The Meaning and Purpose of Exercise

 The reason for exercise as a vital activity is to enhance and optimize the circulation and therefore the functioning of the human body — so whatever achieves that, has served its purpose — whether realized or not. Child’s play will accomplish that — but on the other end of the spectrum, when one is greatly limited or constrained, a superior understanding of that process does much better in achieving the maximum benefits at the least cost. That is a major concern among the aging Baby Boomers who belatedly realize that simply doing what the 20 year olds are doing, is not enough to remain youthful. If it was, then as many naive “certified” instructors recommend, one should lift as heavy as possible because “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” Instead, such misguided advice may lead to death or permanent disabilities — long before the miraculous promised results manifest.

So the first requirement in designing a proper fitness regime, is to eliminate the risk of injury and damage as much as possible — including speed of movement, or explosive movement — like sprinting, one rep maximum lifts etc. — all of which I’ve seen highly recommended as the keys to the Fountain of Youth and well-being — while ignoring or denying their dangers. In fact, many well-intentioned people who finally decide to embark on a fitness program, actually experience some kind of trauma in their initial experience that they don’t return, and resign themselves to the consequences of doing so.

That is very unfortunate because most of what these physical educators think is necessary, is simply not so — but that was what they were taught, and have never questioned, although adopting more contemporary jargon that makes it seem more scientific and well-researched. However, the ultimate test of any truth, is one’s own experience (experiment) with it — no matter how much the “promoters” claim otherwise. That includes the doctors who thoughtlessly recommend to a legally blind 104 year old that she should walk for half an hour each day — in an urban environment. Thus each day, while I was living in a 55+ complex, I would have to pick this person up after falling just getting outside her door, and recommend that she’d be better off just remaining in her apartment and simulating the full range foot movement while holding on to the back of a chair — in the safety of her own residence.

I don’t know if the doctor ever realized that encouraging a blind person to walk for 30 minutes outside her apartment every day was virtually a death sentence — considering the uneven sidewalks, and vulnerability to anybody looking for an easy prey. That is a well-known problem of urban environments today — that must be taken into consideration, but that does not preclude all the other possibilities for achieving those positive health effects — when one looks beyond the unnecessary and arbitrary — to the essential understanding of its requirements.

Movement effects circulation not because of gravity — but because of the pressure differences produced in the alternation of the muscle volume from contraction to relaxation — which pushes the blood and fluids back towards the heart, while the heart unfailingly pumps blood out towards the extremities of the body. Thus the lack is not the failure of the heart to pump, but the problem of inadequate pumping that occurs in inactive movements and lifestyles — which don’t have to be violent or extraordinary — but determined by the difference in one state of the muscle from the other determining the rate of flow. Conversely, a muscle contracted that never relaxes, impedes that flow, as much as a muscle that never contracts — which is usually discernible as movement.

The genius of the Nautilus machines by my friend and mentor Arthur Jones was that in designing his machines, he figured out in which position the muscle in isolation and rotating (moving) around a single axis, had to be contracted and where it had to be fully elongated (relaxed) — and more than lifting weights, that movement from one extreme to the other, effected the flow. But he determined that the maximum demand was produced by the focus on the shoulder and hip girdle involving the most and largest muscles — placing an extraordinary demand on the heart to accommodate, which is why it was experienced as the most demanding and stressful exercise one could possibly do — and for that reason, could not be sustained for more than a short cycle of around six weeks — which was the length of most studies.

Then they extrapolated that if such training could be sustained indefinitely, one would have remarkable gains — well into older ages, but almost everybody would have abandoned such training style from injury and the lack of inability to recover, or died of a heart condition. So I thought, how can such effective principles be applied for lifelong sustainability — even beyond 100. You make the muscles at the extremities work harder rather than the heart — beginning from the axes at the wrist, ankles, neck — which are the well-known sites of atrophy and functioning exhibited by most older people in an inflamed state by which they report as arthritis in the hands and feet, and more contemporarily, deteriorating brain function I noticed was associated with the lack of head movement as well.

