Exercise for Today's Woman

The past 100 years have encompassed just a handful of generations, hardly enough time for any physiological adaptation to occur. We wear today the same body we wore 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, when stress was a life-threatening situation you needed to respond to by running fast, jumping high, lifting a heavy load, pulling yourself into a tree or fighting off an enemy or animal. Yet in this short amount of time, nearly everything in the American lifestyle has changed:

• We drive cars and do little mandatory walking or cycling
• We run only if involved in a sport
• We do little or no physical work
• We spend most of our time sitting
• We eat foods that are chemically altered

Me and one of my Bearded Collie puppies, Comet.

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It's sad to think that already our nation's youth have to workout on treadmills or face a decreased life expectancy. This book will help women change to help the children change.

Think of it in terms of a dog; dogs have been running around at least as long as we humans have. What if you put your pooch in a cage, fed her canned food instead of her natural carnivorous diet and gave her no exercise other than time to wander in the backyard to do her business? Your dog would become obese, have back problems and weak bones, exhibit diseases never before known to the dog world, and appear generally listless and depressed. Kind of like most people today.

The sad facts are that the majority of American women are overweight or obese, everyone and their mother is on antidepressants, diabetes is epidemic among our nation's children and this generation will have the first-ever recorded decrease in U.S. life spans.

Something has to change. This book will help every woman initiate a change. Much of my advice won't work for men-it is uniquely oriented to women. I will show you how to maximize your exercise results, and I'll share an approach to your eating habits that WILL, if you do the steps, elicit weight loss and result in a healthier, happier you. No fads. No gimmicks. But it works.

It begins with an understanding of how our bodies are supposed to work.

Evolution of Exercise

Life used to dictate our exercise. As a small-sized species, humans spent many thousands of years running from a variety of predators and environmental perils. Women needed to have a lot of endurance. We were responsible, after all, not only for childbearing but child rearing as well. We needed to keep going even when our bodies became weary in order to provide food and shelter for our children. Giving up was not in our vocabulary, nor was calling in sick. We needed strength. A powerful back let us split and carry wood to keep a fire lit, wash clothes, knead bread, harvest the garden and pull ourselves and our children into trees to get us out of harm's way. That's why our backs are the strongest muscle group of the upper body. We also needed strength to carry the water from low-lying streams to our homes. We needed to run fast and jump high when a danger threatened ourselves or our children, and that took anaerobic power, something we rarely access today.

Exercise has changed dramatically in the past 50 years. WOW changes the way women exercise for the next 50 years.

In the last 30 to 40 years women have not been required to do much, if any, physical labor. Some of the time we don't even open the door for ourselves. We haven't pulled our body weight into a tree for so many years that today the majority of adult women cannot lift their body weight in a pull-up motion. Try it. It's a fact.

Just 50 years ago women didn't have gyms with weights and cardio; they had enough exercise from household chores and scrubbing floors on their hands and knees without the benefit of air conditioning, and maintaining the gardens and landscaping with non-motorized tools. We didn't have remote controls, laptops or MySpace. We golfed, bowled, played tennis or badminton to fill the slack hours. Today's generation is the first to engage in absolutely no physical exercise, unless they are involved in a sport!

Seventy years ago exercise was not a choice for most of us. It was how we survived. Women didn't question whether they would walk 5 to 12 miles in the course of a day, whether they would do the canning, gardening or cleaning or work for a wage to make ends meet. You just did it. If you did it well, you could dance away the weekend or go bobsledding or skating. Sixty-five years ago, when our country was in a World War, women didn't choose to sit by the radio; instead they chose to work in factories or service centers while still maintaining a house and home.

Only in the last 30 years has exercise become an option. Unfortunately, most people have opted not to exercise and that should come as no surprise. For many centuries the royals, the rich and the powerful have led lazy lives, gorged themselves on rich foods and died young. Their lifestyle was and is envied, so when given a chance, most people opt for a life of leisure and indulgence.

It will most likely take us at least 10,000 years to completely atrophy our skeletal muscle and become a relatively immobile being that can flourish with very little movement. In that very distant future we will have adapted to having chemical injections for nourishment, a very large brain and some type of masturbatory sex substitute, and our offspring will be produced in test tubes. If and when that time comes there will be no need for exercise; however, in the meanwhile we must deal with the rather outmoded body we were born with.

Our lifestyle today requires little physical exertion. Most of us don't have to perform any physical labor. It's the first time in human history that we must invent ways to move the human body and challenge our mind and muscles to perform the work the human body is designed for.

We have two choices: exercise, or try to speed our rate of evolution into a creature that does not require exercise to survive. For those I love and myself, I'll opt for exercise and the continuation of our species as we know it.

Ninety minutes of exercise a day is a lot for most women today. Where will you find the time? You won't, unless you get a new attitude on exercise.

Life Is Exercise

There is one form of exercise that most women perceive as fun. In every culture there has always been dance, and music makes a body move. A rhythmic beat stimulates sensors in the brain to move. This is why toddlers dance to music; it is why we feel the urge to tap a foot or sway our bodies when we hear a driving beat. Dance is the most primal way a body moves.

In the U.S. women enjoy dance generally more than men do. Far from being an expert, I'll chalk that up to the fact that women are more sensitive to their more hormonally active bodies than men, and we do far better at multitasking and transitioning between the cognitive, emotional and physical centers. Whatever the reason, women like to dance, and this is one of the easiest forms of exercise a woman can take part in.

Women always work better in social groups. Find a friend, find a training partner, and begin to incorporate some WOW into all your workouts.

Dance when you're all alone and no one is watching. Join a dancing group—many are offered at community centers. Consider trying Afro- or South American-dance, Rosen Method, Zumba and belly dancing. Why? Because these are fun activities women can do to get a great workout that doesn't feel like work!

Today's leading medical experts believe every woman over age 30 needs to exercise 90 minutes a day, but that does not mean 90 minutes in a gym every day. As a matter of fact, women do better with medium-to-active exercise in bouts of an hour or less. To manage the minimum amount of daily exercise we must change our thinking that "exercise" is synonymous with gym or health club and make exercise synonymous with life. Think about it this way: There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and the human body was not designed to be physically active 90 minutes and sedentary for the next 1,350 minutes!

My approach integrates some very important exercise time in the gym, with some wonderful lifestyle activities and inspiration to accomplish your 90 minutes a day easily and productively. As a matter of fact, you won't even know you're exercising half of the time.

The other half of the time you will be working your body the way it was meant to work for thousands and thousands of years. And you'll not only feel better for it, you will look better as well!