No-Sweat Exercise

Rising sales of tennis equipment and enrollments in health clubs suggest that the U.S. is becoming a nation of fitness fiends. Yet for every jogger puffing through a park, there are probably still a dozen more Americans for whom a stiff workout is getting up during a TV commercial to fetch another beer. Most physical-fitness advocates approach this sedentary majority by exhorting or even trying to scare them into activity. But Laurence Morehouse, a physiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is currently winning many converts with another approach. Out since March, his new book Total Fitness (Simon & Schuster; $6.95) has already sold more than 200,000 copies and is hovering near the top of bestseller lists throughout the country on the strength of a beguiling argument: that effective exercise can be easy.

Against Exhaustion. Most exercise physiologists insist that people must exercise strenuously if they are to benefit from their activity, and they recommend daily sessions on the track or a stationary bicycle and regular workouts on a handball or squash court. Morehouse, who developed simple "cabin exercises" for the Navy and the astronauts, offers a "no-sweat" alternative. He believes that people can lose weight and keep it off simply by "saying no to an extra piece of toast in the morning and an extra ounce of Scotch at night." He maintains that people can get into good condition and stay there by exercising as little as 30 minutes a week. "We've confused exercise with athletes," says Morehouse, a firm, flat-bellied 62. "You don't have to go nearly to exhaustion to become fit."

Morehouse's program is simple. In his view, adults whose skirts or trousers fit tightly are, if not actually overweight, then "overwaist," and need trimming. To accomplish this, they should first cut 200 calories out of their daily diets. Then they should exercise off 300 calories a day. Over a week, this would result in a "deficit" of 3,500 calories, about the same amount as in a pound of fat. "If you lose more than one pound a week, put it back on," Morehouse advises. "When you start sweating, you're working your body too hard."

The exercises Morehouse advocates are easy--walking upstairs instead of taking elevators, standing for a total of two hours a day, and performing a ten-minute exercise routine three times a week. The routine involves limbering and stretching, "pushaways" from the wall to strengthen shoulder muscles and "sit-backs"--reverse sit-ups--to build up abdominal muscles.

More conventional physiologists commonly recommend at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. They find Morehouse's program preposterous. "It's an impossibility to develop total cardiovascular and pulmonary fitness in 30 minutes a week," says Dallas Physician Kenneth Cooper. His "aerobics" program, originally developed for the Air Force, aims at improving heart, lung and circulatory function through strenuous but graded exercises that promote the system's more efficient use of oxygen. The Morehouse book, Cooper complains, "is going to do a disservice to a person who wants to use exercise to practice preventive medicine."

Morehouse brushes aside such criticism. He argues that most exercise programs are simply too tough for the sedentary, while his regimen at least gets them up and moving. His argument is persuasive. Thousands of housewives, executives and even a few active elderly are following Morehouse's no-sweat system of exercise. Almost unanimously, they claim to be healthier than they were when they got no exercise at all.

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