Customer Reviews

Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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.

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.

I picked up this book hoping for a well-researched look at fitness,maybe putting ideas we have today about excercise into a kind of historical context. Instead, I got a superficial look at the history of body building and waaaay too much information on the author's personal fitness routine especially in regards to spinning. This book was a waste of time.

If you really want the "truth about exercise and health", just read the Epilogue. The rest of the book is filled with far too much detail about the history of the fitness movement and business, including the author's own experiences. In fact, one comes away with the conclusion that this woman is somewhat obsessed with exercise. What reader can relate to a person who admits that she belongs to three different gyms, two in New York and one in New Jersey? In a word, the book was boring. I only continued reading it because I kept thinking it was going to get better in terms of answering the big question, i.e., "what is the truth about exercise and health?" Little did I know that I only needed to read the last chapter to find out.

Gina Kolata's considerable talents as a researcher/reporter are wasted on this self-indulgent hodgepodge. For starters, she can't seem to decide what sort of book she's writing: an expose of fitness foibles and frauds? one woman's quest for exercise-induced nirvana? a history of weightlifting (the photos focus exclusively on bodybuilding)? a comparison of different approaches to fitness?

There are a few fascinating snippets in this book (though how many times do we need to hear that Lance Armstrong wears a heart monitor?) but the reader must plow through pages of tedious detail to find them. The climactic "Mount Everest" climb is anything but exciting, and Kolata's passion for spinning does not translate into captivating prose.

Approximately 2/3 of my way through the book, I found a sentence that seemingly encapsulated Kolata's motivation for choosing her topic. "Bill [her husband] informs me that whether I know it or not, I can seem crazy, like someone who needs a drug fix, when I get around my favorite exercise equipment." By the time I skipped and hopped my way to the last page, my sense was that Kolata was trying to validate her own obsession with spinning with this book and to convince herself that it's perfectly fine to be addicted to this form of exercise.

She did not convince me.

I agree with many of the reviews here. This book starts off great reviewing and explaining fitness "truths", but then dies when she spends about a 1/3rd of the book going into great detail about her Spinning experience. I was interested in learning about the science that backs up - or doesn't back up - the exercise information that is pushed every day by trainers, magazines and sales people. This book only touched on that and then when into a slow Spinning death....

There's some interesting history and science in this book, but overall it suffers from the author being too close to the subject. The author is aware of this shortcoming, but I do not believe her efforts to overcome it -- by mixing personal anecdotes interwoven with historical and scientific anecdotes -- works at all. Instead, it just kinda creates a big, undefined mess, not unlike the subject she is surveying.

I think a good example of the strenghts and flaws in the entire book can be seen through the chapter on strength training. In that chapter, she provides some very interesting history on weight lifting, and does very well debunking a popular myth on weight lifting (namely, that weight lifting will increase your resting metabolism). But her own personal sacred cows go untouched: For instance, she reports how she started out using machines, but then she abandoned that for "the area that is reserved for serious lifting" -- free weights, mostly. Never does she touch on the mythology surrounding the "free weights versus machines" debate, which would have been a wonderful opportunity to explore exercise mythology. Instead, she embraces the mythology, without examination: "For years I used a machine ... . Now I do real squats. And I do real bench presses." Now, I'm no expert, but the only thing "real" about a squat or a bench press (absent training for a squat or bench press competition, which she doesn't do) is the ego manifestation in deciding that your particular way of stressing muscles is "superior." She then spends way too much of the chapter discussing weight lifting in terms of women -- again, some interesting history there, but it again belies the author's personal bias.

She does the same thing with Spinning -- she extolls the virtues of Spinning and the Mount Everest four-hour ride, and makes Spinning sound like the fitness event of the century. Then, in the final chapter on the marketing of the fitness industry, she reveals the certification to become a Spinning instructor has more to do with money than with training: she laments that a "chunky middle-aged man" tells her he's become a certified Spinning instructor and is now teaching six classes a week.

As a result, what is there for interesting reading in terms of history and science is overshadowed by the author's need to affirm all the time she spends at the gym: Unlike most mortals, she pushes her heart rate to incredible levels, far beyond what is recommended (because she just can't work up much of a sweat doing a mere 80 percent of her max heart rate); she works with real weights in the real part of the gym; she belongs to three different health clubs because she's just so damn serious about fitness.

The book walks a fine line: She's not obessive enough to give you a real insider's view of, say, a marathon racer or a competitive body builder. But she is obsessive enough to pretend to be one. As a result, there is no real "inside" information to share (unless you really want to learn about what it is like to train for a four-hour stationary bike ride, which itself was obviously a marketing ploy, complete with dry ice to simulate clouds in the moutains), but she's too obsessive about her own conceits to objectively report her subject. That's where the book fails. It is not inspiring, nor informative, nor even particularly interesting.

A better title for the book would have been "Hooray for Gina."

After reading halfway through this book, I decided to stop reading any further. This is not really a fitness book geared for people trying to get into shape.

After seeing Gina Kolata on a TV talk show, I expected a lot of useful information on fitness myths. Instead, the book consists of 5% fitness information and the other 95% percent are boring anecdotes about her personal life and fitness gurus, trainers, and doctors that I doubt anyone would care to learn more about.

Read this book if you literally want to learn the "history" of various fitness myths (in all it's arcane detail). For me, I just want the bottom line information.

I found this book to be fascinating - Kolata debunks a number of fitness myths that I thought were true, and better yet, explains why so many people accept them as fact.

The reviewer who expected a book about getting in shape should have learned about the book before buying it (or at least read the info on the book jacket) - as the subtitle explicity states, this is a "Quest for Truth," not an exercise manual.

I thought her personal anecdotes about spinning were helpful and added credibility to her reporting. She's a serious exerciser and, like her readers, is genuinely interested in learning about the real facts about fitness and health.

There are some things in this book that people simply won't accept because they don't want to (example - that weight lifting will significantly increase your resting metabolism). She quotes and names actual exercise scientists and references studies from scientific journals - so the evidence is all there if you want to read the full study.

I always thought that weight lifting would increase my metabolism, but after reading this book, I'm considering focusing more on intense cardio for weight loss.

She's written over 5,000 reviews for Amazon, and from scanning her About You page it seems that at least 70% of them are 5 stars, and at least 20% are 4 stars. A Google search confirmed this pattern on a number of other reviewers' sites.

Which suggests:

1. Mrs. Klausner is ridiculously easy to please: she has very low standards and loves everything she reads/sees,

2. Mrs. Klausner has amazing psychic abilities: she only reads/sees things that she accurately anticipates liking,

or

3. Mrs. Klausner is a clever businesswoman: she gets paid to like just about everything she reads/sees.