Physical Activity and Health
Publishers: Human Kinetics Publishers; 1 edition (October 20, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0736050922
ISBN-13: 978-0736050920
Description: Hardcover: 409 pages, 11.2 x 1.1 x 0.6 inches, 2 pounds
Authors: by Claude Bouchard (Editor), Steven N. Blair (Editor), William L., Ph.D. Haskell (Editor)

Reviewer: Ted Scheck

On Chapter 23 of Physical Activity and Health, edited by Bouchard, Blair, and Haskell, there is a photograph of a kind of simple machine, one people have been using to climb for thousands of years. In fact, using these simple modified incline planes over time will increase heart rate, lower blood pressure, and typically give you a better view than if you hadn’t climbed them. On the right side of the photograph is a modern marvel, stairs that are somehow attached to a belt-drive thingy. If I sound like Homer Simpson then I’m right with Homer in trying to explain how escalators work. I haven’t a clue.

But I do know this: the photograph shows a woman carefully stepping down the stairs. She is being careful because she is, in her right hand, holding what looks like a heavy suitcase. I look at this lady and I don’t wonder what tropical paradise (or frozen wasteland) she just got back or is soon departing to; I admire her for skipping the escalators, which have always frightened me somewhat. To me, they look like giant teeth.

Ironic, that escalators will climb the incline for you, but you use them enough and your health de-escalates. This illustration illustrates what has happened to our health in the last 5, 10, 50, 100, and 1,000 years. As simple machines are made impossibly complex – from simple stairs to complex moving platforms - as we continue to wrestle, tame and pin to the ground our environment – as we make life easier, less physically demanding and stressful – we will find that it is not our environment that has been wrestled to the ground, tamed, and pinned; it is our own health that we’ve nearly choked unconscious. What is easier for us is not necessarily good for us, and, as with chocolate éclairs, what tasted good to us is definitely not easy to digest. That éclair will eventually have to land somewhere, and it will probably be a fatty accessory unless something is done.

Precisely what the editors of Physical Activity and Health have done. The textbook is divided into 5 parts, has 23 chapters and over 400 pages. It is the most comprehensive and unique book on health and physical activity I have ever looked at. 25 of the best researchers from the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia have put together a tome that has injected within its pages a nearly encyclopedic array of models, tables, figures, and tidbits of research, data, information, and relevant facts. The sheer volume of statistical information staggers the mind. There are actually a few pages that don’t feature some sort of comparative data; the rest of them do.

Part I covers the History and Current Status of the Study of Physical Activity and Health. Suffice to say that, in the introduction, we learn what the lady carrying the briefcase down the airport stairs already knows deep in her high heels and hamstrings; sedentary lifestyles and habits are now identified as a major public health problem in many countries of the world. Now earlier I said that I’m somewhat afraid of escalators. I learned at an early age not to every sit down on an escalator, as my younger brother Tom did when he was 4 and I was 5. The escalator began to first take with it Tom’s shorts, and terrified, he began to cry. Then it tried taking what the shorts were protecting. Then he started screaming. Mom drops the packages and realizes with abject horror that the escalator is eating her youngest child. She reaches down and, with what was probably super-human effort, rips Tom completely out of his shorts, which the escalator eats. The modern marvel that was supposed to replace stairs took a few chunks of my brother’s nether-region and I’ve disliked them and have had an irrational fear of them ever since.

Stupid pants-eating bum-munching escalators! They make us unhealthy, too.

You will read so many statistics about our rapidly declining health that you’ll want to go outside and walk around, just to get the negative effects out of your head. This one comes from the Journal of the American Medical Association, AMA, 2000. I’d like to read the updated data, but the data from 9 years ago will suffice. The leading cause of death in the US is Heart Disease. 710,760 people died that year. Three-quarters of a million people. 29.75% of all deaths that year. Nearly one-third, with a rate of 258.2 per 100,000 people. There are eleven other causes of death beneath it, some of which are Malignant neoplasm, Unintentional injuries, Diabetes mellitus, Alzheimer’s disease, and Septicemia. I’ll have to look up with Septicemia is somewhere on the Net or elsewhere. This editor honestly does not know what that word means, though I’ve probably heard it watching House, which, in my opinion, is the most intelligently-written show on TV. I looked throughout the book and didn’t find how many people have died being eaten by escalators.

The first thing to make me go “Huh!” was that the editors have re-written the definition of physical fitness, my mantra and a foundational pillar of my entire existence as a Wellness/PE Teacher. I really struggled with this definition, until I heard a song on XM Radio as I was driving with my wife. I turned it up. She switched the station. “Hey, I like that song!” I protested. My wife has musical tastes. I have musical tastes. A song can be good to one set of ears and torture to another. The ‘health’ definition of fitness, I realized, should be connected to health and its many different salad-bar flavors. I’m more of a motor-fitness ‘performance-related’ is how this book defines the other side of the fitness coin. Performance-related fitness is not the focus of this book, and is therefore not defined in it. I’d like to review a book where Performance-related fitness is the main focal point, but that’s an escalator in another airport that I’ll continue to ignore.

There are, I learned on page 14, 5 different components of Health-Related Fitness Components and Traits. Holy cow, I’ve been operating on only 1 cylinder my entire teaching career! 10 years and I’ve had an impossibly narrow view of health-related physical fitness.

Morphological Component
Body mass for ht., Body composition, Subcutaneous fat distribution, Abdominal visceral fat, Bone density, and FlexibilityCardiorespiratory Component
Submaximal exercise capacity, Maximal aerobic power, Heart, lung functions, Blood pressureMuscular Component
Power, strength, and enduranceMotor Component
Agility, Balance, Coordination, Speed of movementMetabolic Component
Glucose tolerance, Insulin sensitivity, Lipid/lipoprotein metabolism and Substrate oxidation characteristics

I feel as I’ve just had a complete physical, intellectually-speaking.

