At the United States Olympic Training Center, scientists monitor an elite athlete to unlock
the secrets of motion.
Could what they learn ultimately save thousands from the consequences of a crippling disease?
A 71-year-old astounds researchers with a capacity for physical improvement.
Are we underestimating the potential of the human body?
With the help of science, a group of young athletes swim the fastest race of their lives.
And how long can we hope to achieve our personal best?
Exercise may be the key to a longer, healthier life.
Our bodies thrive on physical challenge.
Indeed we've made it part of our daily lives.
But what is the impact of physical activity on the human body?
Scientists have recently uncovered some startling facts.
Could too much exercise be unhealthy?
We are all endowed with vast physical potential.
Join us on a journey to discover the champion within.
Because there is always knowledge to be gained, new paths to explore, and mysteries to unlock,
the Infinite Voyage is made possible by a grant from Digital Equipment Corporation.
High in the Rockies, a young woman prepares for the grueling 26 miles of a marathon.
A few years ago, she would have been unable to compete in Olympic long-distance events.
Our perception of the human body was obscured by ignorance and myth.
Women were considered the weaker sex.
In Los Angeles, August 1984, the first woman's marathon in Olympic history.
Joan Benoit's victory shatters the age-old stereotype of women.
I once thought that no human could run a mile in less than four minutes.
It was a feat beyond our capabilities.
In 1954, Roger Bannister becomes the first man in history to break the barrier.
In the 1976 Montreal Olympics, for decades Americans dominate swimming, but in a stunning
upset, East Germany takes 11 of 13 gold medals.
The victory was attributed to science.
This defeat would revolutionize training in the United States.
At the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, science is helping elite
American athletes push the limits of their potential.
Now winning takes more than talent.
Scientists are exploring the chemistry of motion.
Olympic hopeful Rose Monday has already won seven major international races.
Still, she wants to find out if she is the best that she can be.
Today, a team of researchers is monitoring her oxygen consumption to see how economically
Rose is burning fuel.
The more oxygen she uses, the better trained she is and the longer she can run.
Technique is the most important barometer of endurance.
Technique is also a critical factor in performance.
Based on a study of world-class athletes, scientists have compiled a profile of the
ideal runner.
Reflectors are placed at key points on Rose's body to evaluate the mechanics of her running.
The information is fed into a computer and compared to the profile.
Analysis reveals that Rose's stride length is shorter than expected, but she is remarkably
fast.
An increase of a half an inch could dramatically improve her time, but there are other factors
to consider.
When a runner's foot strikes the ground, the force may be as high as 600 pounds.
An instrument called a force platform measures the impact.
When Rose increases her stride length, the impact is greater, which slows her down.
The team decides not to change her technique.
Since the Montreal Olympics, sports science has helped thousands of athletes like Rose
Monday achieve their personal best.
With a combination of runners, the San Francisco Examiner's Bay to Breakers is the world's
largest foot race, participants range from the dedicated to the demented.
Much of the popularity of running can be traced to the improvements in the shoe.
In 1978, Runners World Magazine commissioned the first scientific survey of over a hundred
brands of running shoes to see how well they performed.
In his laboratory at Penn State University, Peter Kavanaugh measured the impact of running
on each shoe.
His results would revolutionize their design.
Peter Kavanaugh is still looking for the perfect shoe.
But today he works with athletes to understand the forces of running.
What we found with the force platform is that when a runner is contacting the ground, we've
got forces which reply to different regions of the shoe.
And they start out here in the back with most people and reach a certain level.
But by the time they get to the front of the shoe during propulsion, they grow and they
grow and they get to the point where the maximum force that's applied to the ball of the running
shoe can be the order of 3.5 times the body weight of the individual.
So that we're talking about forces of five to six hundred pounds underneath the ball
of the foot in a typical running stride.
Kavanaugh is now using the knowledge he's gained from athletes for an entirely different
purpose.
The application of biomechanics and biomechanics technology in shoe design emphasizes that
shoe design is really not a cosmetic issue.
We're talking here about preventing injuries to athletes.
And it's interesting that that same technology that can help prevent athletic injury can
also be applied to the prevention of loss of limb in the diabetic patient.
