Page 3 Module 7- Health
The Body of the Whole Person
With grateful thanks to Thomas K. Cureton, Jr., Ph.D., FA.C.SM.
I first learned something about financial services providers who sell more than a million dollars worth of insurance each year when Mr. Frank Sullivan gave me this wonderful invitation to come to MDRT. I said I couldn’t come, because our Summer School was opening at the University of Illinois. I found myself impossibly preoccupied and it would be not quite
right to come away. Then I found that financial services providers don’t take “No” for an answer. So I suppose that’s why you hear of these very successful institutions who don’t take “No” for an answer. So I’m here. And I suppose we might say that Mr. Sullivan had very
wonderful persuasive powers as well as the several people who wrote me kind letters.
Middle Age Starts Early
I’m going to discuss a subject that’s very difficult to complete and finish in a short time. It is closely allied to physiological aging.
We notice the fitness curves build up in youth, and almost regardless of what youngsters do the characteristics which we recognize as the principal components in physical fitness build up through the years of life; boys level off at about 17, girls level off at about 14, and then these curves turn downhill beginning at about 26. The studies at the National Institute of Health, on Aging, gave curves that turned downhill at about 28; and our curves turn downhill about 26.
Then we say we’re on the middle age downslide. I have said many places that middle age begins at26. And the youthful, bounding vigor, at least that build-up curve, is over. And the plateau is over. And now we enter into the middle age downslide which is a bit difficult to control and which perhaps is quite largely misunderstood, or not understood even yet.
Middle Age Poses A Problem
We have studied many middle aged people, and I’ve worked at the whole age range, with youngsters, with adolescents, and with adults, but I have found in the last 25 years that the problem of the middle aged person is a great problem. How to maintain his interest in his own self; how to understand himself, and how to maintain his energy and good feeling tone are all great problems.
I wish to present a thesis which to me is quite validated, but it is not validated to the world at large. Time and Life have picked it up and said: “It’s probable that the thesis is correct; that a man can do a great deal to preserve himself to fight off the ills, the chronic deterioration that afflicts us all, after 26 years of age.” I want to present the thesis that the care and welfare of the human body can be viewed in two great camps.
One of these camps is a medical camp in which the controls are largely passive, and in which the controls are many times with drugs, all with psychotherapy, or other kind of passive procedures. And allied to this are some relatively passive physiotherapy procedures, and light and heat and baths and massage and vibration, and many techniques; and I am fairly familiar with that camp, because I have studied and worked in a number of different medical schools.
The Dynamic Approach
On the other hand many years ago I became interested in the possibilities of the dynamic approach to health. What I have to present is the thesis that the dynamic approach needs to be pulled up, by the boot-straps. It isn’t only exercise, but it is the proper kind of exercise at the right time and moment, integrated into a rhythm that will give you an optimum chance of good living.
You can exercise too much. You can exercise too little. I think more important than this is a rhythm of exercise and rest and recuperation, with proper nutrition, and proper relaxation, and proper sleep. And then to see that rhythm repeated with satisfaction, day by day.
Dr. Kepler at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, wrote an article, some years ago that attracted my attention. He maintained that a man should seek to balance his life; that life is likened somewhat to a cross, that the upper prongs of the cross represent the desirable, major facets of life, and the stem of the cross represents the main support. I compare it to a tree. I have said: “Let something happen to the circulation in the trunk of this tree, and then, no matter
how beautiful the tree is, how many flowers or leaves are on the tree, or how many branches, or how healthy the tree appears to be, the tree soon withers and dies and becomes as dust. And so does man; and so does woman.”
Circulation Is the Key
No matter what the intellect is in the brain of great men, let their circulation get poor enough and then their brains don’t function very well.
A few years ago the Dean of the Graduate College at University of Illinois came over to visit my department. And it was a nice visit.
He concluded the discussion by saying, “I have looked around; I have seen your department,” but he added, “I really couldn’t imagine one single topic that a doctoral student in physical education could pursue that would represent a genuine research problem.”
