by Ken Hutchins

Aerobics is a vast subject—too broad to thoroughly discuss in this text.

Many of my readers realize that I disapprove of aerobics philosophy. Many SuperSlow instructors courageously adhere to SuperSlow Philosophy and try to do the right thing by discouraging aerobics participation. Many of these same instructors are frustrated, because they are not equipped with the arguments to combat the deluge of aerobics propaganda, AND because some of their clients cannot resist the compelling lure of aerobics activity. I realize that these sincere instructors need and want my assistance in combating the aerobics mind set. The information exists—persuasively documented and in detailed comprehensiveness, but its general availability is impossible until the completion of Enough is Enough. For now, I regret that it must suffice to state several observations.

Point #1 It is impossible to segregate the aerobic from the anaerobic energy pathway during activity. As Ellington Darden states, your pathways never completely shut down when you are inactive or asleep. It is not as though your body’s engine has been cut off like a car as it is stored in the garage.

Point #2 As you work harder and you become progressively more proficient with SuperSlow techniques and you use more muscle mass, you use greater degrees of both pathways. However, the aerobic pathway becomes the bottleneck. Achievement of thorough inroad is thwarted by extreme respiratory and vascular demand and work. SuperSlow often becomes more aerobic than so-called aerobics. The excessive aerobic effect often requires curtailment for many moderately advanced subjects to permit progression.

As stated under the topic of Preliminary Concerns in The Appendix, we often provide a water break at a regular point in the workout. This is often warranted—not because the subject requires hydration in a properly cooled and ventilated workout environment—but because he needs to collect his wits and slow his pulse and respiration, so that he can concentrate during the next battery of exercises.

Point #3 Traditionally, aerobics is qualified or defined by various exercise authorities or enthusiasts in three different ways. These definitions are often applied either separately or simultaneously.

Definition #1: Aerobic is qualified by a meaningful and adequately sustained increase in heart rate.

Authorities differ on the required degree of heart-rate elevation and sustenance for optimum benefit and safety. Heart-rate charts are commonly posted in fitness centers to gauge age and percentage of maximum heart rate. These charts indicate “target heart rate.” Target rate represents a statistical bell curve. This bell curve represents data points collected by researchers from treadmill and ergometry studies using VO₂^max measuring machines and EKG monitoring devices. The target rate or “range” assumes that the measuring machines are accurate, that the measuring devices were appropriate for measuring what was sought to be measured, that the measurements were performed competently, and that the statistics were honestly calculated and appropriately represented.

I have witnessed the use of these tools and procedures enough to know that it is mostly guesswork. Additionally, it is a tremendous stretch of faith to expect an individual to accurately measure his heart rate during movement, to confidently know his maximum heart rate based on age, and to apply it to a chart representing a statistical bell curve (further representing thousands of subjects) with the further assumption that he is within the first standard deviation (the only deviation depicted by the range on the chart). In other words, the chart assumes that each individual is not at the extreme high or low end of the bell curve. You can appreciate that this simply charted heart-rate guide is a mess of assumptions built on assumptions.

Some texts and authorities go so far as to assess or define exercise intensity by heart-rate magnitude. Since heart rate may rise or fall without respect to exercise intensity, heart rate does not suffice for this indication. These events do not qualify as factors to determine the qualifications for The First Definition of Exercise (Chapter 15).

Definition #2: Some authorities witnessed an intense Nautilus workout in the early 1980s and stated: “Just attaining an elevated heart rate is not enough to qualify as aerobic. The activity must be continuous—steady state—in such a way as to incorporate the aerobic energy pathway.”

As stated before, it is impossible to meaningfully segregate the aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways. These pathways are not instantly and accurately possible to know and measure. Furthermore, we do not know that the pathways increase in parallel, that they leap frog over one another, or that they increase sequentially. We are fairly certain that neither is ever completely turned off, and that at maximum demand, the body is mobilizing any and every pathway it can muster. To state, “You must incorporate the aerobic pathway,” represents a moot point.

