In 1972, Chicago surgeon Randolph Seed was living on the 45th floor of the John Hancock Center and pursuing his own form of high-rise fitness. For a warmup, he would run down 45 flights to street level. For a workout, he would then climb briskly to the roof, bounding up two stairs at a time, and sprint from floors 91 to 100. For a cooldown, he would run down the 55 flights to his apartment.
One summer day, after reaching the roof, an exhausted Seed encountered several workmen. ”I`ve just run up 100 flights,” the breathless surgeon exclaimed. To which one of the workers replied, ”Isn`t that bad for your heart?”
On the contrary. Stair-climbing, Seed could have told them, is actually very good for your heart. Moreover, it`s not only good but highly recommended. Chicago exercise experts say, in fact, that any one of three simple activities-stair-climbing, walking and bicycling-are all you need to feel better and achieve cardiovascular fitness. No aerobics classes need be attended, no high-tech equipment, videotapes or health-club membership need be purchased. With comfortable shoes or a durable bike, you`re ready to go. The basics, it turns out, are still the king of the exercise hill.
This is a long-overdue message. In the generation since Seed climbed the Hancock stairs, author Jim Fixx laced up his sneakers, wrote a book and helped launch the running craze. Sales of running shoes shot through the roof, but few Americans actually followed an exercise program.
”This represented a fashion statement, not a fitness statement,” says Kimberly J. Herling, Ph.D., 33, an exercise physiologist and the director of cardiovascular rehabilitation and health enhancement at the University of Chicago Medical Center. ”When you see as many people with late-onset diabetes, heart disease and weight problems as we do, you know that something is not matching up between the clothes people buy and how they spend their time.”
Herling thinks that most Americans ”understand isolated facts about fitness but not the basic concepts.” She estimates that only one of three American adults is physically fit and that our children, weaned on TV and video games, are in even worse shape. Millions, unfortunately, apparently share the philosophy of the former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, who once quipped, ”When I feel the urge to exercise, I go lie down until it passes.”
But now there is hope. Although it is said that half of all doctors don`t exercise regularly, those who do list walking and biking as their favorite ways to achieve conditioning in the least amount of time. Herling spends much of her time supervising patients in cardiac rehabilitation. What are they doing? Walking (on a treadmill), biking (on exercise cycles) and climbing (on machines called ”StairMasters,” which are designed to mimic the real thing). All activities that, exercise science suggests, will greatly reduce your chances of one day finding yourself perspiring under Herling`s watchful eye.
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Although you need not know the dynamics of your heart and circulatory system to exercise effectively any more than you need to know the inner workings of a car to drive one, there is an important analogy. The heart is a pump, the body is an engine and, like a car, both benefit from regular tuneups. The hardest thing is getting started, and walking is the perfect way to begin.
Herling supervises an early morning fitness walk at the Museum of Science and Industry three times a week. The walkers are mostly from the surrounding Hyde Park/U. of C. neighborhood, and they come in all ages, shapes and sizes. They have been sold on the idea that walking will increase their stamina, help prevent heart disease, control weight, relieve stress, create healthy and strong bones, tone muscles, improve self-image and help them relax and sleep better.
The reasons this will happen are literally all around them, since their quarter-mile walking path on the museum`s balcony winds through various exhibits, including the huge heart of ”a 28-story human being.” This exhibit explains the heart, our miracle muscle, in minute detail.
Weighing slightly less than a pound and spanning a space only slightly larger than a fist, the heart is by far our most-important muscle. The most-telling part of the exhibit, perhaps, is the one that asks you to squeeze a handle in rhythm with a flashing heartbeat. The hand quickly becomes cramped and tired. The heart, fortunately, has more endurance.
With every beat, the heart pumps enough blood to fill half a coffee cup. In the time it takes to read this sentence, your heart will have pumped one quart of blood. The average heart rate will range from a low of 60 beats a minute while sleeping to 75 while playing checkers or reading to 110 while watching a horror movie to 130 while playing basketball or skipping rope to a high of 150 while running.
