The Spark : A Revolutionary New Plan to Get Fit and Lose Weight, 10 Minutes at a Time

Glenn A. Gaesser; Karla Dougherty

ISBN 10: 1579545114 / ISBN 13: 9781579545116

Edité par Rodale Pr (edition ), 2001

It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting. N° de réf. du vendeur 1579545114-8-1

Synopsis :

Book by Dougherty Karla Gaesser Glenn a

Extrait: Chapter One: What Is the Spark?

On May 10, at 1:12 P.M., Jon Krakauer, one of the survivors of the ill-fated 1996 Mount Everest expedition, made it to the top: 29,028 feet above sea level, the highest point in the world and the intense, shining focus of the past two months. He stayed at the summit, one foot in China, one in Nepal, for approximately ten minutes.

It's an old cliché that academics in ivory towers are not in touch with everyday folks. You wouldn't necessarily put exercise physiologists in that group. After all, we deal with activity: we're out there on the tracks, in the parks, at the gym.

You'd be wrong. We might run up those ivory towers two steps at a time, but we still inhabit them.

This revelation came to me in 1999, a year after I had convened with my fellow academics of the American College of Sports Medicine to establish the new fitness guidelines for maximum health and longevity.

It was then, in a series of conference calls, e-mails, faxes, and meetings, that we proudly and concisely compiled research, statistics, and data that had accumulated over the past eight years. Our recommendations?

Perform intense aerobic workouts, 20 to 60 minutes at a time, 3 to 5 times a week, combined with 2 to 3 times a week of both strength-training and flexibility exercises.

You've heard this all before. These guidelines have formed the basis of countless magazine articles, books, gymnastics programs, "join this gym" inducements, even infomercials. So what's the problem?

Well, let's put these recommendations another way:

Intense, sweat-inducing exercise.

Twenty minutes to a full hour.

Three to five days a week.

Spend your days off lifting weights.

And find an hour somewhere in there to stretch.

Now, there definitely are individuals out there who would -- and who have -- embraced these guidelines. There are people who exercise at least three days a week at an intensity that would make ice burn. I'm one of them; it's my business and my passion. But it's certainly not a way of life for most Americans.

It occurred to me after that day in 1999 that our fitness guidelines were completely unrealistic. That our "ivory tower" mentality encouraged people to start an exercise program over and over again, only to fail and become even more sedentary than before. That our unrealistic expectations motivated people to join health clubs and never set foot in the places after the first three months.

In other words, these guidelines, constructed by myself and my colleagues with the utmost commitment to the health of all Americans, have actually contributed to making Americans five to ten pounds heavier than they were a generation ago!

But there's more. Not only did we ask Americans to carve out a good portion of their harried week, we also asked them to be patient. All the studies we used to compose our fitness guidelines of course showed significant improvement -- but only after following an exercise regimen for three months or longer.

Finally, the third and last revelation hit me: Each study, detailed and meticulous as it was, concentrated on only one or two elements of fitness at a time. There were studies that concentrated on cardiovascular health. Aerobic capacity. Strength training. Flexibility and joint range of motion. Metabolic fitness and weight loss. But there was no one study that combined all these different aspects of fitness to see what the results might be.

The scientist in me began to hypothesize. I kept going back to the first page of the printed guidelines where, in parentheses, almost as an afterthought, we stated that a daily workout of at least half an hour could be broken up into 10-minute segments if necessary throughout the day. "What ifs" began to occupy my waking hours. What if a standard exercise program was made even shorter? What if you added strength training and flexibility into the 10-minute equation? What if you never had to do any exercise for more than 10 minutes at a time? Would you still get positive results -- especially in older, more sedentary individuals? And what if you combined these 10-minute bouts of exercise or Sparks with a concrete diet plan? Would you still lose weight?

And the biggest question of all: How long would it take to see results?

Enter the three-week Spark study at the University of Virginia.

K's Spark

It was the ruins at Mesa Verde that got me. These ancient Indian dwellings, thousands of years old, were once inhabited by a tribe that carved out lives from dozens of rocky cliffs. Their stone-and-clay homes had sheltered a people who were active from morning until night: farming, harvesting, cooking, praying. Exercise with a purpose: survival.

But that hot summer morning, when my husband, D.J., and I headed for their hills, we weren't thinking about ancient civilizations, and we certainly weren't thinking about exercising. We were thinking about fun. We were on our first vacation in years and we felt giddy with freedom. We'd heard that Mesa Verde, in southwest Colorado, was an awesome site.

