Book Review: Fitness After 50 Workout

Title: Fitness After 50 Workout

Author: Elaine LaLanne

Date: 1989

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-8289-0669-6

Length: 101 pages plus 61 pages of worksheets

Illustrations: black-and-white photos by Jim Stimpson

Quote: "[T]he only thing good about the donut is the hole in the middle because it has no calories."

Jack LaLanne ruled the world of fitness gurus for fifty years. In 1989, when he stepped back and let his sleekly curved sixty-something wife write a few LaLanne fitness book, he was still working out too and looking well preserved. This book is, however, written for women. Men can do the exercises too; they won't give a man a feminine body shape, they're the basic stretch-and-tone-before-you-walk-or-swim routine, but they're written up with an "us girls" tone.

Though Elaine LaLanne addresses middle-aged women, I think she has something to offer the young too. Young women who present exercise shows tend to be scantly clad "hotties" who look as if they'd been slightly underweight for their height since age two. Elaine LaLanne wears a shirt with sleeves tucked into her tights, has some loose skin at the backs of her arms and a lower body shape that looks as if she might once have been pregnant, even shows traces of the thinner, drier epidermis that gives away the age of superbly preserved seniors--and she looks great. You can tell she's not 25 years old but, if you are 25 years old and don't like looking at ninety-pound cheerleaders, you may find a sixty-plus model easier to take.

The book discusses two approaches to exercise: exercises that tone specific muscles and guarantee quick visual improvement, and cardiovascular fitness as such. Elaine LaLanne presents the exercises to reshape "problem parts" before getting into the cardiovascular workout. She recommends doing both, but explains how to do the muscle-specific stretch-and-tone exercises alone.

For some people there's a valid reason for this, beyond the pragmatic reason that if you're going to get into the habit of exercising by watching a TV show, the part-toning exercises are the ones you do while watching TV. Most 19-year-olds are ready to dive right into cardiovascular workouts. I remember taking a cardiovascular fitness course at university. On the second day of classes the teacher just marched everyone out into the chilly Michigan morning and said, "We're going to check our pulse rates after running a mile and a half. Run as long as you can, then walk...just get six times around the course in half an hour, so we can get on with the book work in the classroom." And just like that, in whatever shoes we'd worn to class, we all ran a mile and a half. That's not usually dangerous for undergraduates, although that teacher was taking a calculated risk, but many 60-year-olds have let themselves atrophy so badly that running a mile and a half would be sure to produce injuries. It may be wise to spend a few weeks toning and walking slowly before we start running. That "complete physical" checkup LaLanne recommends getting, before you start, is intended to identify special needs.

A large part of this slim book is meant to be written by the reader. You get six months to log your pulse rate, distance walked/run/swum for your aerobics workout, and number of reps of your toning exercises, each day, on worksheets printed right in the book.

How much good will this book do you? How much will you let it do? There are medical problems, including hypothyroidism and resultant obesity, that aren't cured by exercise alone. Even those conditions can be helped by exercise. Hypothyroid patients who work out don't show the most inspiring style, get tired quickly, and don't develop the perfect figures these exercises help women maintain, but they do tone the muscles and maintain a firmer, shapelier overweight body than flabby hypothyroid patients have. If a doctor gives you permission to do aerobic exercises, this book will help you warm up before the workout.

Possibly the most important thing to understand about all books about health-promoting practices is that everyone's mileage will vary. Most of us are never going to look like the LaLannes or be coaching exercise classes for as long as they did. Merely as a status update, I will mention, however, that while enjoying Internet access I've started following a few blogs that actually post the "mood music" people used to suggest at Live Journal. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba replays music fairly well, and I've taken to doing exercises, especially arm and back exercises aimed at recovering the muscle I lost during the salmonella/glyphosate double-whammy episode, while reading things online. I have thought, occasionally, about surgical alternatives to trying to maintain firm youthful C-cups, and that thought makes "uselessly flapping the air" much more interesting than it was when I just had firm youthful C-cups and there was no doing anything about it. If Elaine LaLanne never had to deal with this specific figure problem, she's still an encouraging example.