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Zusatztext Debra Waterhouse! M.P.H.! R.D. author of Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell If you're one of the millions who want to get fit but can't find time to fit exercise into your busy schedule! Dr. Glenn Gaesser has the solution...The Spark will ignite the fit person within you. Informationen zum Autor Dr. Glenn A. Gaesser and Karla Dougherty Klappentext Change Canadian Price to $18.95 on the Cover Chapter One: What Is the Spark? On May 10, at 1:12 P.M., Jon Krakauer, one of the survivors of the ill-fated 1996 Mount Everest expedition, made it to the top: 29,028 feet above sea level, the highest point in the world and the intense, shining focus of the past two months. He stayed at the summit, one foot in China, one in Nepal, for approximately ten minutes. It's an old cliché that academics in ivory towers are not in touch with everyday folks. You wouldn't necessarily put exercise physiologists in that group. After all, we deal with activity: we're out there on the tracks, in the parks, at the gym. You'd be wrong. We might run up those ivory towers two steps at a time, but we still inhabit them. This revelation came to me in 1999, a year after I had convened with my fellow academics of the American College of Sports Medicine to establish the new fitness guidelines for maximum health and longevity. It was then, in a series of conference calls, e-mails, faxes, and meetings, that we proudly and concisely compiled research, statistics, and data that had accumulated over the past eight years. Our recommendations? Perform intense aerobic workouts, 20 to 60 minutes at a time, 3 to 5 times a week, combined with 2 to 3 times a week of both strength-training and flexibility exercises. You've heard this all before. These guidelines have formed the basis of countless magazine articles, books, gymnastics programs, "join this gym" inducements, even infomercials. So what's the problem? Well, let's put these recommendations another way: Intense, sweat-inducing exercise. Twenty minutes to a full hour. Three to five days a week. Spend your days off lifting weights. And find an hour somewhere in there to stretch. Now, there definitely are individuals out there who would -- and who have -- embraced these guidelines. There are people who exercise at least three days a week at an intensity that would make ice burn. I'm one of them; it's my business and my passion. But it's certainly not a way of life for most Americans. It occurred to me after that day in 1999 that our fitness guidelines were completely unrealistic. That our "ivory tower" mentality encouraged people to start an exercise program over and over again, only to fail and become even more sedentary than before. That our unrealistic expectations motivated people to join health clubs and never set foot in the places after the first three months. In other words, these guidelines, constructed by myself and my colleagues with the utmost commitment to the health of all Americans, have actually contributed to making Americans five to ten pounds heavier than they were a generation ago! But there's more. Not only did we ask Americans to carve out a good portion of their harried week, we also asked them to be patient. All the studies we used to compose our fitness guidelines of course showed significant improvement -- but only after following an exercise regimen for three months or longer. Finally, the third and last revelation hit me: Each study, detailed and meticulous as it was, concentrated on only one or two elements of fitness at a time. There were studies that concentrated on cardiovascular health. Aerobic capacity. Strength training. Flexibility and joint range of motion. Metabolic fitness and weight loss. But there was no one study that combined all these different aspects of fitness to see what...