This upset me a little bit, I couldn’t quite understand it, but I did take over to him some summaries
that we had made about problems in physical education and physical fitness research. I entered into some further discussions with this dean, actually he did support me in many ways, but at 47 years of age he was found dead in the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago.
He was known to be a tense man; he was known to be a great mentality. He was an atomic physicist. (And, I knew enough about his life and made a point to find this out.) He didn’t use his body very well.
I have been in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 25 years, and during that time I have collected obituary notices of over a hundred men I had known, and followed up to find out how they lived. Of these hundred friends of mine who are now dead, I couldn’t say that one had followed the simple principles that I have announced already to you.
Deterioration Occurs Rapidly
These men had great intellects, but did not know how to break the tension of the day. They were smart
in their work, but they didn’t realise the profound importance of circulation. You have to fight for it every day. Virtually every day of your life you must exercise to maintain the normal circulation and to prevent the shrinkages, dehydration, and a literal drying up of the small blood vessels that will occur.
Because these small capillaries do deteriorate in the brain, people become febrile. As they deteriorate in the muscles, then the muscles have no endurance; as they deteriorate in the heart, the heart has almost no stroke.
And, all over the body, these capillaries are deteriorating, if you don’t work to pressure them open. There is one fundamental rule: Every day, you should make the blood go through your body as thoroughly, as fully, as is possible. And this takes a variable amount of time. We have disagreed with many people over these points: How long does it take? What types of exercise?
The last time I was in Boston, I inadvertently got into a controversy, and a notice appeared in the paper that I had contradicted the Governor of Massachusetts because he inferred that he could become very fit in 15 minutes a day, in a semi-passive process.
Body Warm•Up Needed
Now, I’ve studied physical fitness all my life, and I have some regard to how long it takes to warm the body up; how long it takes to really get the circulation going into many of the remote channels of the body, and it takes time to build up a body heat.
If we measure this body heat on a treadmill in the laboratory it takes 25-30 minutes to get the body heat up.
A great athlete would say: “I need longer; I need 40 minutes, I need 50 minutes, to get ready for that race. And I can’t do the race as well if I am not completely and fully warmed up, with my small vessels working, and pushing as much blood through the muscles and through the brain and through the glands as possible.”
Now this takes time. And unfortunately the calories of work come into it, and the calories of work demand that we give enough time. Average exercise is about five calories per minute. And if you continue, we have found that programs which add up to about a hundred calories a day don’t make profound changes in cholesterol, in body fat, in lowering the blood fat (the triglycerides), nor do they strengthen the heart, or develop the capillary system that we need. It has been proved that endurance exercise can stimulate the development of many additional capillaries.
At 300 calories a day, and the development of relatively more internal body heat, we get better results. We have found important changes, but not with everybody; it’s a bit spotty and inconsistent. I would say half the people at least can make significant changes in the critical basis of physical fitness, with about 300 calories of physical work a day, added to their minimum program of living. I’m commenting here mainly about sedentary people and middle-aged people.
500 Calories a Day
Now it’s possible for a good athlete to take a workout and burn as much as 7,000 calories a day. We know that men working in the forests of Finland chopping wood all day can burn 7,000 to 9,000 calories of heat equivalent to work, per day. We see from the known studies that, to be sure, then you need 500 calories of physical work a day; to have a moderate program, 300 calories a day, but it’s not sure for everybody.
To settle for 20 minutes a day which adds up to about 100 or 300 calories, is inadequate.
I have pointed this out to a number of groups, and I think we have enough data to make this statement. But people do not understand exercise.
When a young student of mine designed the Canadian 5 BX program, and the program was printed by the Canadian Government, it called for 11 minutes for men; and 12 minutes for women, I had to say, “I’m sorry, but the program is inadequate.” Then I called for the validation data: “Where was this program tested? And where was it measured?” It hadn’t been measured, and it was published without being studied adequately enough in the beginning. I don’t blame that on my student at all, I blame it on the impetuousness of some military brass who said “It looks good! Let’s publish it! And let’s hurry to get this into print!”
