In praise of the bicycle

[System Builder 0]

When I was 40 (or yornger) I could do 16 to 20 mph on bike for trips 20 miles long. I used to commute by bike.

Ruveyn, I am very curious to know how you dealt with a problem that I know I would face if I were to ride a bicycle that far and at that pace for daily commuting to work: perspiration. Normally any aerobic exercise lasting long enough to provide an aeorbic benefit involves a lot of perspiration, particularly during hot and humid summer months. Did you take a shower and change clothes every day upon arrival at your work destination? If so, have you included the cooling off and showering time in your estimates of total commute time from home to work? Or were you, perhaps, in a line of work (maybe outdoor construction) or in a region of the world where showers and clean clothes are not as important as they probably would be to typical American office workers (particularly in offices where suits and ties are the norm for men, with comparable standards for women)?

I am 75 years old. I think that is why my time has increased....

Even so, my resting pulse is 55 beats per minute and my blood pressure is 115 over 65. Not bad for an old fellow. I recently had a cathaterization which revealed not a bit of blockage in my old heart. I have collateral circulation up the ying yang since I have ridden bikes since I was 4 years old.

I also do some weight work just to firm up the parts.

You truly have my hearfelt congratulations for being so active and in such great physical shape at that age. You've worked hard for it and have achieved impressive results!

[ruveyn ben yosef 0]

Ruveyn, I am very curious to know how you dealt with a problem that I know I would face if I were to ride a bicycle that far and at that pace for daily commuting to work: perspiration.

I carried a change of clothes and there was a shower available to the help. I would get in a little early so I would have time to wash up. I store my sweaty threads outside with my bike and all was well.

The bad news is that I cojuld not do the commute in pouring rain (visibility and traction problems) and forget about riding in the winter in Mass. The roads were never plowed to be dry enough. So I could bike-commute for about seven to eight months out of the years.

ruveyn

[RayK 0]

Normally any aerobic exercise lasting long enough to provide an aeorbic benefit involves...

Normaly any so called "aerobic" exercise does very little to enhance the body and nothing for the heart. The term aerobic is actually used to describe one of the many metabolic pathways of which it cannot even run without the substrate pyruvate from the anaerobic pathway. Steady state activity ("aerobics") will have a slight effect on substrate delivery but the activities low intensity will not be sufficient to produce any other metabolic adaptations.

Whether in business or in one's personal life people are searching for the most efficient way to achieve their goals, except exercise. I do not understand the rationale from people that state how much of their life they have wasted attempting to acheive a goal that could be obtained much more efficiently. I do not hear or see anyone stating that it took them months, years, or decades to achieve something that could have been achieved much sooner, and if they did they would most likely be out of a job. But, not in exercise where people give it almost heroic proportions if they can claim they spend hours, days, weeks or years in an activity that produces almost nothing physically, except the eating away of one's lean body tissue in the process.

[ewv 0]

The bad news is that I cojuld not do the commute in pouring rain (visibility and traction problems) and forget about riding in the winter in Mass. The roads were never plowed to be dry enough. So I could bike-commute for about seven to eight months out of the years.

ruveyn

For several years I bicyled to work every day, year round, day and night, in all kinds of weather in Mass. In the blizzards I did better than the cars.

[System Builder 0]

I've been looking more closely at the seemingly incredible conditioning and health claims expressed so strongly by Ray Kilmer. I am greatly intrigued, and I wonder if Ray would be willing to elaborate on a few points.

I am going to be 40 in just a few months (I do recognize the age difference [compared to Ruveyn, age 75]) and my stats are as follows, 100/60 blood pressure, 48-50 pulse rate, blood sugar level of 80 and a total cholesterol of 146. And I accomplish all of this by exercising 5 minutes a week, that translates into 260 minutes or 4.3 hours per year. Now if extreme lengths of exercise were needed to be healthy, why am I and almost all of my clients doing so well? One more example for you, I have a 38 year old client that has been training with me for 8 months, just one workout per week. She also follows my three fundamentals of a proper diet and in the months since she began she has been able to lower her cholesterol from 220 to 188, that is a drop of 32 points, with similar amounts of exercise. Who is the one really working toward becoming more efficient?

On perusing Ray's website, I found that his "Progressive Exercise" program apparently is based on the use of Nautilus equipment. I also noted that weight loss and control is highlighted as a key benefit of the "Progressive Exercise" program. I must say that I completely fail to comprehend how Nautilus exercise of only 5 minutes (or 20 or 30 minutes) per week can do much of anything for weight control. How can it possibly burn off all the excess calories that too many people should not have consumed in the first place?

