Physical Fitness: Facts and Fictions

The positive health claims associated with body-side or physical fitness such as intense aerobic workouts and strenuous weight training are real—but they are overstated and oversold for marketing purposes.

Research done by Dr. Steve Blair from the highly regarded Cooper Institute, showed the following:

• Most physical fitness health benefits result not from strenuous or high intensity aerobic workouts—but from mild to moderate intensity exercise.
• There are few health gains to be made by doing much more than walking briskly for 30 minutes five or more days a week.
• You can break things up and do two periods of fifteen minutes or three of ten. And you can substitute walking with biking or swimming. The key is frequency and regularity—you have to do it often to reap the health benefits from aerobic exercise.

Lifting weights does help maintain muscle mass and strength as we age, but research has shown that the claims that weight training improves our metabolism or prevents osteoporosis are not based on solid evidence. Lifting weights in proper alignment can be a beneficial part of an overall fitness program. But weight lifting isn't the only option. There are other more convenient and less risky ways to effectively build muscle strength and muscle mass.

Most important to long term body fitness and health is musculoskeletal alignment. Your joints, muscles and bones need to be properly aligned, if you are to avoid getting into trouble as you age. Lifting weights and doing aerobic exercise in the wrong postural alignment can cause you serious problems, problems that often won't show up for years. Unfortunately we often don't know we're in bad alignment until its too late—pain and disability don't show up early in the process of chronic misalignment. We can create dysfunction and perpetuate it over time without realizing what's happening. As physician and musculoskeletal expert Dr. Paul D'Arezzo tells us, "Loss of physical function sneaks up on us like an environmental poison".

MESICS training includes carefully integrated programs that you can use conveniently throughout your day, programs that build optimal musculoskeletal alignment along with strength, stamina and flexibility—in both mind and body. To summarize celebrated spine and back care and mindbody fitness expert Dr. Arthur White's ideas, we don't need to go to the gym all that often to get fit—our home and our life is our gym—if we know how to train properly.