The Kiev Gym

At CNN's website there's a very cool collection of photos by Krill Golovchenko of an outdoor public gym in Kiev, Ukraine. It was built in the early 1970's. As you'll see, it's pretty crude because it was built with scrap metal, chains, ropes and old tires.

But you'll notice that this gym produces the same physical challenges and muscle definition you'd find in any fancy gym in America.

You also can't help but notice that these people are focused on their exercise, not their outfits. No spandex and $120 workout shoes. The man below swinging a sledge hammer has sandals on. His muscles don't care.

This gym is open at no charge to the public. People of all shapes, sizes and ages use it.

This photo collection demonstrates how basic fitness really doesn't require very much when people have the desire.

And it begs the question that in a rich country like ours with a runaway epidemic of heart disease and obesity, why isn't there one of these in every city in America?



For the Rest of Your LIfe

The prestigious Institute of Medicine and several federal agencies are teaming up to produce an HBO documentary on obesity called "The Weight of the Nation." No doubt it will be well done, but you can predict that it will have lots of shots of unidentified fat butts and academic talking heads portentously announcing that, for the first time in US history, many of our children and grand children will live shorter lives than previous generations due to poor food and sedentary lifestyles.

Frank Bruni wrote an insightful piece about the documentary and obesity in the NY Times. The most important line in his article is the one with the words, "...we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly than we seem poised to do." I think what he really means is that we need to make more fundamental and rapid changes than our policymakers and institutions are ready to make because they are slow to react and pretty much under the control of agribusiness. That or they are as ignorant as many of the rest of us.

Recently I was at a conference on workplace wellness in Colorado. Knowing I'd have to battle traffic going into the conference center in downtown Denver, I skipped breakfast because they were going to serve breakfast before the opening session. I figured at a wellness conference I could count on finding some good protein sources, like eggs and sausage, because a solid breakfast goes a long way towards stabilizing blood sugars for the rest of the day.

What a surprise to find the offerings consisted of deadly choices like high carb granola and bagels, i.e., sugar once out of the gut and into the bloodstream and low fat yogurt with 26 grams of sugar! I remembered that when I read Bruni's article. I also remembered that the keynote speaker was a PhD Director from a recently constructed obesity research center that would house some of the top scientists studying the problem. He said something very odd: that we should all be patient with the fast food industry because they are trying to come up with healthy alternatives. Really?

The exact opposite is true. Yep, the obesity epidemic has many causes - sedentary lives in front of computers, kids ride rather than walk to school, the stress of long commutes, etc. - but a MAJOR cause is fast food that's laden with sugars, chemicals, and carbs. This food is carefully engineered by PhD's like the pudgy CEO to fire the dopamine receptors so people crave the food just like addicts crave cocaine.

Many of the MDs and PhDs who are experts in the obesity field are as in the grip of Big Food as a mouse being slowly killed by boa constrictor. They end up being apologists for corporations that they should condemn.

What Bruni intimates (correctly) is that there needs to be a massive shift in our social norms. A good place to start would shun industrial fast food just as we do tobacco. Industrial food should be exiled from houses, work cafeterias, and public buildings. This cause will not be lead by many academics or government institutions because their research funding and government largess depends on keeping these powerful, and often vindictive, political forces placated and fixated on their stock prices.

Don't wait for the big institutions to tell you what you need to do, which the people in them often don't do themselves. You can start to make better food choices right now. More fresh foods, more organic, more grass fed. Tell your family, friends, and co-workers why these foods are better and invite them to try it. Your example will inspire more people than any documentary with a bunch of talking heads.







        

Blood, Sweat and Tears

A couple weeks ago, Bob, a friend of mine and practicing member of the Wellness Club, went for an after-work mountain bike ride. Nothing too technical, just a nice up and down loop to work up a sweat after sitting in front a a computer all day.

Nearing the top of an incline, he realized he didn't have enough momentum and decided to dismount and walk the last few feet. Coming to a stop, he went to put his right foot down, but his shoe cleat wouldn't separate from the pedal, and he fell over sideways before he could get it freed.

Anyone who has ridden trails on a mountain bike knows this happens all the time, and you usually get a scrape or bruise. But when Bob went down, he realized something was different about the fall and pain. He pulled himself up and could see blood spurting out the side of his leg. He looked down and realized he had impaled his leg on the jagged stump of a small tree. Using his cell phone, he called his wife, who was waiting in line at a health food store, and explained his situation. (Thanks to Bob for this picture - ouch!)

He managed to glide back down to the trail head, where his wife picked him up and got him to the emergency room just in time because he was starting to go into shock. After numbing him up and giving him a relaxant, the ER doc stuck his latex-covered finger into the wound all the way up to his knuckle, and then called a general surgeon for a consult. They decided to clean out the deep puncture wound as best they could and not sew him up in order to avoid infection by letting the wound heal from the inside out. They packed it with a ribbon of gauze and sent him home with a prescription for some narcotics to ease the pain.

Bob's healing well and getting off the pain meds, but he can't do much physical activity yet, and this is hard on him. Several years ago and headed towards 50, he decided to get rid of his beer belly by getting in really good shape. He watches what he eats and exercises hard every day, rain or snow. He's a great example of the benefits of eating the right foods and working out regularly. When people bring crap food to work, he avoids it. He's broken through to the fitness side.

When you become really fit, you form an addiction to exercise. If you don't do it, you miss it. You feel sluggish, tired, overweight, anxious, depressed. You crave exercise. That's where Bob probably is now, but won't be for long. He'll heal and be back out there soon.

If you exercise hard (do more than walking), there's always a risk of injury. Usually, it's something minor like a strain, sprain, or abrasion. When you push a little harder like Bob and most TOJs do, the risk goes up, especially if you're fatigued and try to do that one last rep or run a little faster than you ever have before. We all have a boundary that we shouldn't cross and, if we do, will get injured. Part of the challenge of getting fit is knowing where those boundaries are. And almost all people who exercise hard will get injured at one time or another.

The day Bob got hurt, he hadn't reached one of his physical boundaries. He had an accident out on a trail that really had nothing to do with fatigue or pushing beyond limits. Being fit and tough from falling other times helped him be able to get to a place he could get some help.

A couple days after he returned to work, he ran into one of his fellow workers, who's young and very overweight. She asked Bob why he was limping. After briefly describing what happened, she said, "THAT's why I don't exercise."

Over the long run, guess who's at most risk between the two of them? Emergency Rooms are no fun, but they beat the hell out of Intensive Care.