Authors: John Robbins
Is it possible to exercise too much? Yes, there are some people who exercise so obsessively that they do not listen to their bodies’ needs for rest and end up repeatedly injuring themselves. They become so addicted to exercise that it comes to take the place of almost everything else in their lives, including relationships with other people. Perhaps they get hooked on their own endorphins, opioid pep-tides that are produced in the body during long, continuous and strenuous exercise. (The word “endorphin” is an abbreviation of “endogenous morphine,” which literally means “morphine produced in the body.”)
In his book
Exercise Fix
, author Richard Benyo discusses exercise addiction at length. Benyo apparently knows what he’s talking about. He was the second man to run across Death Valley (the lowest place in North America and one of the hottest places in the world), climb Mount Whitney (the tallest mountain in the United States outside of Alaska), and then run back.
Of course, the number of people who suffer with this problem is negligible compared to the number whose health is suffering greatly, and who will suffer all the more in the future, as a result of being too sedentary.
I have a friend who leads a very busy life and rarely exercises. You probably know people like her. She repeatedly tells me “I just don’t have time for it.” I notice, though, that she manages to make time to go to frequent appointments with doctors, and to pick up her prescriptions at the drugstore. She is not well, and I am afraid that if she keeps not finding time for exercise, she may all too soon find herself in a deepening health crisis that leaves her unable to do many of the things that she loves to do.
A kind of physical passivity can take people over in our society. The less you move, the harder it becomes to do so. But as Edward Stanley put it way back in 1873, “Those who think they have no time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.”
Okinawa is the birthplace of karate. It is also the home of Seikichi Uehara, who at the age of ninety-six was still teaching a rare karatelike martial art (mutubu-udundi). And he wasn’t only teaching; he was still extraordinarily proficient, as he demonstrated on January 1, 2000.
On the first day of the new millennium, Seikichi Uehara, only four years shy of 100, was featured in a New Year’s Day boxing match that was televised throughout Japan. His opponent was Katsuo Tokashiki, a thirty-nine-year-old former World Boxing Association flyweight champion, also from Okinawa.
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Quite a spectacle unfolded.
The bout began with the young boxer, nearly sixty years the junior
of Seikichi Uehara, punching powerfully and repeatedly at the elder martial artist. But his blows never landed. The old master, displaying amazing flexibility and agility for a man his age, kept evading every punch the younger man threw at him. Deftly twisting and turning, he managed to avoid the lightning-fast blows of the powerful former world champion boxer. This continued for more than twenty minutes, during which time the older man never sought to strike a single blow. The young boxer, Tokashiki, was becoming increasingly exasperated and fatigued.
Eventually, a moment arrived when Tokashiki dropped his guard. At that instant, the Okinawan elder martial artist deftly landed one quick blow, knocking the boxer off his feet, and the match was over. It was his first and only punch of the match.
As the young boxer left the ring in a daze, he kept shaking his head in disbelief, muttering, “I can’t believe it! The old man beat me! I couldn’t hit him!”
Tokashiki was stunned, but not injured. It was clearly the intent of the elder martial artist to defeat but not to hurt him. The philosophy of the martial art of mutubu-udundi teaches avoiding confrontation, and calls for striking only after all other options are exhausted.
When Seikichi Uehara later spoke of the match to researchers conducting the Okinawa Centenarian Study, he laughed and said, “It was nothing. He was just too young and had not yet matured enough to defeat me.”
The performance of this ninety-six-year-old man presents quite a contrast to the prevailing experience of aging in the West, where most people think it inevitable that as they age, their muscles will weaken, their reflexes slow, their eyesight deteriorate, and their physical coordination plummet. Seikichi Uehara is no doubt extraordinary even by Okinawan standards, but his example speaks vividly of the human potential for healthy aging.
Though we don’t see a lot of it in our sedentary and super-sized culture, it’s entirely possible for people in the modern West to retain high levels of physical fitness if they eat well and stay active. If you’re
looking for a good example, you might consider Tom Spear of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He provides another illustration that growing older doesn’t have to mean falling apart.
