating habits? And sex habits? How about the differences in the environments of the work stations? The drivers were up front, eating exhaust all day, while the conductors were somewhat removed from it. How about stress? Drivers had to cope alone and silently, while the conductors could release tensions by chatting with or yelling at passengers.

Any or all of those factors may have been as important as exercise in their effect on heart disease and longevity. In fact, the bus drivers turned out to be more obese than the conductors when they started work in the London bus system. But that statistic was uncovered too late to influence the publicized results of the study. It was a typical case of the triumph of dogma.

Another distortion--in fact, my favorite such grotesquerie--involves the assertion, published in The New York Times and Reader's Digest in the late Seventies, that exercise is indisputably good for you because it is good for the Masai warriors of East Africa. These warriors had, it was reported, larger arteries than had their counterparts among American males. In addition, the arteries in the Masai warriors kept getting larger with age, while those of American males did not. The assumption was that coronary arteries as large as those in Masai warriors would be beneficial for American males--the proof was not stated--and the only reason that American males did not reach that goal was lack of exercise. Both publications pointed out that Masai warriors walk an average of 12 miles a day to herd their cattle, while American males only rarely hike so far. It was persuasive stuff.

Of course, nobody mentioned other factors that might influence the warriors' arteries. For instance, the Masai often grow to extreme heights (seven feet or more) and may thus need larger arteries--developed through the millennia in an evolutionary process--to meet the demand for blood flow over such a large frame. Masai warriors also walk around nearly naked while tending their cattle--and that places a certain demand on blood circulation. Certainly, the most pertinent factor was not mentioned at all: Masai warriors have a much shorter life span than American males, by 20 years or so. Take the available evidence and make another conclusion: The Masai exercise more and they die sooner. Do they die sooner because they exercise more?

All of which is not to say that exercise is bad for you. To be sure, mindless exercise is dumb of you and perhaps bad for you. But it is not the exercise that is bad; it is the mindlessness. On the one hand, it can lead to your going to your death by rote--without thinking--as Fixx did. On the other hand, it can lead you to unreasonable expectations, as the statistics do. The trick is to bring your mind into play. Literally.

Start by asking yourself, What's the most rewarding way for me to spend my spare time? Is it the pursuit of fitness (as we know the meaning of that word from sexy ads for exercise machines)? I know an astronaut from the lunar excursions for whom the most important thing outside of his work and his family was not popping pores and building muscle--which had been adopted as legend for the astronauts--but raising roses. "I don't know how I could get through all this," he once told me, "without my roses." I know another astronaut whose concern was not just that he would die but that he would die without ever having learned to play the guitar. To people facing death, exercise tends not to be the most important thing in life. Maybe it's flying sailplanes or studying haiku, picking stocks or shooting skeet. You do not have to succumb to the mania for exercise just because some mildly unhinged personality on TV cries, "Exercise--or die!"

But if you do accept exercise as your preferred leisure-time activity, at least ask yourself why you're doing it. Are you in it to build muscle? Vanity is a powerful motive in exercise--why not face it?--and weight-lifting may be the answer to your needs. Do you go to the gym to get laid more often? Or because you prefer women who smell more of arnica than of alcohol? Or because you've got to give your liver a rest? On the obscure chance that you're really interested in certain known benefits of exercise, you can build stamina--but not strength--in jogging and running. If you want to build stamina while seeing something of the world beyond the range of your own two legs, cycling will do it. If you want to build stamina without leaving your home, a rowing machine or a stationary bicycle will help you do it. Do you have a variety of reasons for going into exercise? Not to worry: There's an exercise to meet your needs. The new president of Notre Dame, the Reverend Edward Malloy, plays pickup basketball for one and a half to two hours a week with any and all comers, particularly students. For him, it's fun, it's exercise at its best, it involves some of his practiced skills--he played varsity basketball when he was a student at Notre Dame--and it has a useful social-cum-career dimension: It thrusts him into a give-and-take with students that is without the artificial barriers that usually divide college students from college presidents.

Obviously, there is a lot of meaningless babble about what fitness means. It may mean anything from feeling good to minimizing sudden death in a pickup basketball game to knowing you can outrun 200 Zulu warriors with spears. Being able to bench press 520 pounds or do 75 finger-tip pushups in 65 seconds may prove insignificant if you can't make love twice in the same night or walk uphill without breathing heavily.

If some of the benefits of exercise have escaped you, other benefits may surprise you. The Gallup Poll once reported that 43 percent of the adults it surveyed said that they enjoyed greater creativity because of their exercise. That wasn't something the fitness pitchmen touted. A report by A. H. Ismail and L. E. Trachtman on the impact of exercise on out-of-shape members of the Purdue University faculty and staff showed that they felt they had a pronounced increase in imagination. That wasn't something the fitness pitchmen touted. Then Dr. Sol Roy Rosenthal, at the time a professor at the University of Illinois' Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine in Chicago, reported a benefit from exercise that involved a certain risk.

