Back to the Fitness Future
Strength and conditioning regimens come full circle
Brion O’Connor
Continental In-Flight magazine: 10/2008
…I’ve always taken a straightforward approach to staying in shape, one that was instilled by my grandmother. Grandmère Pare was a Jack LaLanne devotee, and I vividly remember her going through her calisthenics along with the original TV fitness guru.
During the ensuing 40 years, I’ve seen almost every fitness craze come down the pike. Admittedly, I’ve tried a few, from aerobics to Tae Bo. But I’ve always come back to the basics, not because these other regimens were ineffective, but because, for me, simple works best. And I’m not alone.
…Michael Boyle, co-founder of Boston-based Mike Boyle Strength & Conditioning, says the most effective programs aren’t much different from the Army’s boot camp regimen of 50 years ago. Even LaLanne, still spry at 94, advocates a simple mantra of discipline and diet as the bedrock of good fitness. “Exercise is king, nutrition is queen,” he says. “Put them together, and you’ve got a kingdom.”
“I work out two hours a day, seven days a week,” says LaLanne, who weighs a svelte 150 pounds. “I lift weights for an hour and a half and spend another half hour swimming. I hate it. It’s a pain in the backside. But you’ve got to do it.”
(For strength training)….Boyle recommends lunges and squats for the lower body (no machines), push-ups and pull-ups for the upper body, and static “planks” for the midsection. (Imagine assuming a push-up position, but on your elbows, and holding that position steady for 30 seconds at a time.)
…If training should be this simple, how did we manage to make it so complicated? According to Boyle, there are two primary culprits: the bodybuilding fad and technology. “Bodybuilding, through the magazines, had a great influence. Everyone was suddenly doing these body-part workouts to get big arms or a big chest,” he says. “The opposite of that is functional training, the idea that training should concentrate on movement, not muscle. If you do a push-up, or if you do a squat, it works a lot of muscles. You don’t have to worry about what body part it works.”
Technology, meanwhile, spawned an entire industry devoted to exercise. “There’s a ton of money to be made in selling exercise equipment,” Boyle says. “It’s a billon-dollar industry. I’m constantly telling people: Don’t get a machine. Use the simplest equipment possible.”
The problem, he says, is that technology often guarantees maximum results with minimum effort, exploiting a basic flaw of human nature. “Technology has made everything simpler for us, so people believe there’s going to be a technological solution to fitness,” he says. “But there is no magic bullet…”
Champion cyclocross racer Maureen Bruno Roy…says she eschews high-tech training aids. “I stopped using power meters and heart rate monitors and all that stuff,” she says…” “I’ve definitely gone old-school with my training.”
Among Bruno Roy’s clients are top-flight marathoners with the Boston Athletic Association who take a similar approach. “They use no tools at all, except stopwatches,” she says. “I see a lot of triathletes going the other way, with all their shiny tools and all their new training regimens, and they can’t get out of their own way sometimes because their data is telling them that they’ve gone too hard or too easy. I really think people have lost touch, and it’s time for them to bring it back.”
Peter Rea agrees. Rea, elite athlete coordinator for the ZAP Fitness Performance Center in Blowing Rock, N.C., says, “The best marathoners are the ones who just go out the door every day”… Over the past 30 years, Rea says, top American runners faltered as science took a leading role in training. “As a running nation, we began to slow down the more we knew,” he explains. “In the mid-1980s and early ’90s, the scientists learned more about lactate thresholds and VO2max. We began to know a lot more scientifically about the body–ironically, we began to run less.”
“Then, in the late ’90s…the pendulum began to swing back the other way…“Kids are training the same way now as when distance running first became popular in the 1960s and ’70s. They’re all running a lot — science be damned.”
Rea acknowledges that science has helped runners, especially regarding the importance of rest days and overall fitness. But if you need any more proof that training has come full circle, just consider the favorite strength-training tool of many top runners: the medicine ball. According to Rea, ancient Egyptian athletes exercised with a round stone in much the same way. “And when all is said and done,” he says, “after all these thousands of years, what we’ve come back to is, basically, a rubber stone.”
http://magazine.continental.com/200810-fit-to-travel
