Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Little is known and respected in martial arts and film circles as the world's foremost authority on the life and philosophy of Bruce Lee. He is the author of The Warrior Within, which offered the first formal presentation of Lee's philosophy. In 1998, Little produced, directed, and wrote the score for Bruce Lee: In His Own Words, which won the prestigious Toronto World-Wide Short Film Festival award for Best Documentary. Little's shooting script for this film resides in the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, California, a branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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Body by Science

McGraw-Hill

Contents

Chapter One

Strange as it may sound, fitness is a state that lacks a precise definition. Most of us use the term without really knowing what it is we're talking about. The fitness industry offers no definitions, nor does the medical industry.

A similar problem arises when one attempts to obtain a valid definition of health. In preparing to write this book, we looked extensively into the scientific literature, including many medical textbooks, to seek out a definition. We were surprised to discover that the terms health and fitness—while bandied about liberally within the fields of medicine, health care, and physical training—have never been given a universally agreed-upon definition. When examining his textbook from medical school, The Pathologic Basis of Disease, Doug discovered that while this book had no difficulty defining pathology, it never once presented a definition of health.

The balance of catabolism and anabolism

People routinely refer to health and fitness as if the two concepts were cojoined. The popular assumption is that as one's level of physical fitness rises, the level of health rises along with it. Unfortunately, no direct scientific link between these two conditions exists. The human body, you see, is never static; it is a dynamic organism that carries on a perpetual balancing act between breaking down (catabolism) and building up (anabolism). This is how your blood-clotting system functions, for example. It is continually breaking down and building up clots, keeping a balance between your blood viscosity and coagulability to ensure a smooth flow and still stem any bleeding that should occur (but not so aggressively as to produce clogged arteries and infarcts). Your pH balance, blood gases, hormone levels, electrolytes, fluid levels, and innumerable other complex processes are constantly shifting and changing as well within these catabolic and anabolic processes. Life, in essence, depends on this precise balance between a catabolic state and an anabolic state, and this balance is what defines the health of the organism.

In brief, these states can be summarized as follows:

Catabolic: Anything that results in the breakdown of the organism.

Anabolic: Anything that results in growth and differentiation of the organism.

Looking back at our species' hunter-gatherer days, we know that there were long periods when starvation was a real threat. During those times, a catabolic state would have predominated. Despite the obvious negative effects, research into calorie restriction and life extension has revealed that during such catabolic states the vast majority of DNA repair occurs. The lesson here is that a catabolic state is a necessary component of health, rather than something to be avoided. Knowing this, we must factor the catabolic and anabolic processes into any definition of health that we create. Health implies a disease-free state, and so the definition must acknowledge this component as well. Thus, given the lack of a working definition from the fitness and medical worlds, we cautiously offer the following:

Health: A physiological state in which there is an absence of disease or pathology and that maintains the necessary biologic balance between the catabolic and anabolic states.

The body's ability to sustain this balance between the catabolic and anabolic states manifests in an ability to make adaptive adjustments, thereby allowing for survival. Each and every day, your body must face numerous challenges, such as exposure to the various elements, muscular exertion, and the presence of pathogens. If it does not successfully adapt to these challenges, it is ill equipped to survive. Fitness, then, can be said to be the body's ability to withstand, recover from, and adapt to environmental threats in the form of stress-producing agents that act upon the organism. Or, stated another way:

Fitness: The bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.

What is exercise?

To fully understand the relationship among exercise, fitness, and health, it is necessary to know precisely what exercise is, as opposed to mere physical activity. The important distinction is that exercise is purposefully directed activity that stimulates the body to produce a positive adaptation in one's level of fitness and health. Physical activity in general, while yielding the potential to produce certain adaptations in one's fitness and health, can unfortunately also undermine one's health. Therefore, we advance the following as our definition of exercise based on known facts:

Exercise: A specific activity that stimulates a positive physiological adaptation that serves to enhance fitness and health and does not undermine the latter in the process of enhancing the former.

Thousands of activities are popularly thought of as exercise, ranging from walking and running to calisthenics, weight training, and yoga. However, many of these activities do not qualify as exercise by our definition, either because they are inefficient at stimulating the mechanical and metabolic adaptations necessary to benefit the fitness (and, to a large extent, the health) of our bodies or because their continued performance results in an undermining of bodily health.

It is for this latter reason that we must exclude activities such as jogging and running from being considered as exercise. This determination may be upsetting to some, particularly those who run or jog, but the hard truth is that those who select running as their modality of exercise are taking a huge risk. Studies have documented that 60 percent of runners are injured in an average year, with one running injury occurring for every one hundred hours of performance.

The damage caused by running will often manifest after a period of fifteen to twenty years of performing the activity, such as when runners who started in early adulthood reach the age of forty or fifty and find that they are no longer able to climb a flight of stairs without their knees aching; or they experience difficulty in lifting their arms above head level because of osteophytes (bone spurs) that have formed in the shoulder joint; or they can't turn or bend anymore because of chronic lower-back pain. These are progressive conditions, rather than immediate ones, and are consequences of inappropriate activities and activity levels that are chronically catabolic and are performed far too frequently to allow an anabolic state to manifest.

Even activities that are considered "mild" can become problematic in this respect. For instance, the thousands of rotations of the shoulder and elbow joint that take place over a career of playing recreational tennis can lead to osteoarthritis, even though the actual weight being moved in a tennis racket is modest. Any activity that is highly repetitive has wear-and-tear consequences that will sooner or later override the body's ability to recover and repair itself. If these types of activities are performed frequently (many times a week), they will typically manifest sooner.

Health and fitness-what's...