Katie Riser is a volunteer in her community.
But the short trip to this meeting puts her health at risk.
Like 11 million other Americans, she suffers from diabetes.
Diabetes caused Katie to lose feeling in her feet.
Because the disease impairs healing, the smallest injury can lead to infection and possibly
gangrene.
Let me know when you feel it.
Fifty thousand diabetics a year ultimately undergo amputation.
Nothing on there?
Big toe?
No.
Katie came to us in the clinic with an ulcer on the under surface of her great toe, about
a half a centimeter deep.
This photograph is some time later when healing had begun.
When we examined Katie, we realized that there were some mechanical consequences for this
ulcer that we had to do something about if she wasn't going to continually re-ulcerate.
Kavanaugh first checks the temperature of Katie's foot for hidden infection.
Peter Kavanaugh is a pioneer in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetic foot problems.
It's a little better.
Really does seem to be healing nicely.
But the problem here, of course, is with this range of motion.
The fact that you have re-ulcerated here means that we probably haven't got the shoe quite
right yet.
And that even though it's stiff and we have stiffened it, it probably needs to be even
stiffer.
Or it may be that the width isn't quite right for you yet.
So I think the next thing we'll do is to stiffen the shoe up and try that.
Okay.
Katie, I'm going to want you to step with your left foot in this area and carry on walking.
Okay.
All right.
To help Katie avoid further injury and possible amputation, Kavanaugh decides to redesign
her shoes.
But first, he will put her through the same procedure used to test elite athletes.
David, have things look on the computer.
All right.
When you're ready, Katie.
His newly developed pressure plate produces a graphic profile of how Katie's weight is
distributed on the bottom of her foot.
The red confirms that the area of highest pressure is under her ulcerated toe.
Although it appears that Katie's foot is healing, she is still at risk.
And compared to the other side, she still has a higher pressure.
So we do indeed have a region of high pressure here under the toe.
This radical shoe design is called a rocker bottom.
Kavanaugh is experimenting with a prototype.
Sensory insoles measure the pressure between the foot and the shoe.
How's that going, Mike?
Oh, dear, it looks good.
Pressure distribution looks fine.
Kavanaugh hopes the design will take the pressure off Katie's toe by shifting her weight toward
the back of her foot.
What these experiments showed was that even with a conventional orthopedic shoe, the pressures
underneath the great toe are still very large indeed.
The higher this diagram, the higher the pressure.
When we took the shoe and we made it rigid and we made it a rocker, what we see now is
that we've made a very considerable reduction of the pressure in this region, which means
that this is exactly the kind of prescription that's likely to be successful for Katie.
New shoes have meant a lot to Katie.
Her toe is finally healed and there's been no sign of further injury.
Well, it looks like it's raining again.
Through the work of Peter Kavanaugh and the millions of runners that have gone before,
Katie Riser is once again able to lead an active life.
How do you do, students?
How would you like to do something that can change your life and something that's fun
doing?
A trimnastic party is going to start like right now, so why don't you join me?
Let's go.
In the 1950s, Jack LaLanne was the first to popularize exercise on television.
Come on, have just don't stand there and be a spectator, be a doer, not a sinner.
By the 1970s, thousands more would take up the beat of Jackie Sorensen's revolutionary
concept, aerobic dancing.
Today, on videocassette, even celebrity instructors provide round-the-clock workouts.
Over 20 million people regularly attend aerobic classes.
Most are women.
For an increasing number, physical fitness is a major component of an active lifestyle.
Our bodies are designed for action.
The 33 bones of the spine are engineered to absorb the jarring impacts of upright posture,
the hallmark of our species.
Exercise is thought to be good for our bones.
It causes calcium to build up on the inside of the bone, increasing its thickness and
making it stronger.
Still, the body has proven fragile.
As exercise has grown in popularity, so has a unique injury known as a stress fracture,
tiny cracks in the bone surface.
Stress fractures are commonly seen in lower legs, the hands, and the feet.
But how could exercise cause harm?
Scientists remain puzzled until 1973, when a clue would come from an unusual place.
Skylab was America's first orbiting laboratory.
It was designed to study the long-term effects of living and working in space.
