| ULTIMATE FITNESS The Quest for Truth about Exercise and Health Gina Kolata New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-374-20477-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-374-20477-2 | 292p. | HC/BWI | $24.00 | |
| Page 11: | "...you have to learn to skim over these appeals and pick out the one in a hundred, or fewer, that actually look promising." |
| Number: S/B "looks promising". |
| Page 42: | "They received national attention, even from president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who received the report from Kraus and an associate, Bonnie Pruden, a physical trainer who directed the Institute for Physical Fitness in white Plains, New York." |
| Spelling: S/B "Bonnie Prudden". Wikipedia has a very good article. See also her official site: Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy. |
| Pages 64-65: | "One of the first of these studies, by a leading Finnish physiologist, Martti Karvonen, was published in 1957. Blair said he considers it "a classic" because it was one of the first controlled studies of exercise training." |
| This appears contradictory because "these studies" refers to the previous paragraph, which says all such studies are now suspect due to their lack of controls. But subsequent paragraphs make it clear that what's really wrong with the Karvonen study is sample size. It used only six men and thus its results are not statistically significant. |
| Page 86: | "One thing it showed was a new physical phenomenon—that the maximum heart rate slows by about a beat a year throughout adult life." |
| Since much of this chapter explains why the formula does not give true maximum heart rate, I wonder how this can be accurate. |
| Page 87: | "A much more accurate formula, he says, is 208 minus age times 0.7." |
| Is this (208 - age) * 0.7 or 208 - (0.7 * age) ? For me, today, these give 102 and 164, respectively. |
| Page 158: | "Why do we need to replace fluids when we ride, and why is it so hard to ride when the room is warm?" |
| These questions, and those that precede them in the paragraph, struck me as too elementary to include — especially since many of them had been answered earlier in the book. But I surmise that Ms. Kolata uses this rhetorical technique to introduce (or re-introduce) the important topics of the chapter. (I also suspect that some time elapsed between the writing of this chapter and earlier ones.) |
| Page 164: | " 'There were only two hundred people in the U.S. who could run a marathon and he knew all of them,' Costill says..." |
| Careless quoting. If this is a direct quote from Costill, S/B "I" instead of "he". Otherwise, quotation marks should not be used. |
| Page 166: | "Surprisingly, you can actually overcome the effects of a warm room by drinking—and sweating, profusely." |
| Mismatched punctuation: S/B "drinking—and sweating—profusely". |
| Page 168: | "The forty bikes are arranged in concentric circles around a platform in front of one of the walls." |
| S/B "in concentric half-circles". |
| Page 182: | "It became his pattern, week in and week out, three days a week, Arnold was in a Spinning class." |
| Punctuation: S/B "his pattern: week in". |
| Page 188: | "...researchers are still discovering new endorphins. If they fail to see an endorphin effect, Wise told me, it may be because 'we have not looked at the right ones yet.' " |
| This seems contradictory. Are not endorphins classified as such on the basis of their effect on the brain? |
| Page 194: | "When psychologists give rats a drink with a distinctive flavor, salty or sweet, for example, before giving them a drug like morphine, they will subsequently spurn that flavor." |
| Kolata provides no explanation for this puzzling reaction. Perhaps it's because the drink delays their getting the drug? |
| Page 195: | "The dopamine that rushes to the brain's reward center..." |
| Overly anthropomorphic, or just descriptive license? |
| Pages 196-7: | "Bill Fox might be right that a runner's high feels exactly like cocaine—but then, that is what one would expect of almost anything that is addictive." |
| Earlier, she reported that people describing how a runner's high feels gave a variety of answers, not at all similar. |
| Page 200: | "And if exercise affects brain centers involved in depression, that would certainly be independent of the endorphin-runner's high hypothesis. Depression involves a different brain chemical, serotonin, and drugs like Zoloft act by increasing brain serotonin levels." |
| And yet, she provides no documentation that exercise does not boost serotonin levels. |
| Page 204: | "It's pitiful, I know, to have such thoughts..." |
| I wouldn't say that. |
| Page 205: | "Larry was appalled, telling me in no uncertain terms that it was embarrassing to be with someone saying, 'Ooch.' The proper way to show it hurts is with a loud primordial grunt." |
| Yah — unless you're Jean-Paul Belmondo playing in Casino Royale. |
| Page 221: | "As for women, they never took to bodybuilding or weight lifting." |
| S/B "never took to bodybuilding or weight lifting at that time". |
| Page 237: | "The number of possible [muscle-training] programs was ten to the sixty-seventh power." |
| That's a lot. |
| Page 249: | "...a fitness tool called the Bodyblade. This workout tool has made tremendous strides..." |
| No, no... Poor marketing. S/B "This sharp workout tool has cut a wide swathe through the world of fitness..." Wesley Snipes could do the demos. |
| Page 255: | "In the March 2002 issue there is the full-page ad for the 'delicious meal replacement food bar'..." |
| Hyphens: S/B "the 'delicious-meal-replacement food bar' ". That should get people chomping. |
Some of the preceding comments are tongue-in-cheek.
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