Fitness vs. Fatness Redux — The Competitive Edge

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I know I’ve discussed fitness and fatness in the past. How one can be perfectly healthy and not fit the stereotypical thin athlete look.

Well, in this morning’s New York Times[1] (on-line edition) there is an article about how skinny athletic cyclists do not hold the competitive (or health) edge over their more robust[2] counterparts (I’m talking about recreational athletes, not the professional guys who all look like they’re about 130 pounds and six feet tall).

The article also mentions that any one of the professionals can bike twice as fast as any of the recreational competitors. I don’t think that’s because of body size though.

Although the article discusses how thin runners might have a similar competitive advantage, I beg to differ.

I learned this lesson early on in my university running career. My body type does fit the thin stereotype as did many of my teammates. I remember standing on the start line of a university cross-country race, sizing up the competition (so to speak …) and dismissing one girl with a stocky, muscular frame.

I’m sure you can guess that I was suitably humbled when she won the race by a long margin. I straggled in about 20th. The only pride I can take out of that story is I never made the same mistake again.

The bottom line is whether you’re interested in health or competition, don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to look a certain way. In fact, as illustrated by my story, there might be a competitive psychological edge to not fitting the stereotype!

1. The Bicycling Paradox: Fit Doesn’t Have to Mean Thin (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/health/nutrition/
17essa.html?em&ex=1184904000&en=445dd068a9
c39626&ei=5087%0A).

2. I just looked up robust in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). One definition is sturdy, which is how I meant it, but it also has strong and healthy as a definition. There you go! Unintentional confirmation of my point by the OED.

Inspiring the Masses

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I am in sports glory these days. With the U20 soccer and Tour de France on (truly hoping for a scandal-free tour this year), I am one happy spectator.

I was in the stands on Sunday when Canada took on Congo at Commonwealth Stadium here in Edmonton. I watched the Mexico-New Zealand match that preceded it and had a great taste of live soccer action. So, when the rain came pouring down, it wasn’t too hard to bail out and bike home to watch the rest of the match on TV.

If only the Olympics were on right now too, and I could happily park my butt on the couch for the rest of the summer.

But aren’t these events supposed to inspire me to get off the couch?
That is often the justification for why public funds should be poured into these events. I’ve wondered about this question for a while now. If high-level sports, be they amateur or professional, inspire people to take up sport, then wouldn’t the U.S.A. be the fittest country in the world? (In case you’re wondering, they’re not.)

A few years ago I tried to find out if any research had been done on this topic and came up dry, but anecdotal evidence abounds. Watch any Olympic games, and you’re bound to see at least one interviewee talk about how as a kid they watched some sporting event and went out and tried it and that’s why they are at the Olympics today.

The following from the Tour de France website, which explains why the mayor of London wanted to host this year’s first stage, sums up both arguments, quite nicely …

“We believe the Tour de France will inspire more Londoners to use their bicycles to get around. Indeed, for triple Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins, watching the 1994 UK stage of the Tour motivated him to take up professional cycling, and the rest is history!”
(http://www.letour.fr/2007/TDF/LIVE/us/
0/etape_par_etape.html)

I hate to throw cold water on all the mayor’s plans, but finally, at a conference I recently attended in Norway, I saw a presentation on this topic. The authors also had difficulties finding any existing research, so they did their own. They looked at various levels of sporting events, from the Sydney Olympics through to local 10-kilometer runs and came up with no discernible impact of these events on population levels of physical activity.

Of course, this is only one study and much more research is warranted, but that doesn’t stop those trying to promote these events from using public health as a justification. The authors were privy to the documents behind the London 2012 bid. These were ripe with rhetoric about how the Olympics will increase population levels of physical activity.

If you’re an athlete, sports fan or a business person, you might have very real, very good reasons for wanting a large sporting event to come to your city. But, don’t believe the people who say that it’s a way of increasing health across society. Their claims are premature.

Now I have to go find the remote because I think the round of 16 has started.

Walking in Europe

By Tanya Berry, PhD, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from blog-writing due to a trip to Norway and Germany.