So it was beautifully drawn up with nice little artistic drawings; and it called for 11 minutes a day, and it adds up to 60-100 calories a day, in the first three schedules that are recommended for middle-aged people.
Golf Not an Adequate Program
We must be a little more critical about these programs. I am in that business, and for 25 years at least I’ve measured the energy cost of many kinds of programs. I say that golf is NOT an adequate program compared to a continuous, non-stop program. Hour for hour, it’s worth just half of an ordinary straightforward, continuous walk. I have
said that golf is the best way to spoil a good walk!
I have said that in the sincere interests of a scientific approach; by having carefully metered the energy cost of middle-aged golfers who are fairly good golfers, we found that golf actually is a stand-around game about half the time. It’s a slow walk, although not many people walk anymore, they ride; and not many people chase the balls really, because they have caddies; and they do take an unproportionate amount of time to smooth the patch of grass down to get ready to make their putt.
So I say, unfortunately, some people stand on the green long enough to swell their blood vessels enough that I’m afraid that if they don’t look out these blood vessels may burst!
As you age you need to think about seeing your own image, and living in your own image, and having confidence and belief in your own image.
Look ahead 20 years. What is your image? I’m going to go one step beyond, and I’m going to say: You look at your image – if you can project your mind that far – 10 years ahead, and what is your image? And what is it 20 years ahead? And what is it 30 years ahead? And it isn’t so good if you look at the pictures that I have on file, because men lose their fitness in a very discouraging way.
Muscles Not the Answer
The personality has been studied, and I don’t think physical fitness is a matter of
building big muscles, but it is the conditioning of the blood vessels and nerves to the
cells.
I think I know enough about human biology to know that we inherit a certain number of brain cells, and you have to work with them, learn to improve them, yes, but you don’t get any new cells. And we inherit a certain number of muscle cells and so far as we know we don’t get any new ones.
What happens is a steady dying of cells in certain parts of the body, and a steady deterioration of the cells of the body. And this occurs in the blood as well as in the other tissues of the body.
What one must do, what one must fight to do, is keep those cells alive, working, functional cells. Now one can do this only by using the cells; getting blood and oxygen to them. Deprive any part of the body of oxygen very long and then the blood turns blue; the tissue begins to lose its responsiveness, especially the heart muscle. Then there is a lack of vigor in the tissue, and little by little some cells die. When cells die in an unproportionate way there is congestion there; and there’s a swelling usually; and finally, there’s a complete loss of function. There’s death in that part of the body; yet the rest of the body might be walking around. This goes on all the time
in people in the middle age span of life.
Now just as sure as you lose your fitness, then things like this happen: you accumulate fat; your metabolic rate gradually ebbs, and you burn your food less vigorously; you lose your muscular strength gradually and you lose muscle fibers; and your reaction time, especially the time to move the whole body, slows very appreciably; there’s a loss of motor fitness such as balance, flexibility, agility, strength, power, endurance. Now we have tests for all those components of motor fitness, and they’re steadily lost through the years of life.
Acuity Diminishes
There’s a reduction in speed and color discrimination; there’s a loss of accommodation to vision, in
the dark especially, and changes in the time required to focus the eyes; there is sharp reduction in the respiratory reserve.
We estimate that at 70 years of age the average man will have only half the respiratory reserve he had at 18. And this is true in circulation. We find from 18-36 years of age there’s a sharp reduction in circulation in the body, and 40-60 per cent of the circulatory turnover ebbs
away, and then it sort of eases out on a plateau, but at 70, a man has lost about half of the circulation he had at 18, and of course his function is quite proportionate with his circulation, mentally and otherwise.