Tom is one of the subjects who have been thoroughly studied (and whose ages have been unassailably confirmed) by the New England Centenarian Study. He celebrated his 103rd birthday by making ten jars of crab-apple jelly, then going dancing. He was still cooking and cleaning for himself and tending his huge vegetable garden, and was in his eighty-seventh accident-free year as a cab driver.
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Although he misses his wife of seventy years, he still has much to live for. “I take great pleasure in accomplishing things,” he says.
At the age of 103, Tom Spear plays eighteen holes of golf three times a week, and consistently shoots fifteen strokes under his age. The teaching professional at the golf club where Tom plays confirms that Tom can still hit a three-wood 180 yards. Featuring an accurate short game, he recently shot an 84 to win a fifty-five-and-over tournament in Calgary. Some of the “elders” he defeated in the competition were nearly fifty years younger than he was.
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When it comes to exercise and health, the name “Jack LaLanne” has long been virtually synonymous with fitness. For many decades, Jack has inspired millions to live a healthful life.
But Jack LaLanne didn’t start out as a model of health. When he was a teenager, he dropped out of school for a year because he was so ill. Shy and withdrawn, he avoided being with people. He had pimples and boils, was thin, weak, and sickly, and wore a back brace. “I also had blinding headaches every day,” Jack recalls. “I wanted to escape my body because I could hardly stand the pain. My life appeared hopeless.”
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Then he met the pioneer nutritionist Paul Bragg, who preached a new way of living, and to his credit, Jack listened.
Bragg asked Jack, “What do you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”
“Cakes, pies, and ice cream,” Jack answered truthfully.
“Jack,” Bragg replied, “you’re a walking garbage can.”
He pointed young Jack in a healthier direction. That night Jack got down on his knees by the side of his bed and prayed. He didn’t say, “God, make me the strongest man in the world.” Instead, he asked for a new beginning. “God, please give me the willpower to refrain from eating unhealthy foods when the urge comes over me. And please give me the strength to exercise even when I don’t feel like it.”
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Jack set out to see what he could accomplish with a good diet and exercise. He found a set of weights and began to use them. He ate only the most healthful of foods. He developed exercise equipment that evolved into what has become standard in many health spas today. In 1936, he opened the first modern health club, paying $45 a month for rent in downtown Oakland.
Jack LaLanne touted the value of exercise and nutrition long before it became fashionable. Many people thought he was a charlatan and a nut. When he encouraged the elderly to lift weights, doctors said this was terrible advice. They said it was a good way for the elderly to break bones. But now, of course, we know that weight-bearing exercise is precisely what is needed to build bone strength and
prevent
elderly bones from breaking. He was among the first to advocate weight training for women. Doctors said women who tried it would not be able to bear children. Now we know that regular exercise is one of the best preparations for childbirth. Over the years, he’s been vindicated a thousandfold. His television programs have brought his ideas to hundreds of millions of people and helped change the way we all view health and fitness.
It has been said that without eccentrics, cranks, and heretics the world would not progress. I don’t think Jack LaLanne is a crank, but he is most certainly an eccentric. On his sixtieth birthday, he swam from the notorious Alcatraz island prison to San Francisco while handcuffed, towing a thousand-pound boat. “Why did you do that?” people asked. Jack’s response: “To give the prisoners hope.” (The prison has since closed, and today Alcatraz Island is a U.S. National Park Service attraction.)
On his sixty-fifth birthday, Jack LaLanne towed sixty-five hundred pounds of wood pulp across a lake in Japan. On his seventieth birthday, he celebrated by towing seventy rowboats with seventy
people on board for a mile and a half across Long Beach Harbor, all while handcuffed and with his feet shackled.
He said his purpose in these phenomenal performances was to demonstrate that a healthful lifestyle can work wonders.