Each astronaut was given an exercise program, and his health was carefully monitored.
Urine samples began to show an alarming increase in calcium.
It was coming from their bones.
The astronauts' bones were starting to dissolve.
To find out what was happening in space, San Francisco physiologist Chris Cann had to find
a parallel on Earth.
Bone loss has long been associated with low estrogen levels in post-menopausal women.
Perhaps hormones were a clue to understanding bone loss among the astronauts.
We were studying women who had hormonal defects or hormonal deficit, if you will, with estrogen
deficiency.
We knew that that had an effect on the skeleton.
Cann wanted to know if exercise could halt bone loss.
His original study group of 37 women included young athletes who would stop menstruating,
a condition called amenorrhea, the result of low estrogen levels.
Using a CAT scanner, Cann measured each woman's bone density.
As expected, a cross-section of the spine reveals a loss of bone in post-menopausal
women.
But when he scanned the athletes, he was surprised.
They too had suffered bone loss, which can lead to osteoporosis.
Healthy bone is dense and thick.
But when calcium is lost, bone becomes brittle, fragile.
Could it be that a generation of young athletes are now at risk for osteoporosis, a disease
associated with age?
Some women who train intensively experience amenorrhea.
Does Cann's study mean that women are unsuited for strenuous exercise?
The implications were explosive.
When we first reported the study of the decreased bone density in amenorrhea athletes, of course,
the headlines show running causes bone loss and all this, and it was very much misinterpreted.
We weren't saying that at all, what we were saying was that if you run so much that you
stop menstruating, then with the estrogen deficiency, there's bone loss.
And of course, then it hit the popular press and went through a variety of different meetings
and people were trying to confirm the work, or in fact, there were a number of people
that tried to disprove it.
Early 1983, the U.S. Olympic Committee held a meeting up at the Olympic Training Center
where they were looking at exercise and the menstrual cycle, and I met Barbara Drinkwater
in the airport.
I didn't know who she was and she didn't know who I was.
We introduced ourselves.
She said, of course, you're the one they brought here to crucify.
I was absolutely convinced that Chris had to be wrong because we've seen several studies
where older women, postmenopausal women, who exercise actually gained mass.
So how could young women exercising at much higher levels be losing it?
To test Chris Kahn's results, Barbara Drinkwater of Seattle's Pacific Medical Center expanded
the sample.
We thought that it would be advisable to broaden the sports that we examined to see if women
who, for example, were ballet dancers would have the same problem, if women who were in
crew, if women who were skiers would also be losing bone.
And so we went out and we tried to get as many sports represented in our most recent
study as we could.
Trina Wellman was a prime candidate.
Once a competitive athlete, a switch from rowing to running changed her life.
She was now plagued by battling injuries.
I used to row competitively in college, and when I left the university, I decided to find
a new sport.
I wanted to stay fit, and the thing I knew best besides rowing was running.
I lost a lot of weight as a result of my running.
I began to train quite hard so that I could be a competitive runner, and as a result,
I believe, of the weight loss, I did become amenorrhea.
I started to develop a number of stress fractures, which seemed slightly extraordinary.
I wasn't running that much, and it was suggested to me by a sports medicine doctor that I get
involved in Dr. Drinkwater's study.
Using a low radiation scanner, physiologist Barbara Drinkwater observed the same bone loss
seen by Cannes.
She was immediately alarmed.
Barbara Drinkwater Basically, there are two things that we're
concerned about with these women.
We're concerned whether they might have osteoporotic fractures now, and I think even more concerned
about their future.
Trina, do you want to take a look at your spine here?
Just roll a little bit.
There we go.
Barbara Drinkwater If a woman in her 20s has the bone mass of
a woman in her 50s, what position will she be in when she reaches 40?
And we'd be finding women in their 40s with the so-called dowager's hump of the osteoporotic
older woman in this young amenorrhea athlete group.
I think it's a serious concern.
The scan revealed Trina had the bones of the average 70-year-old woman.
Should she stop exercising?
Dr. Drinkwater Exercise is good for the bones.