Definition #3: In the second definition, the requirement for “continuous or steady-state activity” was mentioned. Realize that during a traditional Nautilus workout or a SuperSlow workout, your core, stabilizing musculature of the trunk, is working in every exercise. Except for some rest when moving between machines, your core musculature—comprising a larger collective mass than what is often isolated in each exercise—is continuously working. In some respects, a circuit workout as experienced with SuperSlow strength training is more steady state than traditional concepts of steady state.

Therefore, the regimen I recommend qualifies all three of the traditional definitions—both academic and popular—for aerobic.

Point #4 Many authorities further criticize that although adequate aerobic effect is possible with circuit training, most facilities are unable to accommodate nonstop circuit training. The subject usually waits for a prolonged duration between some exercises and aerobic effect is lost.

Maintaining an elevated heart rate is not critically important. In fact, just as much is documented—just as poorly as the mainstream belief—to show that vascular improvement is best with noncontinuous elevation.

Point #5 I am not concerned about people’s supposed need for aerobic exercise—whatever that really is. Aerobic effect is not that important. People have had planted in their minds that they should exercise for their central vascular system by emphasizing aerobic effect while their peripheral muscular strength and peripheral vascular system is de-emphasized.

Ted Lambrinides, PhD, cites several studies demonstrating that peripheral training (i.e., so called anaerobic isolation exercise for the limbs, comparable to strength training used in SuperSlow) and its training effect is just as beneficial, if not more beneficial, to the vascular system than the traditional whole-body or large-muscle steady-state approaches. Lambrinides also underscores that the research in the aerobics area is poorly performed, hardly supervised, and documented with questionable tools. Moreover, those aerobic studies that appear to be competently performed exhibit inconsistent findings.

Point #6 I am often asked, “Is there a place for pure aerobic or steady-state activity?” Answer: Yes.

I allow that bicycle ergometry or some reasonably low-force alternative is often the only choice for severely debilitated and weakened patients. Such activity is sometimes the only muscular work possible. For anyone else, it is a waste of precious time and effort. It usually does not qualify the formal definition of exercise.

Point #7 I witness lost opportunity with aerobics. To rephrase: I see subjects grossly compromise the fitness they could ultimately attain because they remain weakened due to their quest for aerobics. In reference to the three things exercise can do in Chapter 13, excess beyond the minimum of exercise prevents optimum strengthening and well-being. The damage of aerobics goes beyond insult to the recovery system.

During the 1985 Nautilus Diet Research, Ellington Darden allowed the participants in one research group to perform dance aerobics. For the first two weeks, their progress toward fat loss zoomed past the other groups, but they ultimately obtained the poorest results. They became listless, they became depressed, they broke their diets, and they were chronically too fatigued to then efficiently perform their workouts. They were more prone to injury, and they experienced the highest dropout rate of any group we studied over a twenty-year period.

I see the same trend in scores of individuals I supervise outside of research. Serious subjects often cross the line into fanaticism. The aerobics quest is part of this emotional imbalance and almost always leads to chronic fatigue and the previously stated sequelae.

Point #8 I do not permit any aerobic influences in my workout environment. For example: an AIDS fund promoter recently dropped off a display for a walk, jog, or run fund raiser. It was displayed in our reception area for less than five minutes before I could remove it from the premises. During that short time, one of my clients examined one of the fliers and said “Oh, how nice, I’ve been wanting to start a jogging program.” This veteran female client had recently begun to exhibit dramatic progress in fat loss, improved concentration in her SuperSlow technique, increased exercise intensity, accelerated strengthening, as well as more strict dietary discipline. I predict that, had she begun to jog, she would have become chronically fatigued, discouraged, weaker, injured, laid up, and fatter than if she had never begun the program.

