Bruce W. Perry - Fitness for Geeks

Copyright 2012 Bruce Perry

Fitness for Geeks

by Bruce W. Perry

All rights reserved.

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April 2012: First Edition.

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2012-04-12 First release

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[M]

How can we define health? Ever tried to take a stab at it? I attempt to define fitness and geek here because they appear in the title. But it seems health is a mlange of a lot of thingsgenes, lifestyle, a feeling of being safe and in chargenot all of which we can put a finger on.

We tend to grope around in defining good nutrition and health. We can be too reductionist in our view of whos healthy or whether we are healthy, claiming that nutrition is 90 percent of health, or that we have achieved some perfect biomarker like total cholesterol after six tests at the doctors office, so therefore we must be healthy. Or maybe we find out our telomeres are resilient and hanging in there, or we take a long survey on the Web, and the results pat us on the back and suggest well live to be one hundred. Many of these things seem like feel-good, almost delusional exercises. So much about health is mysterious, yet to be discovered, and may never be discovered. I like that aspect of it, because it leads to more experimentation. Maybe your own ideas about how to stay healthy havent been refuted yet.

This doesnt mean that you cant aim for health, particularly if your current strategy has you waking up in the morning most days feeling pretty good. Thats where my fitness and geek definitions come in.

This is a book about fitness and nutrition for the independent of spirit and irrepressibly curious. The reason I have cleaved nutrition off from the general rubric of fitness is that, even though eating well (and the book will try to define that too) is part of being fit, we usually think of fitness as being an aspect of physical culture.

Fitness implies an underlying assumption of physical health. The Oxford American Dictionary defines fitness as the condition of being physically fit and healthy. This book will discuss fitness in respect to becoming a physically stronger person and aging as well as we can. It will not advocate achieving a level of fitness, say, for a particular sport that undermines health in the process, which can actually be pretty common among all our popular extreme sports.

Mea culpa : Ive done a few things in my life that some might consider extremelike a five-hourplus triathlon and a little mountaineering, mostly guidedbut I would not claim that I was pursuing fitness during these adventures (I was fashioning unforgettable memories, and sometimes raising money for charity), and therein lies the difference. Since a good part of this book is about the latest and greatest gear that people are using for self tracking , speaking of extreme, I must pay homage here to the wonderful GoPro HD Hero helmet cams, which are tracking devices in their own right and have captured simply amazing outdoor videos for YouTube, such as that of a skier in the Alps being buried and dug out of an avalanche, and another skier launching off a cliff, unfurling a parachute, then watching an avalanche crash off the cliff behind him. Now thats personal tracking.