There’s an increase in ligamentous strains, and traumatic injuries occur to the joints, especially, to bother us a great deal. We have trouble in the shoulders and we have trouble in the spine; we have trouble in the inguinal region (the groin) and we have trouble with our feet; trouble with our knees -there’s much trouble. I don’t call this the more serious trouble, really, but the increase in peripheral resistance is serious. The load steadily increases on the human heart, and the heart struggles to get the blood out and with it the oxygen and nutrients that are needed to preserve the vigor of tissue. Little by little this circulatory failure occurs; and we know that the circulation is quite inversely proportional to the peripheral resistance.
Peripheral Resistance Defined
Now I know that this peripheral resistance of which I speak is a vague thing in the minds of some; but it is a load that just presses down in the reverse direction to the blood flow. The aorta and all the attached vessels in the chest region become tenser, and they lose their resiliency; they lose their elastic rebound and there’s a gradual loss of efficiency in
moving the blood sent to the cells of the body tissues.
Now this aging means that blood vessels are thickening, picking up fatty materials, lipo protein materials as they’re called, and there’s a gradual loss of function in these tissues.
To measure a man’s physiological age, you have to test his ability; his function. None of us want to lose function. But we do. And there’s a steady loss according to these curves.
Now mental abilities are lost too, and when I said that the curves of deterioration turn downhill at 26, my psychological friends pointed out that a lot of their curves turned down at about the same time, 26. There was a loss of computational speed; there was a loss of memory; there was a loss of mental energy; there was loss of ability to adjust to new situations; and there was a loss of ability to relax. In some cases, it was harder and harder, in certain subjects at least, to even perform the mental tasks of reasoning that they had done in younger years.
Personality Deteriorates, Too
Now Dr. Brozeck, especially, has documented the deterioration of personality to show that just as
sure as you lose your fitness, and you go on this middle-aged down curve, certain things are going to happen to you. This is what happens according to the study:
You will lose your physical courage; You will become more fearsome of life; You will become more fearsome of many things; such as, your position; status, health, future
Well, all this tends to tense a man up a bit and make him more introverted than he should be,
Now there’s a pull back as men age, a pull back from the youthful vigour’s dynamic activities of life; and it’s very harmful. This pull back is blamed mainly for the loss of youthful status in these curves, and as you give up the use of the body you’ll find out it will deteriorate; but there are many aspects to it and it’s quite specific in certain areas.
As we age there will be a greater intro-version, preoccupation with money, competition and responsibility, and all this is expected as men age. But as these psychological pressures mount, there is increased tension, and there is poor blood flow. There is poorer and poorer nutrition regardless of what you put in your mouth. You may think nutrition is just made up of the chemical constituents of the food, the vitamins, or the minerals, the trace elements, etc., the carbohydrates, the proteins, the fats. This is not so! There is also a physiological angle. It is true that those materials, minerals and vitamins represent prerequisites. If your body is not capable of using those materials properly, in the right chemical sequence and pattern, you will fail, in terms of nutrition. Exercise is a wonderful thing to maintain this stability and balance in the nutrition. Many studies have been made.
I have collaborated at the University of Illinois with Dr. Raymond B. Catell, on a number of studies of personality related to physical fitness. It is pointed out, for instance, in one study where we ran a group of middle-aged men we measured the 16-factor personality test. We correlated each one of the 16 personality factors delineated by Dr. Catell’s personality inventory, and related each one to different fitnesses. Among those fitnesses, was, the
length of time a man could run on a treadmill. We found eight of the sixteen factors significantly correlated with just what we call endurance (time of the run).
Don’t brush endurance away. Because endurance is the best way to make circulation. And it’s the best way also to maintain these personality characteristics, and you may work long and hard to develop this wonderful outgoing positive, selling type of personality but let your circulation get bad enough and it will begin to fade away. That we see in the data.