The problem is when some of these young athletes either exercise so strenuously or work so
hard on losing weight or are in some kind of psychological stress that their menstrual
cycles stop, and when their menstrual cycles stop, that's an indication that their estrogen
levels have dropped to the level of post-menopausal women, and they have the same problem with
their bones that the post-menopausal woman does.
The bones simply start to lose mass.
In the case of Donna Guterman, we have a young woman who is a physical education teacher,
very active, and a woman who is also teaching aerobics classes several times a week, and
she's putting tremendous stresses on her bones.
I was amenorrheic for about six years.
Originally my idea of being amenorrheic was naively positive.
I thought this represented a woman who had low body fat, a woman who was very fit, a
woman who didn't have to deal with periods.
This was great.
I was real curious about why I was having a lot of stress factors in my toes and problems,
so I did find out from the study with Dr. Drinkwater that in fact, yes, I had dangerously
low bone density.
Donna's bone scans were also startling.
The bone density measurements show that Donna's bones are equivalent to a woman in her late
60s or early 70s, and the result has been a series of stress fractures.
What these fractures have brought home to Donna is the seriousness of this condition,
and Donna's result has made some changes in her lifestyle.
I realized a few things.
I guess I was really overdoing it.
I had lost perspective of what was healthy.
I had gone beyond what you would call the fit range, both I think psychologically and
physically.
I had to change my concept from thinking that a fit person was an emaciated runner to a
person that had a few extra pounds and a person who wasn't so compulsive about exercise and
maybe put on some muscle.
The problem here is that some people may perceive this as a reason to suggest that women are
not physiologically suited to strenuous physical activity, and that would be a serious mistake.
This may be nothing more than a symptom of overtraining.
It may be a symptom of a dramatic weight loss.
It may be a symptom that a woman's trying to cram too much into her lifestyle.
Donna still does aerobics.
She cut her exercise in half, gained some weight, and her menstrual cycle has resumed.
But long-term studies are still needed.
Both Barbara Drinkwater and Chris Cann are continuing their work on the connection between
exercise, hormones, and bone loss.
The verdict is still out.
For now, their work serves as a warning.
Our bodies love physical activity, but there may be limits.
The 1989 Mid-America Conference Swim Finals.
For Coach Bob Thomas and Physiologist Dave Costell of Indiana's Ball State University,
it is the climax to a unique collaboration between sports and science, one that began
at Costell 30 years ago.
Well what really got me interested in the field of exercise physiology was a curiosity
of my own ability to perform in exercise, but also to try and figure out why I never
was a champion, which is a little depressing at times, I think, but I was really curious
about what it took to be successful and why some individuals were better than others,
and it really focused initially on the adaptations in training.
As director of Ball State's Human Performance Laboratory, Costell has advised many athletes
on how to train.
Coach Thomas, a four-time national champion in the backstroke, wanted a winning team.
Intrigued by Costell's work, he asked for help.
Clearly the team had the will to win.
They trained long and hard.
Still their performance was inconsistent.
Like we've been doing, I want you to go through your pre-meet warm-up.
Then if you want to do any pay swims or build-up swims, we'll do that.
You've done everything you can in your power up to this point.
You've been good in the water, but today I want you to feel great.
At the beginning of the season, Costell tests the condition of each swimmer.
A heart rate monitor will record changes during a controlled swim.
We have a series of pace lights on the bottom of the pool, and those lights aid the swimmer
in keeping just the right speed.
And then we measure their heart rates during the swim, and we measure blood lactic acid
at the end.
As they get in better physical shape, their heart rates are lower and their lactic acid
production is lower.
Those are keys for us to be able to tell whether they're adapting adequately.
Lactic acid in the blood indicates how close a swimmer is training to maximum capacity.
A sample is taken to measure the amount.
Too much lactic acid in the muscle causes early fatigue.
The blood tests reveal that many of the swimmers have high levels, either they're out of shape
or they're training too hard.
Costell also takes a small sample of muscle tissue.
He's interested in how the muscle uses a substance called glycogen.
When we eat carbohydrates, they're converted to sugar or glucose, which is then transformed
into glycogen and stored in the muscle.
Glycogen is an important fuel for exercise.
Here's our sample.
Here you can see a section of muscle that's been stained for glycogen, and you can see
that it's red, and the more red you see within each of those cells means that each fiber
is well endowed with glycogen.