Point #9 In late 1989, Ellington Darden and I spoke to a Nautilus Seminar. Throughout the day, a woman from New York repeatedly asked, “What about aerobic exercise?” “What are you doing to ensure adequate aerobic exercise?” She eventually stated, “You should place more emphasis on the vascular system, and provide work for people’s hearts.”

Finally, Darden took charge and said, in effect, “Look, your subjects don’t really give a damn about their vascular systems. Sure, they say they do because they’ve read and been told they should. But what they really want is to look and feel better—mostly to look better. If they look better, they will likely feel better and be healthier. To look better, they need to lose excess body fat and gain muscle—and aerobics is going to compromise that goal.”

Point #10 Lambrinides often cites strength-training research performed on advanced-age subjects. These 70-110-year-olds are often bedridden, confined to a wheel chair, or must use a walker. He cites scores of examples where the subjects discarded their support devices after only a few weeks of strength-training.

From this research, Lambrinides derives the poignant conclusion that our elderly need strengthening programs, We are romantically attached to our vascular system and programs that focus on vascular disease. Meanwhile, our elderly population unnecessarily rots away, because they are effectively immobilized due to easily correctable muscular weakness.

Certainly, these patients will eventually die. So will I. So will you. But consider the cost of caring for the ever-increasing millions of oldsters who lack only muscular strength to be self-sufficient. Darden, Lambrinides, Jones, and Hutchins sincerely believe that the emphasis on aerobics is tantamount to betting on the wrong horse.

Conclusion Do not conclude by my criticisms of aerobics philosophy that I consider the vascular system unimportant. It is very important. It is a critical part of the whole of the human biology.

But aerobics experts would have you believe that the vascular system comes first, if not exclusively; and that even though they now acquiesce—though belatedly and grudgingly—the need for muscular strength; they still insist on aerobics merely for aerobics' sake.

I sincerely believe that my readers, while perhaps enticed to embrace the aerobics mania to assure good health, have the intelligence to appreciate inconsistencies when they are presented. I realize that some of my readers will be dissatisfied with this pronouncement, but: Forget aerobics! No one really knows anything about the subject. I really do not know what the aerobics gurus are talking about—and neither do they.

Note that I did not edit this foregoing excerpt for content. Although several references are made to Enough is Enough, I have resorted to use much of the material slated for this future work in The Exercise Standard. Later, Enough is Enough may emerge with a more comprehensive and less constrained presentation of some of same topics, but for now, if this material serves the purposes of The Guild, I see no reason to withhold it.

There are, however, three important additions to include in later editions:

One: The suggestion by aerobics authorities that steady state activity burns more fat calories than non steady state activity smacks of a complete ignorance of the First Law of Thermodynamics. This law states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. It is laughable that the exercise physiology twits take themselves so seriously as that they can disavow one of the foundations of real science.

Two: Aerobic is a proper adjective describing a major metabolic pathway in the formal discipline of biochemistry. Aerobics is a noun coined by Kenneth Cooper in 1968 to denote a pop culture movement centered around steady state activity, most notably running. Cooper and others have used this vernacular to subtly suggest that steady state activity assumes an emphasis on aerobic metabolism. His further reach is the suggestion that this is the key to cardiovascular health: a conclusion supported by no research on earth nor perhaps on any other planet.

Three: Although I state some allowance for steady state activity in Point #6, after much reflection on the matter, I really do not see a use for the concept.

These three issues are presented in later original hard copy installments of The Exercise Standard. I deliberately grouped them herein for the Internet version.

In later articles and newsletters I strive to carefully use aerobics to indicate any of those activities associated with Cooper’s popular notion. Aerobic is reserved as a metabolic description. It is therefore incorrect to refer to aerobic dance. The convention should be aerobics dance. Of course, in view of the Exercise vs. Recreation argument, it should be simply dance.

This last point is becoming slightly moot since the aerobics following is shifting to the term cardio. This more directly indicates what they desperately intend their philosophy to be recognized as. It is the same nonsense with a new guise.

—K.H.