But the most amazing thing was that the full extension and flexion of those areas, required the similar state of the supporting muscles proximal to the center of the body, where the heart is located — providing the perfect complement to the circulation problem. That is the fallacy in the thinking that all that is necessary to optimize the circulation for optimal health is to make the heart work harder and faster — instead of realizing that the proper focus should be of the movements at the extremities, which most exercises and exercise equipment ignore the importance of — and so the circulation is only optimized to the heart, while the critical organs at the extremities — including the brain, grip and balance and left to fend for themselves — and in many cases, die unattended deaths — while he heart alone goes on for another 20–30 years!

Now some are claiming that the “soleus pushup” is the second heart of the body — because in articulating the full range foot movement while sitting (and thus bearing no weight), it has that specific function — but that is also true for the extremities at the hands and most importantly, the brain — where even the brain specialists and dementia experts maintain that circulation makes absolutely no difference to that continued optimal functioning — as long as the heart is merrily beating away — as though that was all there was to it.

Thus the emphasis of exercise and movement is entirely misplaced — and simply doing more of what is not the solution is not going to make the problem go away. But when one identifies the proper vectors for study, then it becomes clear on why the human body fails in its characteristic way — despite whatever effort(s) are placed in that way. The obvious signs are the atrophy and deterioration at the neck, hands and feet — that when addressed, maintain the health of the rest of the body — because nothing else is possible.

Training to Failure

  You can’t train to failure with heavy weights; you can only train to failure with light weights. Failure is just that — the momentary inability to lift even the most minimal weight. Drop sets were the beginning of this evolution. It’s not the weight one begins with — but the weight one ends with that denotes failure. And so when one begins with 100 lbs, and can do no more, they drop the weight down so that one can continue, and then drop the weight again, etc. But that is a very labor-intensive way of training — particularly for the spotters who are removing the weight, and ensuring that the trainee is not killed when the muscle fails — with a heavy load. That’s how many people get killed, crushed or disabled.

But one knows that every repetition will decrease one’s subsequent momentary ability — unless they are resting overly long for a complete recovery — as in the case of the many trainees who are actually lifting only 1% of their time while resting 99% of the time — which are obvious in their results. Arthur Jones’ original thesis was that a person moving from one exercise to the next with as little rest as possible produced sufficient failure throughout the musculature that the body would be forced to adapt and grow. But the mistake all the subsequent high intensity people made was increasing the resistance rather than moving continuously from repetition to repetition that is only possible using lighter weights — as Sandow did a hundred years earlier.

That’s also how the concept of “pre-exhaustion” came into play. Each repetition done in this nonstop manner, made the muscles exhausted for the subsequent exercise — until the point of total muscular failure — at which point one could not go on, and frequently required up to a week to recover from. And thus the claim that high intensity exercise of this quality, must be brief and infrequent, while producing superior gains because they triggered the need for actual improvements in the recovery.

Where most people get it wrong is in thinking that cardiovascular failure is muscular failure — because in the use of too heavy weights, breathing is constricted and prevents them from continuing after the first three or four reps — because they are not breathing in a manner that will allow them to sustain their effort. But rather than weight-training and cardio (aerobics) being diametrically opposed, weight training with light weights is the superior cardio workout because the contractions of the voluntary muscles at the extremities complement the autonomic function of the heart to optimize the circulation rather than working against each other in the manner many are “conditioned” to think is desirable.

One wants all cylinders firing in the same direction — and not each canceling out the effectiveness of all the others in a zero sum game.

Exercising Full Range of Motion (Movement)

 The great advance of Nautilus machines in the early 70s was the claim that it provided "variable (proper) resistance through the full-range of movement" -- thinking it was resistance that was of paramount importance, rather than the much more simpler observation, that increasing the range of motion in every movement -- is the resistance, and that ultimately, is what one is trying to increase, while simply increasing the resistance, tended to foreshorten the range of movement.

One observes that to be particularly true of aging and deteriorating people -- yet what is invariably advised, is to add more weight (resistance) to the exercises -- thinking that is the missing ingredient -- rather than the lack of range in that, and every movement.  The classic example is the person advised to walk a mile or 20 minutes each day while merely shuffling their feet with virtually no articulation at the ankle joint.  A far more productive movement for such an individual, would be to sit in a tripod chair (readily available at Walmart and recreational stores for camping), and do the movement known as the alternating calf raise -- because with no weight to support, the full range of articulation can be expressed at the ankle joint -- because there is no resistance against it.

