Extreme Exercise, Extreme Mistake?

Many years ago, my kung fu master warned me that I was overtraining. “I show you something and you practice it 5000 times,” he said. I took that as a compliment. I was young and macho and figured that the more I practiced a martial arts technique, the better I would understand it and be able to perform it. I swelled with pride at my teacher’s comment, figuring it was a sign he recognized how tough I was, and how dedicated and disciplined too. It took me a long time to realize that his remarks were actually a call to moderation. He was warning me that in pushing so hard I was actually slowing my progress, that such counter-productive training could damage my health. He was telling me, in his oblique and gentle way, that I was “training dumb”.

It happens that my chosen branch of Chinese kung fu (Chen style tai chi) develops the body right down to the bone and rewires the brain to see different options and responses and move in profoundly new ways. Such changes take a long time, which is why there aren’t too many tai chi masters around and very few younger than 60. Tai chi is extreme in this respect, but the principle applies to any exercise or sport. The body has a certain pace at which it can adapt, change and grow in response to any exercise. Yoga practitioners don’t drop into challenging postures during their first class, bicyclists don’t forge up the Alps in world record time the first time they straddle a two-wheeler, and runners don’t break the tape the very first time they strap on sneakers.

A couple of weeks ago I was on the stair climber at my local South Florida gym. Three women were “climbing” next to me, chatting as they pumped it out, occasionally sipping water and wiping their brows. “My trainer says I do too much cardio,” the woman in the middle said. “Can you imagine anything so stupid? There’s no such thing as too much cardio, right?”

The fact is that after a certain point our body begins to draw energy from muscle tissue instead of stored fat, thus degrading fitness rather than increasing it, but beyond that I wonder about the values and priorities lurking behind the “too much” question. The balanced view, of course, is that we can certainly have too much, just as we can have too little. The idea of never too much goes hand in hand with never enough. The feeling of not having enough may stem from a sense of lack. A sense of lack reveals neediness, which in turn speaks of what is to my eye a gaping emotional hole in our society, one we fill with various and sundry self-gratifications including over-eating, over-spending, and, of course, over-exercising.

Evolutionarily, dashing around at a mad and madder pace was something we did when the neighboring village of cavemen invaded with clubs, or when the tiger was chasing us or the river overflowed its banks and threatened to drown us. Stressed, we responded in emergent fashion, and hormones like adrenaline and cortisol coursed through our bloodstream. Such activity had unpleasant side effects, but it saved our lives. We hoped and prayed to do it rarely. Today we engage in all sorts of extreme sports and only rarely are they designed (martial arts training and perhaps parkour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour, the urban running and climbing and jumping featured in the recent James Bond movie Casino Royale, are among the exceptions) to enhance our survival in the face of danger.

One of my tai chi students is an extreme athlete. A man of middle age, he regularly pushes himself to the limit. He revels in the extreme athleticism of breath-hold diving and virtually worships the Tour de France cyclists. Recently he came to tell me he had cancer and was headed for surgery. I can’t say I was completely surprised. He’d been depressed, hated his job, and was constantly looking to change his life but felt he couldn’t.

I wonder if, like the misguided romantic looking for love in all the wrong places, some compulsive, driven exercisers are not looking to numb the pain of life with endorphins or fill a life otherwise lacking in meaning with a routine that cannot bring it. It seems to me that it’s fine to gradually increase one’s level of activity, but perhaps the measure of athletic achievement should be less about how fast you run than how long you run and how well you avoid debilitation injury. Eastern practices bring the perspective that exercise is a longevity practice, something well known to tai chi players and yoginis, but I don’t think one has to do these practices to embrace their philosophy. I think one could play badminton this way, or even croquet, and still grow healthy, enjoy the sport, have a lean, trim, muscular, strong and attractive body, and live a long time.

My student is thankfully now recovering well and, in the wake of his illness, far more receptive to emphasizing health and long life as opposed to breaking records. I feel certain that he now looks differently at weekend warriors who burn themselves out, compromise their immune systems, and then suffer colds and influenza only to get out there and do it again. He may even have a different perspective on athletes who compete for outrageous salaries only to become decrepit or die using performance-enhancing drugs before having a chance to enjoy their money.

I hope you enjoy exercising as much as I do. I also hope you’ll consider tailoring your program and your goals in your chosen activity to support a long career, a life full of the pleasure of using a healthy body. Might it not be better to be a star pulsing in the heaven of fitness rather than a meteorite that burns brightly but then suddenly falls?