69 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Creating new mythology, May 21, 2003
This review is from: Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise (Hardcover)
As a primary care physician and member of the American College of Sports Medicine I am pleased to see critical examinations of exercise science aimed at the lay audience. However, Ms Kolata's book tends to create new mythologies as much or more than it elucidates.
I spend 1-3 hours daily reading peer-reviewed medical journals, many of which are sports medicine research journals. While to Ms. Kolata's credit she exposes some areas of everybody-knows-it-but-it-just-ain't-so, in many other areas (positive effects of greater exercise intensity and duration, utility of and scientific basis for heart rate traiing, fluids and performance, etc ....) she misses the mark.
Even nutrition experts seem to view exercise as more important the she does. Last weekend I attended a medical conference on nutrition with several of the most highly regarded academic experts in nutrition reasearch. Each of them echoed the crucial importance of exercise and emphasized how much better it is to be fat and exercise rather than thin and sedentary.
The historical information about exercise proponents is fun and interesting. Unfortunately Americans are getting fatter and completely sedentary in epidemic numbers. I fear this book will serve primarily as another excuse for couch potatoes eager to ignore the scientific reality of the profound benefits of regular vigorous exercise.
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132 of 164 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
It Sags in the Middle, June 8, 2003
This review is from: Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise (Hardcover)
By Bill Marsano. This book. like an exercise session, has a hopeful start, a bang-up finish and plenty of tedium in-between. And there are two things you should know right away: 1., it's not going to give you a fitness program and 2, the only person searching fvcor fitness here is the authors. It's about the myths, misconception of business of the fitness field.
A science writer for The New York Times, she starts well by demonstrating her journalistic response to Heart Waves, a new fitness program pitched by a puiblicist. It's a proprietary regimen--a product. You have to pay to participate at specific places. Suspicious--these things come along about as often as diet plans--Kolata investigates.
And what she finds is a lot of mumbo-jumbo about heart waves and natural rhythms that is designed to fleece the public. The program's creator has had his medical license lifted in New York and New Jersey; he is married to the CEO of the for-profit organization that is the program's biggest promotor; and the study proclaiming amazing results is pronounced poppycock by professional statisticians.
She ends well, too, closing with interesting and occasionally (wryly) amusing details about the history of weight-lifting and body-building (and their great rivalry); food supplements (generally useless; unaccountably, she's not up to date on ephedra, recently implicated in some deaths), and the business aspect of fitness. For example, she sees her daughter become a certified personal trainer, in less than two weeks, simply by buying an American Council on Exercise home-study guide (based on a book only 160 pages long!) and passing a multiple-choice test (price: $200)--without ever having trained anyone in her life. Want to become a Spinning instructor? You can earn certification (about $300) in a single day!
The middle sags, badly, because Kolata is an exercise junkie. I began to suspect as much when she discussed an early aerobics program that recommended persons in "very poor" condition (unable to run a mile in 12 minutes) should START getting fit by walking one mile in 13.5 minutes every day for five days. That, Kolata says, "does not sound particularly extreme." I beg to differ.
I'm a "professional" walker--I've made numerous long-distance walks in England and Italy and published walking articles in major consumer magazines. I walk daily for transportaion in Manhattan. Family and friends generally refuse to walk with me--they can't keep up. And I'm doing only 3.5 mph; 4.5 is nearly one-third faster and a whole lot harder. I've done 4.5 on a treadmill, but only after weeks of training up, and it's exhausting. If you doubt me, head for the nearest high-school
track. It'll be 440 yards a lap, so four laps equal a mile. Take along a stop watch, water, and a friend with a cell phone that has 911 on speed-dial. Unless you're in top shape, you don't have a prayer.
In time, Kolata admits to her zealotry. She's hooked on Spinning, also a proprietary fitness product that is "taught" in "classes" by "instructors" for substantial fees. Spinning is based on the stationary exercise bike but practiced in small, dark rooms, accompanied by videos (Mount Everest is a Kolata favorite) and sometimes candles and deafening music. The basic mood is frenzy--she speaks of sessions so crazed that sweat puddled on the floor.
And once is not enough: Kolata drags us to one spinning class after another. Her writing is workmanlike at best, and she relies on the present tense, so there are no stylistic pleasures to lighten this section. She is simply fascinated with herself.
Other information from the middle section is helpful (if frustrating) and easily summarized. It's this: almost everything you have ever heard about exercise (speed training, slow training, interval training, weight-loss, body-sculpting, effects on longevity, general health and disease-resistance, nutrition, vitamins, heart rates, etc.) is false, unproven, unprovable, folklore, arbitrary or some combination thereof. Current best advice, she says, is to walk 20 minutes a day (it doesn't even have to be all at one time) five days a week (would it have been too hard to credit this? to say how fast?). That, current wisdom says, will get you in as good shape as exercise can--anything more has no real effect.
Therefore, if you're going to go the extra mile(s), Kolata says, there's only one reason to do it: enjoyment.
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