Dan's Papers - May 30, 2008 - A Simple Way to Start Feeling Better

Some health and fitness experts will tell you that there are three key elements of fitness: cardiovascular health (or endurance), muscle strength and flexibility - and that you have to develop and improve all three in order to be totally fit. This approach is fine if you're only concerned about strengthening your heart, losing weight and otherwise improving your health. But if you want to enhance the quality of everyday living or improve your performance at sports, you also need to work on speed and balance coordination.

There's probably no training method out there that is well-rounded enough to develop all of these physical qualities. The only way to cover every fitness base is to engage in more than one type of activity - a strategy that can be time-consuming, inconvenient and expensive. Or, you can adopt the Radu method: during the running sequence in a basic class, switch directions, change your footwork, even run backwards - all of which help to improve balance and coordination. Note that some of the simpler weight training moves are meant to be performed quickly to develop speed.

You may be asking yourself why you should worry about how quickly you can lift a dumbbell, or how light you are on your feet. If you're really new to exercise, you may even be wondering why it matters if you can touch your toes or be able to run without stopping for 20 minutes. To explain some of my recommendations, here's a quick look at ideal physical qualities and how to improve them, thus resulting in easier work and more fun play.

The first is strength, which depends on the number of fibers in a given muscle, as well as their thickness. Before you can fully develop any other physical qualities, you have to work on your strength. When you train, you ask your muscle fibers to work - a wake up call for the fibers that haven't been engaged before. Once they're put to work, more and bigger muscles are engaged.

Muscle strength is the foundation upon which you can build the other physical qualities, and therefore it's the most important. You need it for lifting and lugging anything, from a weighted barbell to a stack of books to a chubby toddler. The stronger you are, the more likely you are to perform well at all sports activities - rowing and swimming, (where you have to work against the resistance of the water), racquet sports (the more power you get behind a serve or return, the faster it will whiz by your opponent), to name a few.

Being quick and developing your speed is important as well. There are two types of speed: speed of reaction (the response to an external stimulus) and speed of execution, which is how many times you can hit a punching bag in a given period of time or how fast you can run a specific distance, for example.

Speed of execution is based on strength. Speed is needed in track-and-field events, such as sprinting (up to 400 meters) and long jumping, speed swimming, speed skating, fast bicycling, fencing, boxing, tennis, basketball, baseball and soccer - basically any sport that requires a quick reaction time.

After speed comes flexibility, which is based on the elasticity of the muscle and connective tissue that surround the joint. Ironically, flexibility is necessary for the same activities that we do to improve flexibility, such as yoga, dance and gymnastics. Flexibility also comes into play whenever we have to reach up for something, like a book on a shelf, or stretch down to tie a shoelace. Flexibility contributes to agility (the stiffer you are, the less coordinated you are) and strength (the longer a muscle is, the more powerful it is).

These abilities integrate your nervous system with the other physical qualities. Good balance and coordination allow you to visualize a movement and physically carry it out.

Just about everything you do requires coordination and agility, from hiking and swimming to sports like tennis, basketball or boxing, in which you have to be prepared to move in any direction at any time.

Endurance is a key component of good health as well. There are three aspects of endurance: the lungs' capacity to take in large amounts of oxygen to be passed on to the bloodstream; the heart's ability to pump ample amounts of oxygen-rich blood to working muscles; and the muscles' ability to work for a sustained period of time without fatiguing.

Any aerobic sport - such as running, power walking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, kayaking, swimming, hiking, jumping rope and ice or in-line skating - as well as fast-paced activities, like tennis and boxing, requires endurance. If you're physically fatigued, your ability to make decisions or do any sort of brain work will be compromised.

For more information check out www.radufitness.com, or go to Radu Physical Culture at 33 Hill Street, Southampton, or Radu at The Plaza Hotel (coming soon). 631-283-9303