The only problem with Mesa Verde is that if you want to see the clay buildings, you have to go on your own body power.

That means climbing hills. Steep hills. But there we were, armed with water and sunscreen, ready for adventure in the hot Rocky Mountain sun.

I was wearing comfortable hiking shoes and shorts. Although my outfit showed every ounce of the forty pounds I'd gained over the past few years, I didn't see it. To me, I was the fairly slim person I'd been in my twenties.

This illusion stuck with me all the way down the first slope. It was easy. Nothing to it but a wayward rock or two. But by the time we hiked the uphill path to the first ruin, I was out of breath and sweating.

My heart hadn't stopped pounding in my ears, but I chose to ignore it. I distracted myself by imagining the Indians stoking a fire in the earth, murmuring softly in their ancient tongue, waking to the sharp slats of sun coming through slits in their hut's clay wall.

After about a half hour, we'd seen everything there was to see. It was time to move on. To walk back up the cliff.

No problem, I told myself. My heart had stopped pounding; my breath seemed less ragged. I began to climb. One step. Two. Maybe three or four. I lost count. I was too busy trying to breathe. The edge of the cliff seemed distant, surrounded by a halo of light. The top! I'd never make it.

I continued to climb -- and stopped every few feet. Climb. Stop. Gasp. Climb. Stop. Gasp. D.J. had already gone up to the crest. I couldn't even see him anymore. I drank my water. Climb. Stop. Gasp.

I wasn't alone. There was a group of women who kept up the same pace, maybe a few years older than I from the looks of them. (To be honest, when I caught enough breath to glance at them, they looked much older and, of course, much, much heavier than I.)

We complained and commiserated with one another as we did the "Mesa Verde Walk." Climb. Stop. Gasp. We made jokes about how the Anasazis must have climbed up these hills. "Hope they hadn't forgotten anything." "So this is why they disappeared." I could barely laugh, let alone stand. Somehow, probably from

the sheer terror of embarrassment that a park ranger might have to carry me up, I got to the top of the cliff. I fell onto a nearby bench. I sat and breathed, hard; the air felt like rocks. I waved good-bye to my new friends -- who, oddly, seemed to be recovering more easily than I (especially for their age and weight!).

Five, then ten minutes. I sat, still breathing hard. I pretended I wasn't having as bad a time adjusting as I really was, so D.J. wouldn't be too worried. But I was scared. I was afraid that I was having a heart attack -- at forty-eight.

I almost wanted to die. I would rather die, I thought, than face this particular fear: that I had let myself go. That I was fat. That I was in worse shape than people who were my mother's age. That I had become that person whom I'd never wanted to be, heavy, unfit, old before my time. How did this happen?

In many ways, my studies on the Spark were a natural progression, from my active childhood growing up in the '60s to my position as cochair on the American College of Sports Medicine fitness guidelines committee. I can't remember a time when I wasn't moving, running, sprinting, jumping. I never sat still. If there was a football game or a baseball game, or even an hour to throw around a few balls, I was there. Being active was a way of life. I just didn't know that a sedentary lifestyle was an option.

In high school, I discovered that I was good at running, that I had a high aerobic capacity. I ran competitively and won a couple of awards. Even today, if I don't get my run in on a daily basis, I'm uncomfortable. I miss the physical, emotional, and spiritual "high."

It was this passion for movement that led me to study exercise physiology at Berkeley, where I studied peak performance in athletes. I loved my work and enjoyed publication in many journals and a professorship at the University of Virginia.

But something happened along the way. Athletes stopped being a challenge. I began to wonder why I was spending so much time and effort on such a small percentage of the population. My interest began to shift to the general public, in particular to the vast number of people who really needed solid, helpful information on good health and fitness.

With funding from the American Heart Association, I began my research on cholesterol, triglycerides, and aerobic fitness with the subjects most available to me: out-of-shape college students. What I found opened my eyes: Doing exercise that barely broke a sweat was just as good as a high-intensity run. It got me thinking that perhaps we don't have to break our backs to get fit and healthy.

But there is a trade-off. We might not have to break out in a sweat to see results, but we'd have to exercise for a much longer period of time. It's a reality: The greatest return on an exercise investment definitely comes with more vigorous workouts. But both these suppositions had built-in problems for sedentary people. They wouldn't want to work out any longer than they'd have to. Nor would they want to exercise at an intensity that would leave them crumpled on the floor.

