Every day I see them … the committed fitness buffs out jogging to keep their bodies lean and their cardiovascular systems running at peak potential. Obviously, they’re getting that all important ninety minutes daily of cardio “they” insist is for our own good.
So why is it that most of them appear to be in exquisite agony? I don’t have to be near them to know that their footfalls slap the surface they’re running on even though I’m in my car with the windows rolled up. They plod along with lolling transverse abdominals, hyper-extended or hyper-flexed low backs, side-to side-shifting on varus femurs with duck feet and thrusting heads leading the way down their selected path.
“Why are you running when you haven’t learned to walk?!” I demand of the hapless, miserable looking “healthy” person who will never hear me. I fight the urge to stop my car and give them a tip or two along with my card to stop the madness.
I shake my head and drive on.
Most trainers and exercise buffs teach/get validation from their reflection. Everyone wants a “six pack” to punctuate the mirror muscles they spend endless hours in the gym pursuing. The usual result is a pretty exterior housing a highly dysfunctional movement package. Too much training of these “pretty-me” muscles (which are flexors of the skeletal system) can lead to chronic injuries, pain, and internal organs literally collapsing on themselves, impairing their function.
Paul Chek maintains “training, not draining” our bodies. He is fond of saying that “pain is your body’s idiot light. That means stop, not push through it to get stronger.” After nearly thirty years of being around the more-is-better fitness fanaticism, I find I enthusiastically agree and my fifty-one year old body is proof of it. Why the experts continue to recommend ninety minutes of cardio-based exercise daily without considering what happens to a body on sub-par fake food, inadequate clean sources of fat and protein, hours of training, and go-go-go lifestyles stumps holistic conditioning practitioners like me. Aerobic exercise is high-density (not synonymous with intensity) movement that mostly uses slow twitch muscle fibers and can bring on buckets of sweat. The more you sweat, the harder you’re working, the fitter you are, right?
PREVIOUS PAGE