I love Europe — pretty much every city I’ve been to has a pedestrian-only downtown core. In Oslo, you can watch a cross-section of Norwegian society walking amid shops, restaurants and art galleries at Karl Johans Gate. At one end is the train station and at the other the palace, two ubiquitous European buildings.
But what is really interesting is the countryside. In North America, you are likely to see signs like this one.

In Norway, you get signs such as this close-up of one in three languages.

Thankfully for me, one of them was English! This sign was in the middle of a forest on a walking trail. We got a map from our hotel and set out — too early for berries, but we did wander through a few herds of sheep.


Here is a similar picture from a trip to the Netherlands several years ago (no translation required!).

On the other side of this gate was a cornfield. We walked along the edge of it by a farmhouse and on through to the next town. No problem.

In Norway, we walked right through somebody’s yard. The homeowner (an older woman) was gardening at the time. We hesitated and asked if we were going the right way. She pointed up her driveway. We kept going and ended up in a fantastic valley with a rushing little river and cool geographic features. It was actually an old and historic route to another village.

It would be so nice if North Americans would adopt similar sensibilities. It’s so much more civilized.

No Pain, No Gain

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

Interesting! For years I had attributed this saying to a certain running shoe company that shall remain nameless. So, before I started, I Googled “No Pain No Gain,” because I was worried about copyright infringement.

One of the first among the 1,040,000 hits (and I used the specific phrase!) was a description of the saying from Wikipedia — the source of all important facts (just kidding — I get cranky when students in my classes cite Wikipedia, but, hey, a little bit of hypocrisy never hurt anyone).

At any rate, according to this trusted source, the saying came out of bodybuilding circles — apparently you won’t gain big muscles without a little bit of hurt. I wouldn’t know.

But I can be pretty sure that the saying did not come from an advertising campaign as I thought, although the nameless shoe company does allude to the theme in a commercial you can watch on YouTube — another amazing source of well-vetted information. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwjRtTKviSY.

Make sure you read the comments. Those are the interesting bits … I can guarantee I didn’t “almost cry” when I watched this. But I digress.

I got thinking about this saying because I was told about a new reality show starring Shaquille O’Neal called “Shaq’s Boot Camp.” The point of the show, which is due to start in a few weeks, is to get overweight kids fit. My source (who is a respected professional, and no, I did not find her on the Internet, we had a real live conversation) saw some previews. As she told me:

What I recall is that at first Shaq was running with overweight boys on a track. They were huffing and puffing (the boys, not Shaq!!). At some point during the story they went to a shot of a young girl (I'd say early teens or younger) lying on a bed in a room like an emergency room or treatment room, with people around her concerned about her heart rate I think I recall seeing a stethescope at some point She was lying with her eyes closed... It was a scary scene.

You know I don't recall if they were doctors or medics or ordinary people or parents or what ... but I recall thinking that my goodness, this scene of a young girl obviously in trouble from overexertion possibly or who knows what does not create a positive happy note of “OH, let's go exercise and lose weight and be healthy.”

… the impression I was left with was that exercise is work, exercise is not fun, exercise can be dangerous. Shaq's program seemed to me to be one to get young people active and healthy, which is good, but I recall thinking that any kid watching might think it looks like “torture.”

So, once again the message will come across loud and clear: “no pain, no gain” or worse — exercise is dangerous. But using a celebrity will mean this show will be watched by many people, and the wrong message will be remembered yet again.

Unfortunately, “moderate physical activity leads to substantial health benefits” isn’t quite as snappy a saying as “no pain no gain.” Here’s the message I got back from Google:

Your search — “moderate physical activity leads to substantial health benefits” —- did not match any documents.

So I modified my search to “moderate physical activity can lead to health benefits” and got back one hit, from the U.S. department of Health and Human services, Division of Diabetes Treatment and Prevention.

On a more positive note, “Active Living” got 966,000 hits but scrolling through the first couple hundred did not result in any links to celebrity shows or YouTube videos.

The long and short of it is that we need to up our media presence. Any celebrities out there looking for a cause?

(As an aside, I’m well aware that although I didn’t name the running shoe company, I still managed to name at least four other commercial enterprises in a 677-word blog and linked you to a commercial advertisement. I’m not helping my own cause, am I?)