Exhausting as it sounds, a rugged workout can be exhilarating. Working up a lather, shaking out the kinks, and getting out of breath can be as addicting as narcotics. Fitness should not be a deadly serious matter—it should be a kick!

There is one sound reason a man exercises—for fun.

There are dividends from fitness, to be sure. These benefits are “extras,” however. These are not reasons why people keep fit. These are bonuses for people who exercise for fun and fitness.

Tension is the businessman’s heaviest burden. Deadlines, promotion, competition, improvement, insecurity, and worry are part of our society. No wonder the executive has difficulty relaxing. Tight nerves and tense muscles are the usual rather than the exception. Fitness is one way out. No one can relax by being ordered to do so. Keyed-up nerves and muscles do not respond to talk. Nerves and muscles can be re-educated. Relaxing habits can be substituted for bad habits.

How To Relax

The way to relax is to non relax. Translated, this means: exercise vigorously. Having non relaxed energetically for thirty minutes, no one needs to be told to relax. He has no choice —he is exhausted—he has to relax. Ask anyone what is the best part of his workout. It is taking a shower afterward— naturally!

A workout inescapably prepares one for relaxation. During a workout it is impossible to be concerned about anything other than the task at hand. One’s every thought and effort is concentrated on the workout. Try preparing a report to the boss while watching your tennis adversary’s cannonball serve go streaking past. Try adding up all your debts while giving the bowling ball a little body English toward a remote tenpin. Try thinking about anything while exercising except exercising. It cannot be done! Your mind is off your problems—and that is good.

After the workout, with physically tired muscles, with the glow of physical satisfaction, and with the refreshing relief of a warm shower, relaxation is inevitable. And in a few weeks nerves and muscles once again have learned the rewarding art of relaxation.

The word “athlete” will be used now and then and should not scare you. By definition, an athlete is one “trained in acts of physical exercise.” The dictionary does not specify sex, age limit, type of physical activity, or competitive ability as requisites for the definition of “athlete.” Many of my athletic patients are of both sexes, of all ages, and never compete. But they certainly are athletes. Most of my athletic patients would, to be sure, deny they are athletes—but they are. Somehow they feel they do not deserve this approbation —but they do.

Dangers Of Obesity

Obesity, the commonest background of premature death, is rare among those who exercise regularly. Obese people have a greater chance to develop heart disease, cancer, kidney illnesses, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, and other degenerative disorders. While fitness per se apparently does not lengthen life, obesity certainly shortens it. There are no vaccinations or antibiotics which protect you from these illnesses. But fitness which abolishes obesity provides statistical immunization.

Fitness means many things to many people. Unfortunately, when most people say they are healthy, they really mean that at that particular moment they are free of any known illness, do not have symptoms, and have a feeling of well-being at rest. Absence of disease is a negative definition of health and fitness.

Adequate fitness allows the individual to perform his daily chores without interference by fatigue, to have sufficient physical reserve to meet unexpected emergencies safely, and to have enough extra energy to enjoy leisure time. It is positive in its implications and thus can be attained and maintained only by activity, not by rest.

While fitness is easily defined, it is difficult to measure, particularly after college years. If one strives toward being fit, it is only fair that one should be able to assess how far along the road to fitness he has travelled. He should be able to say, “I am fit” or “I am not fit” or “I am getting there.”

However, the human economy, being in a constant state of internal and therefore fairly invisible flux, is not amenable to the measurements available to evaluate, for example, the federal economy. There is no convenient metric or decimal appraisal of fitness, no series of figures which can be fed into an adding machine with a slip of paper stating, “You are 86 percent in shape” or, worse, “You are 2 percent fit.”

Many excellent tests have been devised to set up standards of fitness for specially designated groups. At the service academies, for example, officer candidates must perform an irreducible number of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, dips, rope climbs or shuttle runs (these vary from year to year) if they are to pass the physical fitness requirements of these academies. Likewise, most school systems have adopted a variety of fitness measurement programs in an attempt to bring all students up to an at least acceptable lower limit.

Present formal testing methods are beset with problems which render them of only limited general applicability. First, the standards proposed apply to minimum degrees of fitness. If a cadet can “pass” his fitness test, he is safe. There is no urgency for him to do his best; merely to “pass” is sufficient. An isolated instance is the swimming requirement of a well-known university. Here undergraduate students are required to swim one hundred yards in the pool before receiving a degree. This admittedly is better than no swimming requirement at all. But it falls far short of insisting that students must continue to swim, say, once a week after they have “passed” swimming. Gradations of fitness improvement should be encouraged, not merely reaching a minimum goal and stopping.

The second stricture of rigid and inflexible testing systems is that they apply to selected and specific groups. What might be good shape in junior high school would bring tears of disappointment at West Point. And what might be the absolute nadir at West Point would bring tears o£ exultation at a hospital for chronic diseases. Various tests may have great validity in comparing members of selected groups. Perhaps the range of fitness norms can be established for retired English bus drivers, Swedish lumberjacks, Annapolis plebes, and Boy Scouts. This is satisfactory for groups. But you are not a group. Groups may be homogeneous; individuals are not. It is fair to say that many tests can be adapted to different purposes by merely raising or lowering the minimum standards.