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Author and exercise advocate Covert Bailey holds forth in his eccentric style before an appreciative audience in this program from his PBS series
Covert Bailey's Fit or Fat. The three segments of this particular video focus on types of exercise, an offbeat primer on how muscles actually work, and what types of exercise will benefit the most when trying to shed excess weight. Bailey tends to pack his lectures with unashamedly goofy jokes, which he exuberantly punctuates with sounds ranging from Bronx cheers to whistles. But if his delivery veers to the weird, he also imparts a lot of information and common sense. He offers an explanation of a "treadmill test" that measures the amount of oxygen the body uses and stresses that if you want to have a "Mercedes body and not a Pinto body," what really makes the different is exercise, not just what you eat. Using an illustration of a muscle cell, Bailey shows the chemistry involved in exercising, and he finishes up by advocating what he laughingly calls his "LSD" exercise program, meaning it's best to go "long, slow distances." This is a lively and informative presentation that will give someone contemplating a reducing program good background information on how the body handles food and exercise.
--Robert J. McNamara