This is a very important concept in productive exercise for health considerations above all else -- which becomes far more important as one ages or is rehabilitating an injury.  The last thing one would want to do is add further injury -- at which point safety becomes a paramount concern.  Otherwise, one is simply worsening the condition -- rather than improving it, as one hopes to be doing in one's exercises.  Many people quit or forswear exercise for the remainder of their lives precisely for that reason -- that those exercises recommended merely increase the possibility of further injury, discomfort and pain -- even by the "experts" on such matters.

Fortunately, in exercise, there is such a thing as self-evident truth -- that is available to everyone, and not just the self-proclaimed experts of such jurisdictions.  Plainly something works -- or it doesn't -- in the real life scheme of things.  One then is the picture of health and not just what one would want everyone to believe.  So it is often said, "You're in pretty good shape for an old guy" -- implying that person looks like they are declining rather than improving in health.  How much they lift or how fast they run is belied by their obvious appearance --even as much as they try to distract from those obvious signs of decline.

Those are very obviously exhibited at the extremities of the head, hands and feet -- as indicators of the effectiveness of the circulation to those areas.  That must be measured at the extremities and not at the heart -- but of course, it is much easier to measure the heart than it is to measure the circulation at the extremities.  For that, one would more likely rely on the visual condition at those extremities to see off hand if those organs look in tip-top condition, or are inflamed and swollen -- indicative of stagnation of fluids at those sites rather than the presumed circulation.

That circulation is effected and enhanced by voluntary muscular movements (contraction/relaxations) producing that physical flow -- at the axis (joint) at which that articulation is triggered.  The design of skeletal (voluntary) muscles is that a muscle contracts from the insertion (distant) towards the origin (proximal) of that muscle -- but then when it has gone as far as it can go in that contraction, triggers the contraction of the supporting muscle at its insertion to cause the chain-reaction we see as the coordinated movement we are most familiar with.

That is by Nature's design -- proven over millions of years in millions of life forms -- to result in its own state of the art in humans, which is as far as we've come up to now.  That has been the evolution of life forms -- from the most primitive and basic one cell organism, to the most highly evolved, complex, and intricate.  Most notably, are the features in humans of a large brain, complex hand and foot development that allows for the possibility of doing many things -- like reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as music, art, athletics, dance, etc.

Those are invariably expressed at the head, hands and feet, and why the appearance of health at those areas, are the first clue to the overall health of that individual -- whether we want to admit it or not.  Many people are in denial that those are the obvious indicators of the health and qualities of such individuals -- but would be well-advised to trust those first impressions because they are so visible and obvious.  Swollen hands and feet indicate poor circulation even to the most undiscriminating.  Bloated faces and atrophied necks are that same condition to the area of the body that should be top priority in optimizing those critical conditions -- rather than taking for granted that nothing can be done for it.

That would not be how Nature in its right mind would work.  It would not allow a person doing biceps curls all day to develop 18" arms while having no provision for developing the brain in a similar fashion.  Improving the flow of vital nutrients to any area of the body is enhanced by first producing the space (vacuum) in which the new has room to enter.  That is done by contracting (compressing) the residual fluid out so that the new can enter -- just as is the underlying basis of Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

It doesn't matter how forcefully one blows into an already filled lung; more air cannot enter, and even that which can, has no way of entering the lowest branches of the lungs where there is an exchange of gases between the lungs and blood vessels.  Lungs are not simply a simple air sac but means branched tissue.  The one becomes two, the two four, four eight, etc., which is how the simple becomes complex.  It is not that it sought out to be as difficult and complex so that nobody could ever crack the code, or mystery underlying it -- but we fail to get to the simplicity iterated as much as necessary.

There is not one set of rules governing the functioning of the head, and another for the hands, and yet another for the feet -- to all the specialists' delight and profit, but singular basic rules that apply to all.  And that would be that if one increases (optimizes) the flow of inputs to any area, that organ has access to all the nutrients that produce its well being -- but it must follow the rules governing the movement of fluids, which requires physical (actual) movement, and not merely imagined mental exercise.

Such exercise will have predictably no effect on improving human development and capabilities.