Even Treadmills Can Be Dangerous

Most people, in considering fitness activities, don't calculate the most important -- which is the risk-to-benefit in doing anything.  Mountain climbers have a tendency to fall from great heights -- and those who love water sports, have a possibility of drowning.  Treadmills force one to move at a greater rate than they are inclined to.  People usually meet their end, doing what they usually do -- whether they like it or not.  That's just a fact of life -- and living.

Thus, one should spend as much time doing what they truly think is worthwhile -- and do that until the very end.  Just watching television, or smoking as one primary activity, robs time and energy from better pursuits.  These days, that might be isolating oneself with one's own thoughts -- while absenting oneself from their actual environment, and what is happening in their immediate vicinity.  That can be dangerous.  Particularly if one is driving a car.

However, that does not mean one should be afraid of everything, or doing anything.  One just has to realize the risks -- that there can be danger in anything -- even running on a treadmill.  Much less dangerous, is just moving one's body -- relative to itself.  Moving the body -- in relationship to external measures, has been the traditional measure of activity -- rather than the internal change of directly improving one's health, which surely, is likely to be more meaningful.  That is, the measure of productivity is effecting movement within the body (circulation and respiration), rather than moving a weight a certain distance in an amount of time.

That actually has very little to do with producing the desirable effects in sustaining lifelong growth, while it could retard it greatly through injury and even death.  But long before that, one can see the success or failure, in the changing health of an individual -- whether they are improving, or deteriorating (disintegrating) -- most notably at the extremities of the head (neck), hands and feet.  Those qualities can usually be determined by the obvious appearance of decreasing vitality and expression -- and measured on performance scales as cognition (mental functioning), grip strength, and balance (foot strength).  Those deteriorations, compromise one's level of functioning in all one does -- and even thinks of doing, anymore.

As nearly as possible, one's conditioning activities, should be as close to their actual usage as possible -- rather than thinking that one grows more proficient, by doing something that has no real world equivalent in practical matters.  One is not simply trying to become the best at the treadmill -- which is the embodiment of activity with no purpose -- but has become the gold standard for so many.  It makes one's heart beat faster -- but so could so many other things, with much more usefulness.

It seems to me that one of the greatest, most useful activities, is to deliberately and systematically optimize the circulation to those parts of the body most vulnerable to the lack of circulation produced by non-use -- and not taking it for granted that that happens just because the heart beats faster -- or at all.  The characteristic of effecting a greater flow, is producing an alternating condition of contraction and relaxation (expansion) in any muscle, which is the pumping effect that is distinctive of the heart, but also capable by any muscle conditioned to produce that same rhythmic effect.

To the body, that is the single most useful "work" that can be done -- to maintain and increase one's health, and produce all those other desirable effects of improved appearance and functioning.  The cardiovascular flow, has to be effected by the neuromuscular flow of impulses that cause that change in state, and greatest range of expression from the relaxed to the greatest contraction -- beginning at the extremity of which there is that deliberate firing to invoke.

Ignoring that, means the typical failure of the extremities to maintain their capabilities, despite the amount of increased work one may be demanding of the heart alone -- which was never designed to do it all.  This is particularly true for those suffering from the deteriorating conditions that begin at the extremities of their body -- and working its way back to the heart because of these circulatory failures -- until the heart may be the only well-serviced and well-functioning organ, even while all else has failed.  Obviously, that is even a greater failure than death itself.  Unfortunately, that is an increasing possibility is such a singularly misguided focus on the value of conditioning activities -- which should be to increase the range of one's activities and competencies, and not just the one while the rest languish and deteriorate into a horrible end.

The greater life, is much greater -- and not just the one, out of proportion to all the others.  That sense of disproportion and imbalance, invariably leads to unforeseen catastrophic results.  Life is the whole -- and not just the part, however important we ascribe to it.  It is the complete development that has always been the objective of every conditioning (educational) program worthy of its time and focus.