This is before exercise, so it's not too surprising that you can see that nearly all of the cells
are full of glycogen.
After exercise, of course, we can see a totally different pattern.
That is, that some fibers now are depleted of glycogen, that is, they're empty of that
fuel supply.
Consequently, those fibers can't produce energy fast enough, and you can see those fibers
that are empty are the ones that are probably going to be blamed for the fatigue and exhaustion
that occurs near the end.
Costell's tests indicate that some swimmers are virtually running out of fuel.
He suspects they are overtraining.
The swimmers have been notorious in the fact that they try to train as many hours a day
as is possible or that they have available, and consequently, the amount of energy they
burn up every day is far greater sometimes than they'll be able to restore.
It takes time to restore energy to the cell.
Tom suggests to Coach Thomas that he cut the team's training in half.
I took a risk and cut the morning practices out, and the first thing we saw was the swimmers'
attitudes.
They were suddenly more rested.
They were swimming faster during the afternoon practice.
At our meets, they were performing much faster than they had the previous season.
27-6.
Costell's training program has guided them through the season.
They have done all they can do.
The test will come tomorrow, but tonight is a moment to relax, to share comradeship, laughter,
and 25 pounds of spaghetti.
The Mid-America Championship Finals are today.
I hope you're ready, because this is it.
This is it.
Remember, mind, attitude, confidence, match.
Let's put it together, and let's see what you can do.
It has been the best season in 10 years.
Nine wins and two losses, 22 swim their best times and one sets a conference record.
For Dave Costell, it's a proud moment, but he'll take away more than memories.
What he's learned about the human body is not just for athletes, but for all of us.
In my own case, I'm 53 years old now, and I probably train with about the same volume
and intensity that I did when I was 20 years old.
Now that's not all physiology, it's certainly some biomechanics.
Maybe swimming pools are faster now than they used to be, but I think the point is that
you can maintain your physiological conditioning quite well, resisting perhaps what we've
often thought of as being an aging process simply by maintaining a level of activity.
Young and old, a little bit of exercise goes a long way toward finding the champion within.
Unfortunately, the average American spends an hour a day behind the wheel, six hours
behind the desk, and seven in front of the TV.
From caves we've evolved to advanced civilization, where life is made easy by high-tech automation.
If a life without moving is what you choose, sooner or later you're going to pay some
dues.
Escalators, elevators, remote TVs, you're having it your way and you're getting heart
disease.
Smoking, lack of exercise, a fatty, salty diet, it's all going to lead to a coronary
riot.
It may not be pretty, but man, it's a fact, every 32 seconds there's another heart attack.
Heart attack, heart attack, heart attack.
At University Hospital in Portland, Oregon, physician Lynn Goldberg treats the casualties
of modern life.
Doing very well.
One of my patients had a very significant heart attack.
This destroyed much of his heart muscle.
Years ago it would have been prescribed that he rest for rehabilitation, but today we prescribe
exercise to improve his functional ability and keep him in an active lifestyle.
170 over 58.
What, you're exercising at the track?
You're up too high.
So that's 120.
So that's fine.
130 and above is too high and you had four.
Lynn Goldberg has seen the devastating impact of heart attacks.
Now his interest lies in prevention.
Nearly one in every two Americans dies from cardiovascular disease.
Paul Meyer was lucky.
BJ Day, 1945.
Thousands of young men returned home.
Ironically, many survived combat only to succumb a few short years later to the nation's new
number one killer.
On the eighth floor of Denver's Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, photographers are ready when
President Eisenhower is wheeled out on the sun deck for his first posed picture since
he suffered his heart attack.
It would take President Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955 to focus the country's attention
on the problem.
While the number of heart attacks mounted, one population seems surprisingly immune.
Longshoremen.
During a landmark study in the early 50s, they were observed lifting, pulling, and pushing
cargo.
After 22 years of research, it was concluded that the low rate of heart disease among longshoremen
was somehow related to strenuous activity.
Lynn Goldberg would wonder why.
His favorite exercise is weightlifting.
Because of the similarities to the pushing and the pulling of cargo, he began to investigate
how weightlifting affects the heart.
