Many believe the prescription of exercise in response to various chronic diseases is something relative recent. Dr. Ken Cooper's treatment of engaging in regular and sustain cardiovascular (aerobics) training in response to heart, lung, and vascular disease in the late 60's and 70's received a remarkable response from the medical profession—and, in most cases, very favorable.
Where are our leaders in health and fitness? Why are they not engaged in a disciplined, well organized advocacy effort for daily physical education? Why aren't parents demanding quality health and physical education for every kid.
However, it should be noted that while exercise is well recognized as one of the single most important health behaviors to reduce the onset and severity of the very chronic diseases that most plague all advanced industrial societies, no one has accepted responsibility to assure it is taught and taught well in our nation's public schools. Childhood obesity and the continued rise in chronic disease rates could all be profoundly influenced with daily, quality physical education. Until as a nation, we go beyond campaigns, slogans, TV advertisements, and occasional "special events," we will continue sliding downhill.
Where are our leaders in health and fitness? Why are they not engaged in a disciplined, well organized advocacy effort for daily physical education? Why aren't parents demanding quality health and physical education for every kid with special programs for the obese, physically challenged, and underdeveloped? Where is the outrage? Do we need more time? More research? More cheerleading and self-promotional agendas?
No, we must get organized, disciplined and committed to changing the status quo.
Here's what the founders of modern medicine had to say about the importance of exercise:
- Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) — "If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health."
- A. Cornelius Celsus (10-60) — “Take exercise: for whilst inaction weakens the body, work strengthens it; the former brings on premature old age, the latter prolongs youth”
- Galen (129-210) — "Those movements which do not alter respiration are not called exercise.'
- Hieronymus Mercuralis (1530-1606) — “Exercise is deliberate and planned movement of the human frame, accompanied by breathlessness, and undertaken for the sake of health or fitness…”
—Da Coach