On searching Ray's postings further, however, I found that Ray evidently would agree.

Ruveyn, whether you want to recognize it or not, exercise has no direct cause effect relationship with one's health. People that exercise are healthy and unhealthy. People that do not exercise are healthy and unhealthy. A person might be able to increase their functional capacity through exercise but this has nothing to do with their health. The real reason to exercise is because the body begins to deterioate after maturation. So, if we are going to keep our functional capacity we need to stimulate the body to retain it's muscle or gain new muscle. But, being able to ride a bike for miles does not prove that you are healthy, it only proves that your body has made specific adaptations to implied demands or what some people call, the "training effect."

"Most of the improvement in functional capacity due to exercise is not even directly related to the heart. It is due to an effect on the peripheral muscle cells whereby they more efficiently extract and use oxygen from the blood. Dr. George Sheehan, the "guru" of running [explains]....

Ok, so what is the basis for any weight control benefit from the "Progressive Exercise" program? I noticed a very offhand mention of something else in Ray's first excerpt above, something that Ray calls "my three fundamentals of a proper diet." I couldn't find any further explanation of the "three fundamentals" on Ray's website or in his postings in the "Bicycle" thread, but I managed to find an excellent elaboration in another Forum posting by Ray in another thread (here). Evidently one of the key "fundamentals" is careful restriction of calorie intake. Now that is something that I can readily understand as having significant weight control benefits. But doesn't that really just confirm that nutrition, not exercise, is the most importantant factor for long-term health? I can see how exercise can be beneficial, too, as Ray has explained, but the benefit of exercise (prevention of muscular deterioration with age) evidently is really just secondary and supplemental, not primary (though perhaps nevertheless a very important supplement).

I also wondered if Ray's "three fundamentals of diet" have anything to do with the nutritional recommendations of Dr. John A. McDougall, M.D., which I have been following myself since 2001 (with excellent results for weight control, greatly improved digestion, and, over time, improvements in respiratory and skin health). From Ray's description, however, I can see that there is virtually no correlation. Ray does not advocate anything like the comprehensive plant-based diet that Dr. McDougall recommends.

On the other hand, one observation by Ray does correlate well to Dr. McDougall's observations: the human body cannot utilize animal proteins directly to meet human protein needs. Rather, the human body breaks animal proteins down into amino acids, then resynthesizes the amino acids into the human proteins that a human body needs. Dr. McDougall goes on to ask (implicitly): why force the body to break down animal proteins at all? Why not get amino acids directly from plants, the way so many animals do? More information on Dr. McDougall's recommendations can be found on his website, http://www.drmcdougall.com, and in his two main books, The McDougall Program and Digestive Tune-Up .

I have another question for Ray regarding exercise: your website implies that it is possible to provide exercise counseling to clients outside the Las Vegas area by phone. Is access to Nautilus equipment (or similar equipment) essential, or can other forms of exercise suffice? Apparently bicycle riding is of little or no value, and jogging may be too physically stressful, and simple walking many not be intense enough. How about swimming? Or weight lifting (in moderation) if one has a barbell and dumbells? Can anything substitute for the muscle-preserving benefits of Nautilus equipment?

[RayK 0]

System Builder, I am glad you found the information intriguing and will attempt to answer your questions.

To begin, a person does not need Nautilus equipment to get the advantages of proper principles of exercise. But, Nautilus equipment does enhance the obtainment of the goals a person is trying to achieve. Arthur Jones designed Nautilus with a cam that is called a "variable resistance cam" which allows the person to have a constant demand against the muscle that increases in resistence and lowers in resistance as the person moves through their range of motion. When a person uses free-weights, in comparison to Nautilus, they will notice that when doing a bicep-curl and in a contracted position (at the top of the movement) the weight is almost nothing. When a person uses Nautilus equipment the amount of resisitence varies as one moves through their strongest and weakest positions. With all this said, a person does not even need motion to stimulate positive adaptations, a person does need to lift against a very demanding weight, or in other words, workout out as intense as possible.