The formula for cardiovascular fitness is simple: You need to exercise at 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate for 20 to 30 minutes for a least three times a week.
To figure your maximum heart rate, subtract your age from 220. Multiply by 60 to 70 percent, and you have your target exercise heart rate. For example, a 30-year-old man or woman needs only to walk (or run) or bike or climb stairs three times a week or more at 114 to 133 beats a minute (which is 60 to 70 percent of the maximum rate of 190, or 220 minus 30) and to sustain this intensity for 20 to 30 minutes. You can monitor your heart rate by taking your pulse at the wrist for 15 seconds and multiplying by four.
Herling tells her museum walkers that they can achieve excellent health benefits simply by briskly walking at the proper intensity around and around the exhibit of the huge heart. She explains: ”The more you exercise, the more your body adapts to your improved level of fitness. Your heart muscle becomes stronger and pumps more blood with each beat, so it doesn`t have to work as hard as before. Also, your blood vessels widen to accommodate the increased flow of blood and, over time, your blood pressure will drop.
Most importantly, your body tissues become much better at extracting the oxygen they need from the circulating blood, and you don`t have to breathe as hard. Your entire cardiovascular system becomes more efficient. Over time, the body develops new set points in its ability to respond to the challenge of physical exercise. Many people actually come to crave the feeling they get from exercise.”
Although she now has a doctorate in the physiology of exercise and can discuss fitness right down to the level of the biochemical and cellular changes, Herling insists that the concept is very simple.
”It`s simply you against yourself. You have to be realistic enough to overcome the basic problems of finding a time and place to exercise, and then you have to stick to something you enjoy. Choose activities that you can build into your lifestyle. Even if you do nothing else, these simple steps will improve your fitness. Walk to and from work. Instead of driving, use a bike to shop and get around. Skip the elevator and climb up and down stairs.”
”Climbing stairs is the ultimate treadmill test,” surgeon Seed says.
”Simply dragging your weight up and down a stairwell will condition your heart. I guarantee that if you walk stairs for 30 minutes three times a week, you will be in good shape.” Seed, 58, now does his climbing on a StairMaster at the East Bank Club, ”setting the controls so that I can mimic walking up and down 200 flights.” His new goal is to run the Western States 100-mile ultramarathon ”when I`m 60.”
If you don`t like to climb stairs and your joints and tendons can`t take running, biking may be your best bet. It offers the benefits of brisk walking or running without the wear and tear.
Hannah Hedrick, 52, ”refuses to go to a gym to work out,” so she meets her fitness needs by biking to and from work. A staff executive in the American Medical Association Division of Medical Education, Hedrick pedals her ”rusty coaster bike with no gears” over a five-mile lakefront route from her home on the city`s North Side to the AMA building at North State Street and West Grand Avenue. A trained instructor in both yoga and tai chi, she will occasionally use her arms and upper body to practice some ”gentle tai chi movements” while coasting on her bike.
”I`m a convert from running. Although I`m too stocky to run long distances, I started running at age 30 and continued for 10 years and developed arthritis and chronic back problems in the process. Why did I start? Because I was 30. Why did I continue? Because I was determined. Now, through biking and yoga I feel truly at home in my body for the first time.
”It works, too, because although I have never `worked out` in a gym, my resting pulse rate is as low as someone who runs marathons,” Hedrick says.
”I may look like a bag lady when I arrive at work after biking five miles on a winter day while dressed in layers and layers of ski clothes, and my
`beater bike` gets stolen every year even with a lock, but so what. When I`m cruising along the lake on a beautiful day, I know that this is where I am supposed to be.”
Philip Galiga, 34, an art director at the University of Chicago, is another dedicated cyclist. He says, ”I read somewhere that 60 percent of all city workers live within five miles of their jobs. You can bike this distance in 30 minutes easily and get some exercise and enjoyment while doing it.”