That's when my Spark ignited: What if the exercise that people did was intense enough to give them all the benefits of vigorous activity -- but not so long in duration that it was next to impossible to fit into a normal person's schedule?

Could it be done?

I began to refocus on my experience with professional athletes. World-class endurance athletes, especially runners, weight-lifters, and swimmers, always divided their daily workouts into shorter segments. Instead of running a full 20 miles a day, for example, they might run

7 miles in the morning, 5 around midday, and 8 in the late afternoon. By breaking up their workouts, they weren't worn down. They remained strong. It gave them an edge over the competition.

If it worked for world-class athletes, why not for everyone?

It was time to take my theories to the street. If college students, in their prime, could find significant health and fitness improvements within three weeks, what about people my own age, graying baby boomers who might not have seen the inside of a gym since high school? Could I help them become healthier?

The Spark study gave me the answer: a resounding yes.

It is quite possible to reverse years, even decades, of sedentary abuse -- within three weeks.

K's Spark

My family's "Spark" had nothing to do with physical exercise. Oh, they had a zest for living, all right, as long as they could get there by car. My dad had a large hunger for knowledge and people. And, unfortunately, a seemingly bottomless hunger for food and drink as well. Eating was our pastime, our joy of life. Graduate college? Eat a pound cake. Get a job in your major? Wine and cheese. Sunday night get-together? Thick steaks and hot-fudge sundaes or take-out Chinese food.

It's how I grew up, what I knew. Except when it came to using my mind, exercise was as foreign to me as finger bowls and dressing for dinner. I was sedentary from the neck down.

When my father died of a sudden heart attack at fifty-two, we called it a terrible twist of fate. It didn't occur to me that my family history was rich in risk. Cholesterol was a strange-sounding word found in scientific journals. I kept going the way I knew best. I found solace (and love, comfort, joy, and relief) in food throughout my life. I even ate while I wrote.

Here I was in Mesa Verde unable to breathe, when it hit me as hard as a frozen quart of Chunky Monkey: My family had heart disease. All of us.

But what could I do? I couldn't just bounce back with a crash liquid diet or another aerobics class. I couldn't think past the strain of putting on a plus-size leotard.

I had a headache. I felt overwhelmed. I was fat. I was out of shape. So what if I was a good person? A good wife? A good daughter? I was still going to die too soon. I looked up at D.J. and smiled. "I need to eat."

From the start, the scientist in me plunged into the complexities of the Spark almost to the exclusion of everything else. I went to sleep thinking about muscular strength and aerobic capacity, or an element of metabolic efficiency that needed to be explored. In researching an unrelated topic in my office, I'd find myself going off on a Spark tangent about fiber. I talked about the Spark so much at home that my family began to tease me.

And then there were the people:

rDianne V. came up the gymnasium complex stairs at the University of Virginia huffing and puffing. She walked into my office pretending she wasn't out of breath, trying to smile and say hello. Dianne was thirty-eight and weighed 235 pounds. Heart disease ran in her family and she didn't want to have to take medication later on in life. She'd asked to be a part of the Spark because she'd tried every diet out there and always gained back the weight she'd initially lost. As she was approaching her forties, she realized that she had to take better care of her health, which meant regular, consistent exercise, something she'd never done before. She told me she wanted to be able to walk up the stairs carrying her backpack without having to stop every few steps.

Pat S. was five years older, and her goals were similar. At forty-three, she wanted to have more energy to raise her two children, hold down a full-time job, and, whenever she could fit it in, enjoy her personal time more. She certainly didn't want to spend the hour or so she had after the kids were asleep exercising. It felt like work to squeeze exercise in when she was exhausted. Until she joined the study, she didn't know she had any other option.

Joanne H., age fifty, wanted to be the best participant in the study. She came on board ready to soar. She was sick and tired of being out of shape. "I refuse to age gracefully."

Mary W. had a beautiful face, with the sculpted cheekbones of a queen. During the preliminary testing she learned she had a body fat index that was only slightly above average for her age of forty-two. Mary wanted to lose weight, but she was realistic. After having three children, she knew she'd never be thin. But healthy, toned, and strong was another matter.

Each of the forty participants in the study approached the Spark with the same combination of trepidation and excitement, resolve and skepti...

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : The Spark : A Revolutionary New Plan to Get ...
Éditeur : Rodale Pr (edition )
Date d'édition : 2001
Reliure : Hardcover
Etat : Very Good