We get into the History of Activity in Chapter 2, seeing where we started and how far we’ve come. The remaining chapters in Part I give us fascination data and stats on physical fitness with age. At the end of each chapter Key Concepts are defined, along with a list of study questions.

Part II: Effects of Physical Activity on the Human Organism looks more like a pure health textbook that has been rewritten with exercise physiology concepts. Blood chemistry is explored in detail in Chapter 5. I teach Elementary, so although this information is fascinating to read and well-researched, I would skip past this part of the book unless I began teaching on the Middle School or High School level. Chapter 7 gets deeply into how skeletal muscle adapts to exercise. Chapter 8 tells us how our vital organs respond to the increased demands of exercise and here the book more accurately reflects an advanced physiology of exercise class.

Part III gets us back to the pure statistics with the role of Physical Activity and Mortality Rates. Inactivity – or evil pant-eating escalators – directly contributes to death. If you sit around most or all the day, and your body does not get regular exercise, then your body is succumbing not only to the effects of gravity (and possibly wind resistance) but also to the effect of your own organs eventually turning against you as if to say, “Why did you not exercise when you had the chance? We should be living vigorously, instead of dying as mush.”

I’ll be 46 in exactly one month. I exercise as regularly as my schedule allows. I bike and walk my dog. I lift weights and chase my primary kids around the Gym, pretending to be a monster that wants to catch them and eat them. I really don’t want to eat them and I figure they know we’re playing a game, which really is a fitness activity disguised as a game. They run and squeal and squeal and run and we’ll meet in the middle circle and I’ll give them a red or a yellow pinnie and we play a game called Ketchup and Mustard. It’s a tag game that most of my kids can never get enough of. I’m amazed that they want to play a simple chasing/fleeing game of tag. They’ll run themselves to the ground, falling in an exhausted heap. I’m trying to do my part.

The older I get the faster they become. I enjoy my job and my life is better than probably 90% of the entire world. But still, I could stand to lose 25 pounds. My tummy could be flatter and I avoid escalators at all costs. I don’t like the moving platforms at airports and shopping malls are depressing places, especially food courts. Fast food might be fast and more convenient but oh boy is it high in all the wrong stuff and we, as a nation, are not setting good enough examples for our children to follow, because approximately a quarter of all American children are overweight or obese. This text is all about how far we’ve fallen from the grace of the good health our parents and grand-parents worked so hard at. My Dad was a star of the great late 1940s and early 1950s teams of St. Ambrose College and, I was told at his funeral a few years ago, that he had inhumanly quick feet. I’d forgotten all about this, until I flashed upon a memory of something my brother and I used to do when we were very young. Before going to bed, we’d have races to see who could do 25 push-ups the fastest. Then, out of breath and no longer tired, we’d have to do another exercise. Dad used to try to get my brother Tommy and me to ‘foot fire’ and we’d run in place as if our feet were dancing on hot coals. Dad did this, too. In 1969 I was 6. Dad would have been 40 or 41 and I could never match his speed. After 20 or 40 seconds of “foot fire” we’d fall down, ready for sleep. We grew up active. Many or most of you reading this grew up in similar ways. What has happened?

Dad carried himself throughout most of the rest of his life on an athlete’s quick, light, dancing feet. His idea of ‘fitness’ and ‘health’ were that to get where you wanted to go, you moved, and moved quickly. Foot fire! You should try it; it’s terrifically tiring.

Most of this book is research studies and data with chapters wrapped around them to make them readable. The chapters are incredibly informative and useful. The book is chock-filled with amazing information. There is a chapter on Exercise and Cancer; another on Exercise and Its Effects on Mental Health. The scope is atmospheric and the depth of detail oceanic. Notice I did not say enjoyable because this data is, frankly, alarming. We’re escalating ourselves to death. We’re fast-fooding ourselves to early graves; smoking ourselves to coffins at the prime of our lives and killing ourselves with knives, forks, and spoons. Children are experiencing diseases that used to be called ‘old people’s diseases’ because, literally, only older populations used to contract them. Obese and overweight children as young as 7 are dealing with diabetes through obesity and high blood-pressure. This is true but it is also sad and sadly avoidable; if these children got more exercise, spent more time in Gyms running around instead of time spent snacking on chips and soda playing video games or texting, then this textbook would not be as relevant and necessary.

This textbook is a Sign of our Times. We are becoming dangerously unhealthy; unable to climb stairs, relying on technology to move us from Points A-Z. Order this book. Study the tables. Eat them slowly. Digest them; ruminate them as if your mind has 7 stomachs. Chew the cud. Let it process slowly all the way through you. Allow the tables and data and information to synthesize into your bloodstream and make change, positive, healthy, moving foot-firing change.

In this book somewhere will be something that you are or will suffer from. Or your children or your children’s children. We are an unhealthy lot and we are being fed from our own fruit, the spoiled and bitter fruit of inactivity and sedentary lifestyles. How do we change the nature of this fruit? By changing our natures.

This book has some good news within it, chiefly in Strategies in Promoting Physical Activity in Youth and other informative chapters that serve as signs along the side of our current unhealthy stretch of Interstate, signs that lead to turn-offs of less TV and more exercise. I will use this text like Morton’s Seasoning Salt on my sandwiches and soup; it adds flavoring and makes the experience all the more richer.
Sobering, even depressing, Physical Activity and Health may be one of the most relevant and important books you have in your library. Use it as a guide; use it as a warning of the effects of taking pant-eating escalators instead of stairs; of simple and complex machines taking us up in distance but down in health. Highly recommended book, and one you should carry with you.

Ted Scheck, MS