Fit To Be President

Rx: For a healthier, happier, longer life for you and your family: regular, natural exercise

This is what I have prescribed for myself, my family and my patients—including the President of the United States.

By "regular exercise" I do not mean a rigid training program to weary mind and muscle. I mean, rather, occasional exercise that is both beneficial and enjoyable. You can have fun while you exercise, and it can be fun for your whole family as well.

President Kennedy is a walking— or rather running—testament to the principle that people who are active in sports during youth and continue their activity as adults are likely to remain vigorous as they grow older.

As each of us grows from childhood (when exercise is organized) to maturity (when it is likely to be sporadic) we find ourselves losing stamina, tending to tire and injure ourselves by over exercising in sudden spurts.

The continuing factor that can lessen such tendencies is something that I like to call "muscle memory," the effect of early conditioning carried over into maturity. As an example of muscle memory, remember how long it took you to learn to ride a bicycle? Yet you never forgot the skill, once you had it, even if you hadn't bicycled for years. The same holds true for other "carryover" sports learned in youth, such as golf, tennis, swimming, bowling, skating, skiing and horseback riding. Once the memories are established, the skills may become rusty through lack of use, but in a short time they can be "recalled" and you'll manage nearly as well as before.

Muscles without the right memories, on the other hand, will prove clumsy at jobs they never knew. Of two middle-aged people taking up tennis, the one who played in childhood will find his natural strokes returning with comparative effortlessness while the other strains more with less effect. If you once learn a coordinated movement you don't have to think about it again. But if the muscles never learned these lessons in youth, never acquired the athletic skills of free movement, then it becomes exceedingly difficult and even dangerous to attempt them later on. When you learn new physical skills in the adult years, you are likely to suffer strains and sprains.

For this reason, every parent should do his or her best to see that children train and develop muscle memories while they are young, and not just in team sports like football and baseball, but in the carryover sports that will serve them all their lives.

But what of those of us whose parents have neglected to take this early precaution? Are we automatically doomed to be sedentary because we never learned tennis and played only tag?

The answer to the last question is an emphatic no, provided we seek a sport not too far removed from whatever muscle memories we may have established—and provided we don't drive ourselves too hard or expect too much.