Two Causes of Unfitness
Now the more sophisticated you become, the more difficult it is to become fit, and I see in the records two great causes of unfitness:
First: One is the ever-increasing mental requirements of life – it actually has a tensing effect. I work in a university in the middle of a very tense group of university professors, and I will say, if you think there is competition in your field, you ought to see it on a university campus too! I deal with these men and they don’t have much use for physical education, really many of them do not. They haven’t got time for it! But as I spoke of the Graduate School Dean, some of them don’t last very long either.
Second: Now the ever-increasing trend to live an easier life, to let the machines do
your work. One must realize that we are in an age of automation, and unless we are intelligent enough to counteract the loafing trend, we’re going to suffer increasingly from these deterioration diseases, and a great deal of research is at hand to show that automation, sedentary and confined living can make invalids of us; and kill us early. Now, anxiety will increase, and you should expect it to increase as you age. Your sensitiveness
to aesthetic stimuli will increase, and you will have a tendency to over-eat and over-drink a little bit more as you get older. You will become over-concerned with your status in society, and you will also notice, though, that there’s an ever-increasing amount of mental as well as physical fatigue. There will be a disintegration of what I call the MIND-BODY integration. I have always said that physical fitness is led from the brain. If you haven’t got it in the brain, the interest, the understanding, the education, the volition, you won’t get fit.
Very few can attain it without those qualities which are mental qualities. You must struggle to understand the physical fitness problem. It takes more and more understanding to get sufficient motivation to exercise.
Nervous tension is a great problem. Branch Rickey stood up to give his gratitude for being elected to the Hall of Fame. In the middle of his address his tension got quite high and he got quite emotional. Then he suffered a heart attack, and almost didn’t make the bench. About two weeks later he died. This heart attack was precipitated in the middle of his address.
Nervous Tension a Serious Problem
I have in my files at least three dozen cases of this type. I know of a professor who was retiring at the University of Wisconsin. In the middle of his retirement speech response, he suffered a heart attack. We’ve known many cases of this kind. Now, the mental tension in life is great. I say that it takes more than exercise. You have to learn how to combat this mental tension. When the President of the American College of Cardiology gets up in Chicago to give his annual address, and then he collapses in the middle of his address – the knowledge you see, does you little good unless you have conditioned yourself to resist the stress.
Now my friend, Hans Selye is one of the great authorities on stress physiology, and when in
Cologne, Germany, together, I teased him a little bit. I said: “Hans, you know I’ve read your books, that book you wrote about living with stress.
“It says that: ‘We are born and live our lives with a bucket of stuff called ‘adaptation energy’ . . . and we have collisions, we have frustrations, we have traumas, and little by little this adaptation to stress capacity which you say is hereditary, is gradually used up. And so the bucket becomes empty. And so we lie down and die.”
I said, “Lord Help me, if I couldn’t have a bit more positive philosophy than that! But,” I said, “I’m going to say something more serious to you. Actually you are rated as one of the great scientists of the world. And I’m going to say in my mind just personally to you, that you’re only half of a scientist. When you learn to fill the bucket-then you will fulfill the other half of the job, and merit the full title.”
The Positive Components of Health
Now I’m saying that medicine and the health sciences generally deal more with disease than they do with the positive components of health; that we herd people up in hospitals, and immobilize them, and incapacitate them and medicate them-in order to make them healthy!
Do you believe this?
So we come back to the great thesis “passive approach compared to the dynamic approach.” We should study how to stay Our of hospitals. We should study how to keep the body going, moving, doing, every day, and if you study it you will see then, as I think I do, the many of the benefits of this.I have said that physical fitness is a program that leads to the development of more energy, it leads to more life for a man’s years; it will make the body more attractive than it otherwise would be-you will even smell better! It will enable you to use the world, the outdoors, in a much fuller way.
We must struggle to balance the living, and not make it all intellectual; not make it
all occupational; not make it all a life of indolence, or a preoccupation with anything
whatsoever, it should be reasonably balanced; I would say after working and travelling all around the world, and having been in many countries, that I think the United States of America is still very infantile in its application of physical education and physical fitness-period! We think we know how to build up the physical power, capacity, ability of people! And we do it all the time. Most people know they should do it. But I suppose they want me to loan them a little character, or to wean them into it, as so many seem so helpless.
