Philadelphia Reflections

Glutes, Abs and Pects

Union League of Philadelphia

Robert Matsey, the director of Executive Fitness at the Union League, recently entertained the Right Angle Club with a discussion of new trends in muscle building. Which is to say the old theory of Dynamic Tension, as featured in adolescent magazines by Charles Atlas, is being superseded by platform stabilization, a much more popular approach among senior citizens. Since a few members of the club are already in the Medicare age range, and more are approaching it with concern, the talk was greeted with great interest.

Personal Trainer

Bob Matsey has a degree in marketing, so it all comes down to this: the more powder you use in a cannon, the bigger the bang it makes. But if said cannon is sitting in a canoe, the extra gunpowder doesn't add much firepower. The new approach stabilizes the platform to magnify the cannon power, without paying so much attention to adding directly to the gunpowder. No one said that weight lifting and pushups don't bulk up your muscles; but if you want to climb stairs and lift things, it will get you farther to stabilize the pelvis and shoulder girdle than to split your seams with muscles that can't do much. Or, worse still, that will lead you to throw out a lumbar disc -- or a cervical one -- struggling to perform a simple task. All of which leads to a complicated discussion of the function of the hamstring muscles of the back of the thigh, which is mainly to overcome the inappropriate architecture we inherited when we became two-legged animals. And, as well, to overcome the tendency of a young straight back to curl up with age and inactivity, and press your nose toward the ground. One of the main causes of back pain can be traced to shortened tight hamstrings, a condition which destabilizes the platform of the pelvis.

Sitting down is the great enemy of posture and bearing; fifty years of it leads straight toward turning a former soldier into a skinny old geezer. Sitting down to a dinner table turns people into fat old geezers, deep inside which is a skinny geezer hidden by the fat.

Muscles

Every medical student is puzzled to learn that most energy expended by muscles is used to lengthen, not shorten, muscles. Without getting into the biochemistry of this issue, it can be taken to explain the tendency of muscles to shorten up when under-used. And, in turn, explains why stretching works a lot better than "bodybuilding" against a resistance. It thus may help to understand why it is sometimes easier for skinny old retirees to re-build their muscles into proper balance and coordination, essentially training infantile muscles to work together in the right way. Those who have struggled to "work through the pain" may actually reinforce bad coordination and will require still more sweat on the brow to force things to work the right way all over again. For example, there are two kinds of hamstring muscles, short ones, and long ones. The short ones stabilize the pelvis, but if you whip things into obedience, you may be improperly recruiting the long hamstrings to act as stabilizers, making you in effect "uncoordinated" and awkward. RNT stands for reactive neuromuscular training, a process which amounts to improving a muscular coordination flaw by forcibly exaggerating it. The scientific basis for this jargon is a little hard to follow, but it does soon become very clear that RNT is quite uncomfortable. It makes a sort of argument for a compulsory draft into the armed forces at an early age, to beat bad muscle coordination out of the whole public at an early age, before they start sitting themselves to death in front of a computer.

A great deal of emphasis nowadays is placed on gluteal strengthening, a sort of unnatural posture training which can, unfortunately, be easily dismissed as worthless. In the spirit of defending this particular fitness training, a lady at a nearby table in a fancy restaurant was heard to exclaim to her luncheon partners, "What I mind most about growing old is that I have lost my ass!" Since obviously, this particular disability is great to be avoided, get some gluteal training, ladies.

Along the same lines, the economics of fitness centers was recently explained with considerable seriousness, but not by Robert Massey, who disassociates himself firmly. The trick, explained the outside expert, is to get people to sign up for a whole year of training when they first come in, full of enthusiasm. Since most of them will drop out of attendance after a couple of weeks, it is possible to show quite a profit running a fitness center with hardly anyone showing up.

And finally, Tom Hawes, former president of the Right Angle, rose to link this discussion with the current debate about health care reform Relating how an elderly couple in Florida went to a physician specializing in sex counseling, asked him to observe their technique and comment on it. He later told them their technique was surprisingly good, and he had no recommendations. The charge for this service was $50, readily agreed to. Nevertheless, they returned with the same request three more weeks in a row, until the doctor asked them what they expected to learn from all this. "Oh, that's not the idea. She's married, and I'm married, so we can't go home. The hotel charges $100 and you only charge $50. "

"But the beauty part is, that Medicare reimburses us $43."

Originally published: Friday, November 20, 2009; most-recently modified: Tuesday, May 21, 2019