Goldberg recruited a group of people who hadn't smoked, taken medication, or exercised for
six months before his study.
He then designed a personalized weight program for each of the members of the group.
Okay, now I want you to go like a rocket ship just blast it off, go, go, push, push, push.
Getting stronger was the most obvious benefit.
After 16 weeks, each was trimmer and more physically fit.
Goldberg had also solved the mystery of the longshoremen.
The most significant change was occurring in their blood.
Going through the bloodstream are particles called lipoproteins, which contain cholesterol.
Low density lipoproteins, or LDLs, carry cholesterol from the liver to other parts of the body.
High density lipoproteins, or HDLs, act like biological vacuum cleaners.
They remove excess cholesterol and carry it back to the liver.
When there are more LDLs than HDLs, cholesterol builds up on the walls of the coronary arteries
and may cause a heart attack or stroke.
We have long known that aerobic exercise is good for the heart, but Goldberg discovered
that strenuous activity also lowers cholesterol.
Try and get one more out of it.
That's it.
Good.
A reduction in LDL, the bad cholesterol, the type of cholesterol that causes coronary heart
disease, was reduced about 19% after 16 weeks of weight training.
The HDL cholesterol tended to rise and that ratio of good cholesterol to bad cholesterol
improved.
So they had an improvement in their cholesterol ratios as well as a decrease in the bad or
LDL cholesterol after the weight training period.
At a time when 60 million Americans have dangerously high levels of cholesterol, Lynn Goldberg
has found a new way to combat what remains the nation's number one killer.
Spectator sports have become America's number one pastime.
To meet the demands of the game requires preparation and a unique combination of strength, speed
and endurance.
Physiologist Bill Evans of Tufts University monitors the physical fitness of the Boston
Bruins.
They are among the best condition athletes in the world.
To stay in shape, they must constantly make greater demands on their bodies.
Evans suspected that what was good for one group of Bostonians was also good for another.
To test his theory, Evans took a group of retirement age volunteers and put them on
a 12-week exercise program.
They were asked to increase their activities a little more each week.
For the elderly, everyday activities that most young people take for granted are more
difficult to do.
Walking up a flight of stairs or carrying in a bag of groceries represents a very high
percentage of their maximal capacity.
Particularly the higher intensity types of activities, because they do them less, their
fitness levels begin to decline.
And as they begin to decline, those activity levels become more and more difficult to maintain
and fitness levels drop off precipitously.
We know that our athletes have to train at a fairly high intensity in order to be able
to improve.
So it's not very far removed to think that our older patients really need to train at
a high intensity in order to see real functional changes.
Everything thumbs up?
You feel okay?
Okay.
Keep it up, Pat.
Got to really bear down at the end here.
Good job.
Okay.
Here we go.
We'll take you down now.
Two, one.
Okay.
Stop.
All right.
Good job.
Okay.
Real nice.
Good job.
Give us a treadmill, Pat.
Just give us a cooldown.
Excellent.
That's good.
Good job.
How do you feel?
A little tired.
Okay.
Evans monitors Pat's progress like he would the Bruins.
The results are equally impressive.
Okay.
A little breathless?
Yeah.
Okay.
The doctor said, well, wait a minute, Pat.
We think we have a problem with one of the machines.
They asked me to come back a week later and do the test over again.
So I came back the week later and did the test over, and I said, oh, there was nothing
wrong with the machine.
We just improved so much we couldn't believe the readings on the machine.
So I was quite pleased to hear that.
It's interesting that many of the things that we thought were inevitable consequences of
aging, like maturity onset, diabetes, reduced physical function.
That is the ability to lift weights.
We know that, for example, about 50% of women over 60 can't lift 10 pounds.
Those things probably are not age related at all.
And that's why I think that increasing activity for this population is probably more important
than any other single segment of our society.
At age 68, Alfred Rubio joined Evans' group.
He was put on a weightlifting program to see how his body would respond.
This is the cross-sections of the upper thighs of one of our subjects before training.
Right here, you see the femur, the bone of the upper thigh.
This black area is the marrow.
All of this area right here is the muscle.
These are the knee extensors, what makes the knee straight.
These are the knee flexors, what bends the knee.