P.E. Poorly Taught
I have to say that it’s (physical education) very poorly taught in the school. If I took a group of
people like those in the audience and asked them to come to the gym and put on gym suits and show me for one hour, how THEY condition their body, and to show me so that they could demonstrate the main principles of a good physical workout; I wonder how many could pass? I would raise the question of how good a heart stroke they have. And it’s very important to have a good heart stroke. It’s very important to have open, functioning blood vessels. And yet most of us get ours clogged up far too soon.
How resistant are you to stress? We say that we train people in a physical fitness way to increase their resistance to stress. You want to look better; you want to look like you did at 25, well, how many of you would come anywhere near it?
I’m not so interested really in how you look. I’m more interested in how you move your blood; I’m more interested in how your brain functions; I’m more interested in how you maintain your personality characteristics. I say, “Let your nutrition get bad; let your circulation get bad-and all these wonderful leaves, these wonderful flowers that are on the tree of life, wither, and fall to the ground and die and rot-and so does man.”
Now we don’t know very much yet about building immunity to disease. I have never said that
physical exercise per se, will conquer or cure any virulent germinal disease. I have never said that.
I have some belief that some time in the future more might be found out about this;
I’m absolutely convinced myself that the immunity of certain diseases is manipulatable, is conditionable, by using the environment in a proper way, but we know very little about this, really.
Health Clubs No Guarantee
Once I went to Philadelphia to appraise a health club where men thought they could get fit by being massaged on marble slabs, in hot rooms, with soft, soapy brushes. I went there, and took all the treatments, and when I got through I reported to the Board of Directors that I saw nothing in the program that was very important to make vigour, to make
circulation, or to really condition the nervous system, or the muscles, or the glandular system or the brain. I saw almost nothing valuable to dynamic health there. I saw men who were just cultivating methods to salve their sensations, and it’s sort of nice to be pawed you know. There are some men who will pay a certain fee to have a pretty woman hold their hands, and I put some of the treatments in that category; it feels sort of nice.
Now you must realise that physical fitness is obtained by stressing the body; resting; nutrition; recuperation; and balancing the life so you can be psychologically at ease with the world. Relaxation is very important. I’m not on the side of putting the health in the cell and forgetting about the body the integration. I will give you one example.
I worked in a mental institution. And I had seated in front of me some people, just like an audience.
They were schizophrenic, and I stepped up and down on a bench and I said, “How many of you can do this?” I said, “Nod your head if you can do this exercise.” And everybody nodded their head. And I said: “Well now, come on! Join me! Come up and do this with me!” I couldn’t get a person off his seat.And so I said, “Maybe you didn’t understand me.” So I explained it again, and I demonstrated again. I said: “Now you said you could do this exercise; now come on, come on, some of you at least! Come on up here and join me!” Of course we couldn’t ever get anybody out of his seat.
There’s No Easy Way
You see there are so many people in the world today who want to be fit; they can’t be fit unless they realise that there’s no easy way. You must do it; and I don’t care
what you read about it; how much you talk it- unless you do it, unless you put in the minutes, hours, it isn’t going to work. It isn’t going to add up to enough calories. And I’ve pointed to the inadequate program that the American public is ‘salved’ with today. The newspapers and the magazines are prone to “make it seem easy” and it isn’t. People class me as kind of a toughy. I don’t want to be any tougher than I have to be to get the fitness. But I’m not easily fooled in this area, and I have tested many hundreds of people, actually many thousands of people in my career, so I’m not easily fooled. We rowed upstream because the program is not easy. It’s hard. I want to show you a little evidence about the program, and I would like to leave the discussion of it right here with this thought:
In this country today, there are 20,000,000 motor morons who can hardly lift a finger. They can’t pass the easiest of the simplest motor test that we put together. There are at least 20,000,000 of them.
