Book Review: Fitness from Six to Twelve

Title: Fitness from Six to Twelve

Author: Bonnie Prudden

Date: 1972

Publisher: Harper & Row / Dial

ISBN: 0-385-27895-9

Length: 312 pages plus indices

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “It isn’t only the lessons of life that come out on walks. There is a world to be discovered.”

For those who don’t remember, Bonnie Prudden was the physical fitness activist of the Kennedy Administration. Most people have heard by now that “young,” energetic President Kennedy, much like his coeval Robert Dole, had been badly injured: both veterans would have been completely disabled for life without physical therapy programs based on exercise, massage, and also Dr. Janet Travell’s innovative program of “trigger-point therapy,” which initially involved giving innocuous fluid injections into the “trigger point” of a cramped muscle.

Brief digression: Although I came along too late to meet Bonnie Prudden personally, I can fairly be called a “grand-student” of hers. Travell and Prudden experimented further and found that the injections weren’t necessary—simple pressure against the “trigger point” would relieve the pain. The results are discussed in Prudden’s later books, Pain Erasure (for families) and Myotherapy (for massage and rehabilitative therapists). I remember learning about these techniques from a small group of factory laborers who claimed that they were the only thing that relieved the tension built up by twelve hours of heavy labor. When I found Myotherapy in a library I realized that there was some theory behind the laborers’ odd demand for a massage treatment that I didn’t imagine could be helpful. I learned that trigger-point massage really does work what more primitive people have long considered miracles—we really can restore sight to some blind people and hearing to some deaf people, although it won’t happen during every practitioner’s career. I was able to help enough people to save up enough money to study with Judith Walker Delaney, who was Prudden’s designated heir and now teaches cutting-edge trigger-point techniques known as Neuro-Muscular Therapy (NMT). I have seen hearing restored, seen marriages revived, seen people go in to a therapy session “walking like old ladies” and go out walking like teenagers...but even Bonnie Prudden never personally restored sight to a blind person. Blindness can be caused by muscle cramps too, but this is rare.

Anyway, the concept of regular physical fitness tests in elementary school, and the “President’s Medal” for kids who did well on fitness tests, originated in the synergy among JFK, Prudden, and Travell. Prudden, already a grandmother, demonstrated to the country how bouncy and stretchy senior citizens could be, while she put groups of children through their paces; she taught primary school children the rudiments of trigger-point massage, and didn’t even mind writing what quickly became a rare book called Exersex. She wrote a variety of books promoting the idea that actual fitness, as measured by strength and flexibility, rather than success at games was vital to children’s future health. She advocated swimming lessons for infants and gymnastics for schoolchildren.

It should be noted that most exercise gurus no longer use some of the tests and exercises Prudden used. If the instructions in her books are followed carefully, exercises like standing knee bends and straight-legged sit-ups are safe, but too many people were doing them too fast and without adequate preparation.

This is the book specifically about exercise and stretching for elementary school students. Prudden considered this is a key age for fitness, when most kids are starting to calm down enough that they can become sedentary, sluggish, and not fit enough to become healthy teenagers. She shares the benefits of years of experience organizing fitness classes for kids, whether they were “little girls’ dance classes” or “conditioning classes” for mixed groups of future athletes. Her “conditioning classes” were to some extent customized around the trendiest physical activities of the period—horseback riding, tennis, swimming, ballet, skiing, skating, gymnastics—but she also give tips for students who might be more interested in baseball, basketball, etc. There’s also a chapter on the benefits of “conditioning” for children in this age group who have major disabilities (she recommends going back to her books on exercises for younger children, since disabilities may place children in the developmental equivalent of a younger age group).

A funny thing happened when I wrote about the benefits of exercise on AC, especially for middle-aged women. My audience betrayed a degree of gender polarity. The loyal female readers who read reviews of books like Shaunti Feldhahn’s For Women Only rated my summary of one chapter as “The family that works out together, stays together” not helpful. The male readers who skipped the book reviews and read the firsthand sport-and-exercise articles rated those articles helpful. So I may be addressing the least receptive part of the audience here, but I’m going to say it anyway, just to “spite the devil.” Most middle-aged women are not going to look like our First Lady in any case. We have to work with what DNA gave us, and some of us just aren’t ectomorphs. If your ancestors handed down genes for a top-heavy or bottom-heavy shape, a wide frame, and/or round face, the range of celebrity looks available to you may be narrow. Exercise is the key to looking more like Dolly Parton or Jennifer Lopez than like Lizzo or Roseanne. Then as a bonus, if you stick with the exercise for another twenty years, exercise is also the key to being a trim, alert, energetic grandma like Bonnie Prudden! So you might as well get the children into the swing of things, and this is the book that makes it easy, fun, sociable, glamorous, and musical.

Fitness from Six to Twelve is warmly recommended to all parents and all children.