Fitness camp
16 May 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Susan and Laurie drove up for an informal fitness camp. For folks who come up on a repeated basis the agenda becomes more spontaneous. The day had morphed from thunderstorms into perfection and Laurie lamented that she hadnt bought her kayak to speed-skim the high mountain lake hidden in the Catocins by Camp David. No matter, we stuck close and decided to power walk the circumference of the old Renfro farm, my default cardio trek spot. The ladies wore their heart rate monitors to access what exactly (if any) physiological impact our walking and hiking would have. Having fun is one thing but unless there is a certain level of cardio intensity the activity is worthless, at least insofar as triggering any type of adaptive response that results in physical improvement.
Optimally when we perform an exercise mode we want a return on our time investment. Cardio exercise can burn off calories, improve internal organ function, increase endurance and offer a whole bonanza of physical benefits assuming the intensity is decidedly above mall walking pace. I suggested we seek to operate within a certain quantifiable range: no less than 70% and up to 85% (or more) of age-related heart rate maximum. We started off having to transverse 1000 yards of hilly open fields what better time and place to toss the Frisbee? I have a particular type of professional Frisbee that allows me to toss 200-yards on a consistent basis. You should have seen those ladies burning rubber to catch and throw that Frisbee. The rapid fire toss, run, catch, throw again activity is deceptively taxing but exhilarating. You need to sprint hard in order to shag the ring on the fly and by the time we got to the cusp of the ridge surrounding the farm, both had spiked their heart rates to 80% to 90%. I put the ring away and we got began circling the steep hills of the farm.
I took 40-minutes to circumnavigate the farm. The air was incredibly pure, post-thunderstorm. There was a spooky mist drifting off the trout stream. On the final steep rise heart rates spiked and each marked the peak number. Exactly 60-seconds after stopping on the crest we took a second heart rate reading and compare the 1st reading to the 2nd a precipitous drop is considered good. After an elite athlete spikes his/her heart rate, the heart beats drops precipitously. That is a good sign; if a person is in good physical condition once the exertion is past, the heart rate returns to normal quickly. Conversely if someone is vastly out of shape it takes forever for their heart rate to simmer back down to normal after extreme exertion. Both Susan and Laurie had drops in excess of 20-40 beats. Real good. When threw the Frisbee for a final slog before climbing back into the jeep: both had generated heart rates in excess of 75% of age-related heart rate maximum and had fun doing it.
Because our mode was an enjoyable, off-beat way to generate a serious training effect, theyll likely seek to replicate and repeat the pleasurable experience. This is a long, long way from the self-imposed drudgery of pedaling away, gerbil-like, on an exercise machine in a commercial gym breathing stale recycled air doing something that is more a chore than a joy and more a responsibility than a passion. I saw a movie on Oscar Wilde and they had a scene where he was imprisoned in Redding Goal for being gay and getting caught he was sentenced to two years hard labor. The authorities had invented a mindless device for inflicting hard labor. The manacled convicts stood in a long row atop a circular stair step that rotated as they all stepped on the same rung together. All day long they would mindlessly step up and around, on and on, with no purpose and no talking.
I walked into Golds Gym about 10-years ago and when I entered the room there was a long row of identical cardio machines and on every cardio machine was a grim-faced fitness devotee mindlessly stepping away, with no apparent purpose and apparently no talking. It seemed to me at that instant a fitness equivalent of Redding jail each machine user desperately sought to be distracted from what it was they were doing: several wore walkman CD players, several watched the TV screens strategically placed for organized distraction, two read magazineseveryone is pumping like mad and trying to take their minds off what they were doing just as the manacled convicts no doubt created mental distractions to take them away from what is was they were doing. Contrast this to our outdoor nature walk.
You become so absorbed in the combination of exercise and scenery that the whole activity takes on a transcendental quality no one was having any transcendental experiences at the fitness equivalent of Redding jail. Are you having fun with your cardio? If you figure out how to inject fun into the exercise equation you end up wanting to do more of it more often.
PS I have a suggestion: what if some enterprising young capitalist could figure out a way to place generators in every aerobic machine nationwide. We could devise a method to quantify the time spent pedaling or rotating the treadmill and then convert that into a wattage-generated number. We would then pay the machine cardio user a small fee on their way out of the gym. Stop by the desk and pick up your .83-cents. The cumulative power output of all aerobic machines nationwide would be enough to provide the people of Pittsburgh free electricity for an entire year.
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