Galiga recommends finding a good shop and taking a bike for a test ride before buying it. ”You can buy a good bike for $400,” he says, ”less if you buy it in the winter. For city biking, I recommend a mountain bike, because it`s sturdy and can stand up to city potholes. For the suburbs, I suggest a road bike, which is sleeker and faster. I own both, plus a beater bike. You definitely should invest $50 in a helmet, and women should insist upon a woman`s seat.”
Harry Roberts, 68, a business professor at the University of Chicago, has developed a unique way to exercise even when the demands of teaching limit his time. Dressed in coat and tie, he runs to and from his home and the Illinois Central commuter station in south suburban Homewood and to and from the Illinois Central station in Hyde Park and his office. It works out to about three miles a day and gives Roberts all the exercise he needs on those days when he can`t bike or swim.
Roberts began running 30 years ago to calm down an upset stomach and has never stopped. In his 50s, he took up marathons; in his 60s, he took up triathlons, adding biking and swimming workouts to his running.
How does he feel when he doesn`t exercise?
”Pasty,” he says.
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There`s running . . . and there`s running up hills. And hill-climbing has as its staunchest advocate Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton, who attributes his 13-year longevity in the National Football League (where four years is the average tenure) to that unusual form of fitness.
Now retired for five years, Payton, 37, is a successful businessman who owns a chain of restaurants and hopes to establish a new NFL franchise in St. Louis. Stuck in the corner of his Schaumburg office is one sign of his more leisurely life; a set of golf clubs. Standing up, Payton wistfully looks out the window in the direction of what he simply calls ”the Hill.”
Throughout his playing years (1975-87), Payton had been in search of an Illinois equivalent of the sand levees where he had run in his native Mississippi. In the summer of 1981, he found his hill, which was part of a massive landfill project near the intersection of Route 53 and Dundee Road in Arlington Heights.
”It was perfect,” Payton recalls, ”70 yards high and sloped at a 70-degree angle. The Hill was an intimidating monster. It wasn`t straight up, but it was close. It was so steep that once you made it to the top, there was no way you could step your way down-you had to run both ways. The terrain was rough, too-good old Illinois dirt-and it required the kind of starts and stops and zigs and zags that you actually use in football. The first time I tried it, I could only make three round trips. I brought a few teammates along for moral support, and some of them vomited after one trip up and down. A few turned white as ghosts, and I thought they were going to die.”
Payton would soon force himself to do 20 round trips on the hill. In the morning. He would often do another 20 in the afternoon. He followed this summer routine until he retired after the 1987 season.
The hotter it was, the more he liked it. ”I always had to have someone with me,” he recalls, ”because I never knew if I would make it down or not. Often, I would get lightheaded and have to lie down before continuing. By the time I had done 20 trips, I was totally wasted. I would have to rest before I was able to bend over and untie my cleats and drive home.”
On the days when he skipped the hill, Payton did 90 minutes of sprint work in the morning and another 90 in the afternoon. A typical workout would begin by running 880 yards at three-quarters speed, followed by alternating walks and all-out sprints over 110 yards (done four consecutive times), 220 yards (three times), 50 (five) and 100 (five). Then, after a 440 at three-quarters speed, he would alternately walk and sprint ten 10-yard distances. The workout concluded with a final 880 at three-quarters speed.
”I never let myself stop,” the ex-Bear says. ”Run a distance, then walk it, then run it again, then walk it. I`d stay in constant motion. It was a great way to prepare for the season. Football is a game of short bursts of speed, done again and again against great resistance.” He says he willed himself to take on the hill and do the sprint work because, ”The way you think is the way you are. I let myself get out of shape once before my sophomore year at Jackson State, and I vowed, `Never again!` I decided that I would rather pay a little price every day than a big price for being out of shape.”
