The Proper Gym Workout

Is it life enhancing or a death warrant? The gymnasium can be your friend or your enemy. KS works up a sweat about exercise.

You are too busy to go to the gym. You'll do it later. There's no point because you run for a train every morning. Why do you need to bother?

It's not just that the membership card in your wallet is an instant ticket to self-righteous- ness when you see your couch-ridden friends: according to the US Surgeon General, regular exercise reduces the risk of premature death, cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, colon cancer, non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, obesity, and osteoarthritis. Moreover, exercise imparts the added benefits of improved mood, decreased anxiety, relief from symptoms of depression and an enhanced sense of wellbeing.

Sounds like the identical benefits I get from drinking a bottle of wine every day. Can't I just keep doing that instead of leaving the house and getting sweaty? The SG doesn't say — and he also neglects to mention that the gym offers opportunities to ogle some very fit bodies. Neither does he mention that regular exercise enhances sexual performa-nce. Of course, none of us need any improve-ment in that department but … OK, where are my shorts?

If you're a gym newbie, a gymbecile, it can be a daunting experience when you walk into one for the first time — lots of big sweaty people, sounds of grunting and groaning, and exercising positions that look excruciatingly painful. Don't panic, there's help at hand. Most places offer an orientation session for your first time. Staff will show you around, demonstrate how to use the machines and then let you have a go. And as for the pain, it doesn't have to be agonizing. Your workout, your limits.

The staff might advise you to start off each session with a warm up. If you go into hard exercise cold, you might snap some-thing. A quick straw poll of gym goers esta-blished the following: one hundred percent of respondents stated that they warmed up with stretching. Those results are with a margin of error of zero, on an unrepresentative sample of one person.

Our respondent did concede that some gentle work on the bikes or the tread-mill will do just as well, but stretching is all over and it feels darned good.

Whatever. Warm up, or hurt yourself.

One you have warmed up and then heated up in the workout, you'll want to cool down. This being the gym, cooling down counter-intuitively means more exercise — more stretching, or a dip or even a walk in the pool. Cooling down relaxes the muscles and reduces muscle fatigue, one of the biggest discouragements for the beginner.

Another thing we learn is that exercise isn't just one sweaty, homogenized thing — or rather there are lots of different kinds of exercise according to what you want to achieve. In this way, exercise is, again, a little like drinking wine. If you are having white fish such as skate or sole, you might choose a dry, white Chardonnay; or with something spicy, a St. Emilion. When working out you will choose the routine that suits your objectives.
Broadly speaking, there are two possible objectives. You might be looking to bulk up or you might be looking for cardiovascular exercise.

In the first case, you are doing the body building thing, aiming for a body like Arnie (though hopefully not the intellect), while in the second case you are working on your heart and circulatory system with the intention of being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and living forever and having lots of stamina to work out some more — perhaps with the body builder above, if that's your predilection. Or it might be that you swing both ways and go for both approaches. Or you might need neither and just stick with the ogling.

Cardiovascular: treadmills, aerobics, exercise bikes.

Aerobics has long been a bit of an alternative culture — leotards, big socks and obscure jargon about ponies (see the bit above about body builders). Apparently now the aero-heads have moved on from the equivalent of 'do the mash potato' to complex dance routines. At least one gym offers the Brazilian martial art capoeira as an alternative to the dancing. Luckily, exercise helps to improve memory for all those steps.

The cardiovascular brigade are not daft, there's considerable logic in that leaping about.

Cardiovascular training increases maximum VO2 — in other words, the amount of oxygen you can take in to fuel the exercise you are doing. Too little oxygen or too much and you run the risk of producing cancer-related free radicals; too much and your body produces damaging lactic acid (milk? The body is indeed a mysterious thing). Cardiovascular exercise, apart from making you feel darned good, increases your ability to take in and make use of oxygen so that your body suffers less from doing too little or too much.

Bodybuilding gives you some obvious control over the way you look. According to taste, you can create yourself as merely well formed, or massive and intimidating. In the latter case, we have not yet found a gym that provides green paint, so you may have to factor that in yourself.

Our research shows that having big muscles does not rule out the benefits of aerobic exercise — you have to warm up first and that gets the corpuscles flowing.

Or how about this for a routine? Get in the gym, warm up, spend half the remaining time with cardiovascular exercise on the bikes or treadmills and then the remaining half on muscle development. You might end up looking like Brad Pitt or Sandra Bullock —or both.

When working on muscle development whether you are petit or economy sized, you have a lot of muscles to work on. Apparently the trick is to work on lower body on the weights this day, and on upper body the next day, and so on.

So why choose the gym? Sitting in front of the telly, washing your hair, or boiling your head in chip oil are popularly held to be more appealing in comparison.

You could bike or jog or work out at home for less, but the gym has one thing those activities don't have: other people.
In socializing terms, the gym suits all personality traits. There are many types of people who choose a workout to let off some steam and it's a great way to make new friends. Japanese and foreigners mingle together in such a friendly atmosphere of metal and step machines that talking to each other seems like the natural thing to do. Approaching Japanese people is sometimes a difficult thing to do but having a common interest laid out in front of you can make communicating a little easier.

So you aren't convinced — exercise is anyway an inconvenience. Well, consider this. What is more inconvenient, exercising and hour a day, or being dead 24/7?

Text: Naheen Madarbakus and Chris Page
Photos: Taka Kataoka