Physical fitness fascism

Jack LaLanne, the physical fitness guru who died last year at the age of 96, started working out with weights when they were an oddity, and in 1936 he opened the prototype for the fitness spas to come— a gym, juice bar and health food store— in an old office building in Oakland.

"People thought I was a charlatan and a nut," his New York Times obituary quoted him. "The doctors were against me— they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive." But LaLanne persevered, and he ultimately found a national pulpit in the age of television.

Today we have come full circle. Over the past generation few subjects have been more pontificated about than exercise. Mens sana in corpore sano is all very well, but the fitness fiends are so damned earnest about the corpore part. Not content to radiate their own cherubic wholesomeness and nauseating willpower, they want to convert everyone else, too.

These muscle missionaries assume a self-righteous, fitter-than-thou attitude that can exhaust us sedentary types to the point where the very mention of physical exertion collapses us into the nearest armchair. Or, as Robert M. Hutchins once wrote, "Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes away."

Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago at the age of 30— presumably because he was exercising his brain when his competitors for the job were exercising their bodies. (The same quotation is also attributed to Mark Twain, who wrote Huckleberry Finn and Innocents Abroad when he could have been lifting weights.)

Edgar Wallace's example

The American lawyer-politician Chauncey Depew went a stage further, claiming that he got his exercise acting as pallbearer to his friends who exercised. He lived to the age of 94.

The problem is that for most of us exercise is a bore— and more people probably get bored to death than die of physical inactivity. If you're impatient, walking seems a waste of time.

The crime novelist Edgar Wallace boasted that he never walked more than four miles in a year; he used the time saved to produce literally hundreds of plays and novels. Where would detective story addicts be if Wallace had spent his days on the Stairmaster at the Y?

Perhaps it's time for those who urge fitness and temperance on us to look more closely at what they're doing.

Is jogging fun?

In a world hell-bent on hedonism, asceticism is an unsalable product and the monastic way of life has limited appeal.

It's no use telling us that exercise, like spinach, is good for us. We want to have fun, for heaven's sake. Who laughs when they're jogging?

Tedium seems to be endemic to most fitness programs. Traditional sports have been largely handed over to professional entertainers; horses are for betting on rather than riding; and we've become watchers rather than participators.

Health club dropouts

Some people feign exercise by driving motorized golf carts, shouting jaunty nautical terms from behind the wheel of a powerboat or riding the ski runs on snowmobiles. They persuade themselves that they're keeping fit when all they've done is remove their backsides from one chair to another.

Gyms and health clubs derive much of their income from members who join, go three or four times, then quit. The reason, presumably, is that people weigh their double chins and bulging midriffs against hours of aimless lifting and trotting and decide to continue, albeit a little out of breath, along a hell road paved with their good intentions to take some exercise— some day.

The medical profession could make a real contribution by putting its collective mind to the very worthwhile business of making exercise interesting and enjoyable. Many of their weak-willed and waiting patients, including me, will at least make the physical effort to bend an elbow and raise glass in thanks— assuming, of course, that our elbows haven't yet atrophied.♦


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