There are 30,000,000 old people who are 65 years of age and over, who have lost the use of their
body, almost, I would say 80 per cent, 90 per cent; they’ve lost the use of their body and they haven’t been educated to hold onto it. Under 65 there are another 30,000,000 people who suffer from chronic ailments, and 14,000,000 of these have heart disease problems, and they have problems of mental disease and nervous troubles. There are all kinds of chronic diseases: obesity, arthritis and even the cancer problem; all degenerative diseases beyond a doubt. Many studies are being made in this area to show that exercise and balanced living habits are basic in their control.
But here are 30,000,000 people under 65, who don’t know enough, aren’t interested enough, in order to work enough, to stay fit. And they’re unfit if you test them.
Now then we’ve got these strata in our society and all told, it adds up to about half of the whole population.
Hospitals Not the Answer
So I don’t know whether the technique is right; as you say, “Let’s build more hospitals; let’s create more doctors; let’s get more nurses-and let’s take care of more and more people!” The first thing you know, there won’t be enough people left in this country to take care of the sick.
What I’m wondering is: Who’s going to do the work of the world? Who’s going to have the energy to run this place? Now look at the size of the unfitness problem and you’ll see a story that is the most critical. It’s almost a deplorable story-that a nation as great as ours could have conditions like some of these that are here.
Abilities Decline Rapidly
Dr. Anton Carlson, great physiologist, at the University of Chicago, said, that we develop in this country mentally quite all right. But at about 60, this decline occurs, and we drift rapidly towards senility. I’m suggesting to the people in mental hygiene that they learn how to maintain the fitness of people in this older age span, and there won’t be such a sharp drift towards senility. My own belief is they could keep a great many of them out of the mental
hospitals.
The reproductive function rises fast in this counry, but beginning here, at about 30, or thereabouts, it goes rapidly down hill.
The motor ability in this country, is only ordinary, and every time our children have been compared with children of other nations, we come out second best. And when we test groups of adults just taken out of American cities, it’s really quite a deplorable state.
Dr. Carlson put his great emphasis in this last area, that the nutrition and the metabolism fails much too fast, and underneath this is of course the associated failure of circulation and respiration.
I’m saying unless we attend to the maintenance of those functions we have almost no chance for the optimum life most of us would like to have.
The deterioration curves from the National Institutes of Health depict the failure of the heart stroke, in terms of vigor, velocity, acceleration, of what Dr.Rushmer has called ‘the initial impulse’ the `kick’ that’s in the heart stroke, and it steadily fades out of you. Parallel to this failure of the heart stroke there’s a failure of many other kinds of fitnesses such as:
The standard cell water steadily decreases;
The flow of plasma through the kidneys steadily decreases;
There’s a loss of oxygen intake capacity; There’s a loss of vital capacity;
The cardiac output per beat gets weaker and weaker.
And so there is a general trend toward what we call ‘loss of vigor’ and debility.
I would suggest to all of you, that one-half at least, of the control of health ought to be in this area. It shouldn’t be all germinal, and it shouldn’t be all indoor hospitalization.
Dynamic Approach to Health
The other half of the health at least, control of health, ought to be the dynamic approach.
When Dr. James Watts came to us from the National Heart Institute, and gave his speech, I said: “Dr. Watt, you’re looking at 200 people who believe that heart disease is virtually preventable. If we could bring people up to understand how to maintain their circulatory function, it would ward it off. It would postpone it; it would even in many cases, cure it! I think more consideration should be given to spend these many millions of dollars to prevent people from getting heart disease, instead of spending most of it to doctor the people so they’ll last a
year or two longer!”
Now, I tested 2,200 boys and men and plotted the test scores using an 18-Item motor test. It’s a balanced, good test. The peak goes up and hits a peak at about 05,26, then by
26 the curve is coming down; and this is the same as women’s curve. I would say that men and women in this country deteriorate in a parallel way, and that they live about the same kind of sedentary life. The machines are doing most of the work for women; and the machines are doing most of the work for men, and we’re well onto the way toward physical decay and, more and more as I said, infirmity treatments.