And this area right here is fat, and you can see that there's a lot of fat interspersed
in the muscle itself.
OK, what we're going to do is just ask you to do maximal contractions as hard as you
can do.
OK?
Ready?
Start.
Push it out.
This is the strength of Alfred's leg.
Excellent.
Don't stop.
Almost there.
I'll count it for you.
Don't save yourself.
Push it out.
Dramatic changes are occurring deep within his muscles.
A muscle is layer upon layer of bundled cells.
In each cell are thousands of contracting protein strands which produce muscle power.
Cells build new protein strands with exercise.
As each cell grows, the muscle grows.
Even new blood capillaries develop to bring more oxygen and nourishment.
The result is a stronger, more powerful muscle.
A CAT scan image reveals the change.
What we see here are the cross-sectional area of the thighs of our man after 12 weeks of
high-intensity training.
What we see is that the muscles are 16% larger than they were before exercise, before the
training.
That's as much or more than anything we see in younger people doing the same amount of
training.
And what it indicates to us is that no matter how old you are, your muscles never lose their
ability to respond to training.
I joined the program when I was 68, and in three years since then, I have continued exercising
regularly three times a week.
And to me, with the general improvement in health and my general feeling of confidence,
et cetera, it convinces me it's never too late to start with an exercise program.
At Boston's Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged, a simple walk can be a challenge.
Here where the average age is 88, exercise is more important than ever.
Exercise in the very old concerned Bill Evans and physician Maria Fiat-Taroni.
To see if they can improve his strength, they've put 88-year-old Julian Goulston on a weight
training program.
The older we
get, the more we slow down, is immobility the consequence of age or inactivity?
Here Julian is evaluated to see if his training has also improved his balance.
The way we're going to do that is I'm going to ask you to stand with your feet about nine
inches apart.
We'll warn you when we're going to do it, so you won't be surprised, okay?
First what we're going to do is start with no weight, just so you get the feel of it,
okay?
You ready, Julian?
Ready.
Okay, one, two, three, go.
Good, okay, you maintained your balance, you took a couple of steps, that's fine.
You double-crossed me that time.
Okay, this time it's going to be a little bit heavier, all right?
Same thing.
Keep your balance any way you can there.
Ready, Julian?
Ready.
Okay, one, two, three, go.
Good, okay, very good.
What we have seen is that these very old people above the age of 90 can triple their muscle
strength in eight to nine weeks of training.
They can significantly increase their muscle mass.
And all of those things may make a major difference in the ability for them to ambulate, to get
around, to be mobile, to reduce the risk of falling down when they walk, which may make
a major difference in their survival.
Give me a C. C. Give me an A. A. H. R. C. H. Teams, teams.
Our research shows us that part of the problem is our expectations.
We expect that our parents and our grandparents are going to be less active and less able
to do everyday kinds of things.
And because of that, they do.
And I think that we really have to have a fundamental rethinking of how we perceive
the elderly and that we shouldn't automatically categorize them into these older people that
have to be put away in a bed or in an easy chair.
I think the biggest mistake that you can make is driving your parent to the store rather
than asking them to walk.
The elderly give us hope.
Aging is a fact of life, but age may be a state of mind.
We've learned from Julian and his friends that the potential for improvement remains
within us all.
You know, you're going to play for the Celtics.
I can see that.
You're going to play for the Celtics.
Sophocles observed, of all the world's wonders, none is more wonderful than man.
Graceful, agile, flexible, a complex creature of motion.
Yet the most astounding feature of all is our potential.
Sophocles and athletes together have given us a new view of the human body.
By studying those who test the limits of their ability, we are learning to explore our own.
We have found that we can overcome our frailties.
We have discovered that although there may be boundaries, our physical potential can
reach far beyond our expectations.
We can even alter the very chemistry of our inner world.
We draw from the strong among us.
We are each made stronger by the experience.
From the old to the young.
From the athlete to the physically impaired, we are all endowed with unique gifts.
To tap our individual potential is to harness the power of the champion within.
Because there is always knowledge to be gained, new paths to explore, and mysteries to unlock,
the Infinite Voyage is made possible by a grant from Digital Equipment Corporation.