So, intensity is the primary principle that must be sought if a person is going to stimulate the most positive adaptations. To stimulate any positive gain from one's exercise a person must push the body intensely enough to get the body to sense one's resources are not enough to withstand the abuse that was just applied. If we can use an example from economics it might be more helpful. If you owned a company that manufactured jeans and your plant produced more than enough resources/jeans to fulfill the markets demands you would not waste your limited resources producing another manufacturing plant to produce more jeans when the one you have produces more than enough to fill the markets demands. If you were to build another factory you would soon go out of business for wasting all of your limited resources. We, as humans, did not get to this point after millions of years of evolution by being inefficient. Our bodies are amazingly efficent and hence why it is so hard to stimulate an adaptation.

The intensity of the workout sets the next two principles, of which one is duration. When the intensity is raised high enough to stimulate the positive benefits it will by it's very nature become short in duration. Intensity works in adverse relation to duration which in general means the more intense the shorter the duration. As I have said before, a person can stand out in normal temperatures (60 to 80 degrees) without much difficulty. But, when the temperature becomes colder or warmer, and from our example much colder and much warmer, the duration in these extremes will automatically drop. Basically, what you and I see as a positive, lean body tissue, the body senses as another demand on our limited resources and will not make the adaptation without a proper, intense stimulate of short duration.

The third principle of exercise is frequency. Once a person has worked out intense/hard enough to stimulate a change they have to give the system time to make those changes, which cannot happen overnight nor in just a few days. Another example; let us say that you have cut your arm and require stitches. Would it do you any good to go back to your doctor the next day or even 5 days later and ask them to take out the stitches? I hope your response is no. Well, we are not just attacking/stimulating the muscle, we are stimulating full systematic adaptations. The tendons have to become denser, the ligaments have to become denser, the bone has to become denser, your endocrine system has to make adaptations and create an immense amount of new hormones to not only help the recovery of your body, but also the growth of new tissue. You metabolism makes adaptations, your central nervous system makes adaptations. I hope you are begining to see that although you are only directly attacking the muscle, it is the whole system that has to make adaptations to the stimulate which I have found takes days to not only recuperate but grow. So, the growth process requires that we workout intense enough to stimulate the positive adaptation, which by the very nature of intensity it must be short in duration and infrequent to allow for the growth.

If exercise does not play a large part in weight loss, then why exercise at all? Let us use another example from economics or business. Let us once again say that you own a company that (in this example) is begining to have monetary difficulties. Which department do you start laying-off people from if all the different departments are not being productive? You might choose to lay-off a few people from each department as all of them might have inefficient people in them. Now, instead imagine you have one department that has productive people that are generating a profit, you might choose to lay-off people from other departments and keep the productive/profitable ones as they are truly needed. Let us translate that to the human body. When a person uses diet (calorie restriction), alone to stay lean or lose fat, every department starts to shed resources that are not sensed as needed. A pound of fat cost the average person between 2 to 4 calories a day to maintain. A pound of lean body tissue cost the average person about 20 calories a day. If you could discard a bill that you had to pay for the rest of your life, which one would it be, the $2-4 bill or the $20 bill? Well, your body cannot think so it does not act toward a long-term goal, it is going to reduce you of the most demanding entitiy, your lean body tissue. But, if you are giving the body the proper stimulate (intense exercise) it will shed the non-productive extra fat and keep or even build lean body tissue, such as muscle.

The average human does not need large amounts of protein and as a matter of fact the average male only requires about 70 grams of protein a day. But, our bodies do not make distincitions between where the amino acids are derived from. And as I have mentioned before the body can use the energy from carbohydrates to synthesize new protein. It also does not make distinctions between where carbohydrates come, nor fat. Our bodies do not make moral choices where any of the resources come from, it uses them or converts them into what it needs at that specific time. And every single piece of food we put into our mouths puts a demand on our metabolic system which subtracts from our longevity. But, as I have stated before, their is no logical reason not to enjoy our foods, any foods, as long as we take them in within rational amounts.

As I have stated earlier, intensity is the primary principle for stimulating a positive systematic change and Nautilus equipment is not needed. So, a person can stimulate changes by working out intensely and then increasing the intensity to generate new lean body tissue or even to retain it once a person reaches their genetic capacity. But, how does a person know they are increasing the intensity when running, biking, swimming or other forms of activity, and how does one do this in a way as to limit the risk of injury? A person could attempt to lower their time in all the items I mentioned but to do that a person also has to increase the forces upon the human body with no way to control the risk of injury. Example, the average 150 pound person generates about 120 tons of force from one mile of running. Imagine that type of force mulitplied over a life time and an even higher amount for the person that attempts to run faster and faster.

I hope this answers your questions. If I have not clarified any specific points please do not hesistate to ask more questions.