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Title: Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise by Gina Kolata ISBN: 0374204772 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.75
Rating: 1
Summary: It Sags in the Middle
Comment: 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.
Rating: 2
Summary: Flabby tales of fitness
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: Creepy, bizarre world of spinning taken waaaay too seriously
Comment: She's no Eric Schlosser, this book is bizarre. The guy who wrote elsewhere in these reviews that it's a "Hooray For Gina!" book is so right on the money. This is a Type A Baby boomer's quest for the perfect way to complete her four-hour spinning marathon inside a suburban gym, and she knows her curiosity and digging a little deeper will net her some cash as she and her publisher figured there are enough others out there like her who want to know as well. Oh, and there are.
It's too eager and strained and takes itself far too seriously.
Funniest line (not on purpose) is when she's recounting the story of the guy who started spinning heading a 12-hour marathon (sadly without all the cheerleading pep talks from the front of the room), and 10 hours into the ride he tells everyone to go outside and get some fresh air.
But they're all puzzled 'cause the windows are open.
Eric Schlosser would've made a joke about the strange obsession and disconnection suburbanites have with "fresh air," but Gina didn't get it. They thought he was weird....some kind of strange solo athlete type (who actually goes outside)...
...The kind who actually goes outside to excercise instead of riding a bike and having a teacher push you over a microphone??? Schlosser probably would've gotten the guy to admit he can't believe his winter bike training method has morphed into a neurotic suburban mom sport and is now drinking himself silly as he's a big joke among "the boys" or something.
This is just too bizarre. If you're an over-achieving yuppie type obsessed with indoor climbing gyms or any other indoor excercise and heart monitor gadgets, this is up your alley.
But for the rest of us who're looking at our watches waiting for the baby boomers to get old and in bed already and stop with their silly little "we've gotta live forever" fads, Cliff notes would be better. Or some kind of women's magazine article you could flip past.
If you're curious, wait for it at the library.
--Erika
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Title: Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp ISBN: 1582432252 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser ISBN: 0618164723 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Total Renewal: 7 Key Steps to Resilience, Vitality, and Long-Term Health by Frank Lipman, Stephanie Gunning, Dennis C. Williams ISBN: 1585422290 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 24 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Female Athlete's Body Book : How to Prevent and Treat Sports Injuries in Women and Girls by Gloria Beim, Ruth Winter ISBN: 0071411755 Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books Pub. Date: 02 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser ISBN: 0618334661 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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