Now, 25 years ago I said at the center of all the physical fitness problems is the matter of maintaining the circulation; the condition of the heart, blood and blood vessels, and keeping up the circulatory and respiratory functions, and most of all conditioning the nervous system to bear stress; and keeping a good balance in the autonomic nervous system.
You have a physique, and of course, your physique is dominated in part by heredity. I don’t put such great stock in remaking a person’s physique, at least not to a great extent. I think we’re limited sharply there by the kind of heredity we have, but I would say that the proportions of bone, muscle and fat, do change, and we could keep an eye on that. After 25 years of age it’s important to watch the fat and see that it doesn’t increase, much.
Dietary Programs Often Misunderstood
But dietary programs which attempt to reduce the fat below a normal body type level amount are destructive programs and are not understood very
well,
We believe that there should be a constant effort to develop these basic components of the body and its ability:
-the balance and
-the flexibility and
-the strength, and
-endurance,
-the power,
-the agility.
Those are basic abilities that should never be lost in the scheme of fitness.
As you get older your sensory reactions will begin to wane. Your taste buds begin to disappear. You have less feeling in sexual sensation. Your skin even loses some of its tactical responsibility and its tactual sensitivity.
Now the skin is responsible for protecting the body, in a way. But as years go along, the skin loses its ability to do this. And you lose sensations in the toes, or numbness will begin to appear here and there. The skin loses its underlying fat and becomes very vulnerable to ultraviolet rays. Sudden exposure without gradual conditioning can become traumatic.
There’s a gradual loss of hearing, sight, and one can expect some of this. I contend that the
fitness program gives us an optimum chance to maintain the sensory sensations that we have, and
keep them at a desirable level all through life.
A lot of people say that physical education is plainly ball games and plainly sports. Well, I think
a great deal of sports, but I deplore the loss of understanding that people have of themselves. I
deplore the loss of a systematic scheme of training in the minds of people, so that they envision a good
way to get fit and go forward to do it. I have said that deterioration of the body is the worst disease there
is in this country today; because about 55 per cent of the people today over 40 years of age are dying of
deterioration disease, and are not dying of infectious disease in the oldest sense of medicine.
The deterioration curve of oxygen intake capacity which physiologists say now is the best general single test of fitness, and from 20 years of age there’s a steady loss of the ability of the cells of the body to use oxygen.
Cells Just Disappear
Do you know what some of this loss is? The cells just disappear! A lot of the muscle cells disappear. Some of the blood cells disappear. A lot of the nerve cells disappear. And so there is a loss of ability to use the oxygen. To a certain extent this is reversible, and we have data to show that this curve can be reversible. The flow of plasma through the kidneys parallels the other curve practically.
It is pointed out that collateral circulation that is developed through running can preserve the life even if some part of the artery gets clogged, there would be enough collateral circulation by passing to save the man’s life, and he wouldn’t die, even though he had a heart attack.
So we say, “Run for your life!” Running gives you the best dividend for the time spent, high energy work, it’s up at about 10-15 Calories a minute; and you carry your own body weight.
I point out that when you stand on a spot and do exercise the calorie cross goes down about 50 per cent. And when you lie down and do some relatively statical kind of exercise it drops way down below that.
Now the exercises which are the best are the continuous, rhythmical exercises, which will add up to about 300 to 500 calories of workout. You need exercise every day-if you eat-and it is the exercise basically which pushes the greatest amount of blood through the system.
Having worked on this for a long time, I can say that it is essentially those exercises which are rhythmical, continuous, non-stop exercises, which we champion.
We recommend that you do research on Google to find suitable exercise programs using the aforesaid principles, find one that suits you, is affordable, and can be implemented into your day to day living.
Don’t brush off the exercise in your life, but seek
to get a balance, and seek a rhythm that will permit
an optimum living and adjustment to the stresses of
life.