Having pioneered health and fitness gyms in the United States, Jack is gratified that physical fitness and nutrition have become a huge growth industry worldwide, because he believes that the emphasis on exercise and a healthful, natural diet creates stronger, smarter, and better people. “With healthier citizens,” he says, “we unburden society from sickness, and reduce the medical bills that are draining people’s savings and causing so much grief.”
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Having enjoyed his ninetieth birthday in 2004, Jack is living testimony to the value of regular exercise and a healthful lifestyle. He used to be a vegan (no meat, dairy, or eggs), but though he still eats no dairy products—“anything that comes from a cow, I don’t eat”—he now occasionally eats egg whites and wild fish. Mostly, he eats organic raw fruits and vegetables. And he takes lots of vitamins.
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His vibrant message is that it’s never too late to get in shape. “Those who begin to exercise regularly, and replace white flour, sugar, and devitalized foods with live, organic, natural foods, begin to feel better immediately,” he says. He emphasizes that it takes both nutrition and exercise. “There are so many health nuts out there who eat nothing but natural foods but they don’t exercise and they look terrible. Then there are other people who exercise like a son-of-a-gun but eat a lot of junk.…Exercise is king. Nutrition is queen. Put them together and you’ve got a kingdom!”
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Now in his nineties, Jack LaLanne is still a model of fitness and vitality. Full of life and spirit, Jack’s one-minute “Jack LaLanne Tip of the Day” pieces are now shown on seventy television stations. As energetic and flamboyant as ever, he and his wife, Elaine, speak all over the world, inspiring people to help themselves to a better life, physically, mentally, and morally. Jack and Elaine have been married for fifty-three years.
Jack was recently asked if he thought he’d live to be 100. His answer was to the point. “I don’t care how old I live! I just want to be
living
while I am living! I have friends who are in their eighties, and now they’re in wheelchairs or they’re getting Alzheimer’s. Who
wants that? I want to be able to do things. I want to look good. I don’t want to be a drudge on my wife and kids. And I want to get my message out to people.” He smiled. “I tell people, I can’t afford to die. It would wreck my image.”
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He was once asked about George Burns, the famous comedian who made it to 100 though he smoked cigars, drank alcohol, and was not health oriented. Jack, it turns out, knew George Burns well, and he answered, “George Burns was more athletic than you think he was. And he was a very social man. He loved people, he enjoyed life. He worked at living. Old George was a social lion, he got around and did things. That’s the key right there. It starts with your brain.”
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Jack LaLanne is a man of great accomplishments. But perhaps his greatest achievement is that this once painfully shy and sick young man has learned to love people and to love being alive.
The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.
—Doug Larson
W
hen George Burns was in his nineties, he received a letter saying: “My husband and I are senior citizens and we still care about each other. Is it okay to make love in the 90s?”
George replied: “I think it’s best around 70 or 75. If it gets any hotter than that, I turn on the air conditioner.”
Like Jack LaLanne, George Burns understood that the greatest misconception people have about the aging process is that it’s synonymous with decline and illness.
Like a fish unaware of water, we move about in a world of invisible assumptions. We usually don’t realize how pervasive are such negative beliefs about aging. We take them for granted. And we unconsciously pass them on to our children.
Witness, for example, “Secrets of Aging,” which opened at the Museum of Science in Boston in 2000. Billed as the first comprehensive exhibit on the topic of aging, the exhibit drew more than a halfmillion visitors in its six months in Boston, then toured nationally to other museums throughout the United States. The most popular
component of the exhibit attracted long lines of children. It was called “Face Aging.”
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After waiting in line, each youngster sat down inside a booth and had his or her face photographed by an automatic camera. After another wait, the child’s digitized portrait appeared on a TV monitor. Then, by tapping a simple keyboard, each youngster could rapidly call up simulations of what he or she would “look like” at various ages. By tapping quickly, the series of stills could be made to run almost like a movie. The series of “photos” went up to the age of sixty-nine.