In his research, Dr. Rosenthal had been stymied by a laboratory problem that, after weeks of work, left him weary and frustrated. To get a break, he turned to a daring form of sport: He went timber racing at the Oak Brook Club, a horseman's paradise west of Chicago. Timber racing is a dangerous run through woods, where any lowhanging bough or gnarled root can bring down both rider and horse. Rosenthal does not remember today who won the race. What he does remember is the unprecedented high he experienced afterward: the rush of exhilaration, of euphoria. He felt a strong sharpening of his mental powers and a heightening of his senses. In particular, he remembers that as he headed back to Chicago, he suddenly hit on the answer to his impenetrable lab problem.

Intrigued, Rosenthal soon found that many other participants in high-risk activity reported a similar euphoria. Not every time, not always with the same intensity, but with a sufficient consistency for him to offer, as a general theory, the Rosenthal Effect. Risk exercise, went the theory, provoked a psychic reaction that left the exerciser feeling, for a few minutes or a few hours, able to handle and solve problems. It provided a profound insight, said Rosenthal, such "that his life and mind have been enormously enhanced."

Other researchers have gone beyond those early findings. Some, for instance, showed that exercise could trigger a "peak experience"--a response that was both psychical and quasi-mystical. That was an insight into science as well as into exercise; for psychologist Abraham Maslow, in describing peak experience as a part of experiential psychology, suggested that it derived from a long-run cumulative set of experiences, not a single short-term activity. Other scientists began to discover that specific chemicals secreted in tiny amounts by the brain during certain exercises could explain the mental high. Still other researchers suggested treating drug addiction by substituting the high of exercise for the high of a drug.

For the everyday exerciser, the most dramatic frontier was the new concept being formulated by some researchers called hi-psy. This approach was oriented to the individual, not--as in Rosenthal's theory--to the sport. In hi-psy, the response does not rest upon the risk of the exercise but upon the attitudes and input of the exerciser. Most individuals invest a high psychic input in activities such as skiing or sky diving or rock-climbing and get a consequent high psychic reward--while the psychic input invested in golf or tennis or walking is low, so the psychic reward is low or nonexistent. Hi-psy allows for the person to choose the measure of psychic response he wants by the psychic investment he makes in his exercise of choice.

Hi-psy is different from any exercise concept of the past, because it demands thought and awareness--an involvement of the mind, not just the muscle. It is different also because the force comes from within the individual; it does not depend upon the sport or obedience to some fitness guru or pitchman. It is a liberating idea.

The everyday, every-sport dimension of hi-psy explains the mystery of the "runner's high." As Rosenthal sees it, running should not return a psychic high, because it is not, for the most case, a sport of risk. Yet certain runners repeatedly report a definite psychic boost. It develops because the run on that day over that course demands an inner commitment of the runner that rote repetition does not. It is not because the next step demands risk. It may demand speed. It may demand running uphill when the runner is uneasy about his growing fatigue. It may demand running longer on that day than he feels he can run. The point is, it requires the individual to exercise his brain. It is thus the beginning of the end of tyranny.

To that, add one more advantage: In hi-psy, you get the return today. If you jog just 15 miles a week--what Dr. Kenneth Cooper now offers as a useful pace for aerobic conditioning--then you will, in the next 40 years, jog 31,200 miles (around the world and then some) without ever having been anywhere. You may find at the end that you haven't even extended your life. But in the new regimen, the reward is immediate and intimate.

A number of individuals have already programed hi-psy into their lives. One young bank executive I know went trail cycling on his way to work after an allnight hospital session that was climaxed by the birth of his first child. Not only did he overcome a bone-searing exhaustion but he developed such a psychic high that he came up with an idea in the loan-and-collateral area that solved a major problem at work. A French-horn player I know took to hightest skiing on the eve of a day on which he was to play the difficult solo horn part in Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel. He purposefully induced a psychic high that carried him through a performance that earned acclaim from the critics and a commendation from a testy, grudging conductor.

All this reflects the powerful, new impetus--and value--emerging from the current crisis in exercise. For crisis inevitably brings change, and these changes present immense new rewards for the individual committed to fitness. Only a short time ago, such a person had little choice but to submit to a dismal, Spartan future: As a jogger or a runner, one had to give up not just smoking but living. The sea change is profound; the individual doesn't take orders--he gives them. To himself. The most exhilarating fact rising out of the crisis in exercise is that anybody who doesn't like the change--the hoary old pore-popping muscle-bending high priests of the past--can beat the competition cold. Just get in shape by getting smart.

"If exercise is so good for you, how come so many people are getting sick doing it?"

"Researchers [tried] to prove exercise saves you from everything from terminal dimpling to meteor splat."