Ultimate Fitness
The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
The bestselling science reporter for The New York Times tells us what works and what doesn't when we work out
Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health is Gina Kolata's compelling journey into the world of American physical fitness over the past thirty years. It is a funny, eye-opening, brow-sweating investigation into the fads, fictions, and science of fitness training.
From the early days of jogging, championed by Jim Fixx— who later died of a heart attack—to weight lifting, cycling, aerobics, and Spinning, Kolata questions such popular notions as the "fat-burning zone" and "spot reducing," the effects of food on performance, how much exercise helps build fitness, and the difference between exercise to help the heart and exercise to change the body. She explains the science of physical fitness and the objective evidence behind commonly accepted prescriptions. Along the way she profiles researchers and mavericks who have challenged conventional wisdom, marketed their inventions, and sometimes bucked criticism only to back down from their original claims.
Ultimate Fitness spotlights the machines and machinations of the fitness industry, and cuts through the marketing and hype not only to assess what is healthy, but also to understand what our obsession with staying healthy says about American culture today.
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Everyone knows that exercise is a good thing. But when New York Times science reporter Kolata (Flu) set out to investigate the claims of various fitness regimens, she found that "the tiny pearls of good science are buried in mountains of junk." Much of the accepted wisdom about exercise, it turns out, is false from the belief that endorphins cause an exertion-induced euphoria to the notion that all individuals, with sufficient effort, can become fit. An avid devotee of "spinning," a type of stationary biking that mimics actual road conditions, Kolata brings both personal enthusiasm and journalistic skepticism to her subject. She traces the history of the fitness movement from the ancient Greeks through the 18th and early 19th centuries, when feats of strength and endurance became a popular means of entertainment. By the 20th century, increasingly sedentary living prompted a new interest in fitness: the jogging fad emerged in the 1970s, followed by aerobics, weight lifting and other activities. Kolata looks at hard data about exercise, but also interviews enthusiasts and promoters, whose devotion to their regimens sometimes transcends the available facts. People exercise for different reasons, Kolata finds. For improving overall health, moderate exercise appears to be sufficient. To improve physical appearance, intense effort is required. To reach a sense of exhilaration and strength, however, one must actually love physical exertion for its own sake. The "truth" about exercise, Kolata concludes, may lie in the view of psychopharmacologist Richard Friedman, who suggests that "exercise is more often a marker of health than its cause." Illus. not seen by PW.
