•  Fitness & Nutrition

Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Exercise and Health
By Gina Kolata
Farrar, Straus &Giroux
288 pp $24

A few words on losing weight: Eat less!

On becoming fit: Off the couch, dude!

On cheating death: Best of luck!

There: Slacker that I am, I've used just nine words to ham-handedly sum up a few of the key points made in nearly 300 well-researched pages by Gina Kolata. Of course, when I deliver them, they're about as compelling as they are when spouted ad nauseam by physicians, gym teachers, smugly in-shape coworkers, and any health-club gorilla who knows how to use a towel and a combination lock.

When Kolata makes the same statements, though, she carries an authority that the rest of us lack. She's a science writer for The New York Times, and she's a world-class skeptic when it comes to even seemingly innocuous claims promoted by the health and fitness gurus of the moment. Kolata is also an exercise fiend who belongs to three gyms, totes her running gear everywhere, and has never met a Spinning class she couldn't turn into an out-of-body experience.

Kolata's book Ultimate Fitness is not a guide to becoming ultimately fit. At its best, it's a hard-headed examination of the lore -- much of it disguised as science -- that propels millions of Americans as they strain, sweat, and spend in the name of better health. There's an awful lot of baloney between the slices of whole wheat, and Kolata zealously exposes it.

At health clubs, for instance, members are often told they'll burn more fat in a moderate workout than in a tough one. The message is alluring to people with pounds to spare and a few hundred dollars to part with: "Hey, this won't be so hard after all!" The take-it-easier concept is even enshrined on many exercise machines, which feature on their computerized gauges a "fat-burning zone" just above what might be called the "barely-can-fog-a-mirror" zone.

Too bad it's all wrong, Kolata tells us. Every exercise physiologist she confers with confirms her commonsense suspicion: The "fat-burning zone" is an urban legend that has taken on the trappings of truth. Kolata even located the physiologist who came up with a related notion now immortalized in charts on every gym wall and even in medical texts: Your "maximum heart rate" during exercise equals 220 minus your age.

To Kolata's astonishment, the formula was meant only as a rough guideline -- not as the precise measurement often used by serious athletes to gauge their progress via wristwatch heart monitors.

"I've kind of laughed about it over the years," Stanford University professor William Haskell told Kolata. "It's typical of Americans to take an idea and extend it way beyond what it was intended for.''

With painstaking research -- the prose can sometimes require heavy lifting on the reader's part -- Kolata punctures other fitness fallacies. You've heard that exercise can increase your supply of HDL, the "good" cholesterol? It can -- by maybe a point or two.

If you're relying for knowledge on the attractive young people working as trainers in health clubs, you might think again. Kolata's grown daughter became a "certified" trainer by paying about $500 and taking a multiple-choice test. Continuing-education exams are also required. Sample question: "True or false: Fatigue is not a goal during warm-up."

The history of exercise, it turns out, is really just one crazy thing after the next, with nobody knowing much for certain. Runners in the early 1800s trained on a breakfast of mutton, stale bread, and flat beer (much the same way I prepared for morning classes in college). In today's marathons, volunteers dole out water at each mile marker, but as recently as the 1960s water was illegal in races, seen as an unfair performance enhancer. Barely a generation ago, exercise was taboo for heart-attack patients, who were forced to lie abed for weeks; now, after a few days, they're practically hitched up to wagons and trotted out of the hospital.

When Kolata wrote her book, she was immersed in Spinning, an arduous form of stationary cycling to music. The centerpiece of her effort was a four-hour Spinning session meant to simulate a trek up Mount Everest. She tells us how she trained, what she wore, what she ate, what she drank, and how she felt when a dry-ice mist wafted over the Spinning room:

"It lingers in the air, ethereal, making it easier than ever to be transported out of East Brunswick, New Jersey, and into a world where all that matters is to keep pushing the pedals, watching my heart rate, letting the music help take me into the athlete's world. I am unaware of the others in the room; all that matters is this intense effort and this determination not to let up."

I know the effort that requires. I take a couple of Spinning classes a week, and at the end of 40 minutes I thank God that the sweat-sodden, rubber-kneed, bone-tired mess I've become can totter away relatively whole. Even so, Kolata's Spinning adventure failed to grease my chain.

The problem is that it lacked dramatic impact. The late Jim Fixx wrote about the way jogging changed his life, turning him from lard to lean. In Kolata's case, she merely went from firm to firmer, from A to A plus. That's hard to accomplish, to be sure -- but so is reading about it.

Its saving grace, though, is that it serves as a graphic answer to the question implicit throughout Ultimate Fitness: Given that such a surprisingly meager amount of information about exercise has been proven by scientific research, why then does Kolata, the ultimate skeptic, even bother to lace up her sneakers?

Two reasons, we learn. The first is that exercise -- the vigorous, sweaty kind that soars beyond the so-called fat-burning zone -- helps her keep extra weight off. And as we see in Kolata's accounts of her walks and runs and weight lifting and, especially, Spinning, the second is that it makes her feel really, really good.

The good news is that you don't have to be as obsessed as she is to benefit. While moderate exercise -- say, a brisk 30-minute walk daily -- will help you shed only a pound a month without changes in your diet, it could make a marked difference in your overall health and feeling of well-being, Kolata points out. In fact, studies have shown that the people who get the most out of exercise programs are not the superathletes, but the folks who start as couch potatoes.

Similarly, Kolata is bullish on working out with weights, pointing to scientific evidence that it can "improve muscle strength, make everyday life easier and prevent falls."

Will any of this help you live longer? The short answer is: Nobody knows. Will it help you live better? If you could knock Kolata off her Spinning cycle long enough to ask her, she'd give you a definitive "yes."

-- Steve Chawkins is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.

First published August 5, 2003
Last updated October 28, 2008
Copyright © 2003 Consumer Health Interactive

Back to top of page