Participants who meet the game’s objectives before the end of the program win, and receive some type of prize. Here is an example of an incentive game we at COMSAT Fitness Center in Bethesda, Md., hosted last year:

Fitness Clue

Fitness Clue can be copied or modified to best meet the interests of your members.

Objective: To discover who killed the aerobics instructor, with what object and in which room of the fitness center.

Rules:

1) Each person chooses a game piece to move around the game board. You may only move vertically or horizontally.

2) Each square on the game board represents 10 minutes of a workout (cardiovascular or toning/stretching). The X in the corner rooms are secret passageways. You must work out 50 minutes to use the passageway to pass from one corner room to its diagonal partner.

3) The participant works out, records the number of minutes on his/her score sheet, then moves his/her game piece the correct number of spaces. For example, 40 minutes = four spaces (round up after five minutes so 35 minutes = 40 minutes). Extra minutes are forfeited once a participant reaches a room.

4) When a participant has reached a room, he/she may guess the identity of the murderer, and with which object the victim was killed (the room in which the player is in serves as his/her guess for the location). The participant tells one of the staff members his/her guess, and the staff will say how many of the three answers are right, but not which ones.

Keep it a secret! The participant may record his/her guesses on their score sheet to keep track of the correct/incorrect guesses.

5) If you want to stay in the room, you must work out 50 minutes to make another guess. The minutes can be cumulative.

6) The program will last five weeks, or until someone guesses all three answers correctly with one guess. Other participants may win before the five weeks are up. The correct answers will be kept by the staff and not told to anyone except the winner(s). Winner(s) are not allowed to help others.

7) All winner(s) will receive a small prize. Other participants who work out four of the five weeks, but do not win, will receive a participation prize. Have a list of these near the game board, or on the score sheets, for easy reference!

Asthma is a condition characterized by narrowed air passages (bronchi) leading to the lungs, which causes labored breathing and wheezing. In 1990 approximately 5.6 percent of Americans were affected by asthma, resulting in over six billion dollars in healthcare costs. Obesity is common in asthmatic patients, but from research to date it remains unclear how exactly obesity relates to asthma in the general population.

Sylvia Y. N. Young, M.D., M.P.H., of the Navy Environmental and Preventive Medicine Unit in Sigonella, Italy headed a study examining the relationship between BMI and occurrence of asthma. People with a BMI of over 25 (measured in kilograms per meter squared) are considered overweight, and those with a BMI over 30 are considered obese.

The study population consisted of 2,788 asthmatic patients and about 40,000 controls enrolled in a military managed health care program in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Enrollees replied to annual questionnaires that asked about their height, weight, and history of asthma. The participants ranged from 17 to 96 years of age.

The researchers found that as BMI increased, so did the rate of asthma. Compared to patients with a BMI under 25, those with BMIs between 25 and 30 were 20 percent more likely to have asthma. Those with BMIs over 40 had 2.8 times the risk for asthma.

To check the accuracy of patients’ replies to the questionnaire, Young and colleagues also randomly selected 1000 of the asthma patients and 1000 of the controls and verified their conditions from online pharmacy records.

After excluding asthma patients not prescribed bronchodilator medications and controls prescribed bronchodilator medications, the authors looked for associations among asthma, BMI, demographic factors, lifestyle, and other disease-related risk factors among 366 verified asthma cases and 744 verified controls.

Again, asthma rates increased with BMI. Among verified subjects, those with BMIs between 25 and 30 were 40 percent more likely to have asthma
than those who were not overweight. Patients with BMIs between 35 and 40 were 4.8 times as likely to suffer from asthma.

In addition to high BMI, the authors found in both the larger and the verified analyses, that younger age, female sex, less physical activity, stomach ulcer, depression, and high blood pressure were also predictors of asthma occurrence.

Macro-level perspective

All of the club industry’s fundamentals remain strong. Clubs are ideally aligned with key demographic factors, and they are engaging the aging population, especially baby boomers. As the public becomes more health conscious and the nation’s health bill becomes more overbearing, the fitness industry takes on a greater role.

The industry continues to attract a better-educated employee base who have more education and certifications. It is still a highly fragmented industry, with the top 10 companies owning fewer than 6 percent of the total number of facilities in the U.S.

Clubs still compete on the basis of accessibility to intended markets, facility appearance, physical plant, equipment, programs/activities and services. Pricing is still too emphasized as a marketing variable. And true unique club positioning is rare, as too many clubs are not differentiated, and are presenting themselves instead as local commodities.

Based on clinical studies, most people will plateau in their exercise programs somewhere between their sixth and eighth week. At a minimum, exercisers should change their routines during that time frame.

During those six to eight weeks, exercisers should have at least two different alternating activities. They can alternate within the same workout or vary their routine every other day.

When choosing activities, exercisers may want to combine one high-impact activity with one low-impact activity, if appropriate. For example, runners may choose to swim or row on alternate days.

This way, they still work their legs but give them a break from the high impact of running. Runners also benefit from engaging their upper bodies and conditioning the muscles that normally are not used while running. Another example is group cycling enthusiasts who may do well to alternate a weight-bearing exercise, such as jogging, elliptical exercise or stairclimbing.

Ideally, of course, you have been keeping in shape all year long. You do not use bad weather as an excuse to eat more and exercise less. If you are committed to fitness, you eat and exercise moderately on a consistent basis. Doing too much or too little of either is detrimental to your health.

Before you get overzealous about reaching some lofty fitness goal by Memorial Day, consider the pitfalls of overdosing on exercise.

Three indications of overtraining are an increase of more than 5 beats per minute in your morning pulse rate, the feeling you have toward your next training session and a sudden weight loss. If you are constantly tired and have little desire to train, you may be at risk of overtraining and should cut back.

The most common injury associated with exercising too much is a strained muscle, which can sideline you for days, even weeks, while you recuperate. Other potential injuries are overuse shoulder, runner’s knee and tennis elbow. To help avoid these injuries, do not perform the same activity on consecutive days so you do not stress the same muscles and joints excessively.

Also, make sure you alternate your workouts using the hard-easy principle. If you have a hard (intense) workout one day, perform an easy to moderate workout the next day. And avoid increasing the time or intensity of your workout too much at one time.

Warming up your muscles, ligaments and tendons before exercise also will reduce your risk of injury. Start your activity slowly and then end gradually with a cool-down followed by a stretching routine.

If you do sustain an injury, follow the RICE principle: rest, ice, compression and elevation. When you are ready to resume exercising, consider if you need to alter anything about your workout. Perhaps a certain movement is aggravating the injured area, and you need to change your technique.

Intense training may increase your chances of catching a cold or flu due to overexertion. In a study of marathon runners, those who trained more than 60 miles a week caught nearly twice as many colds as those who trained less than twenty miles a week. This suggests that after a stressful marathon run, the body’s immune system is more susceptible to being attacked by bacteria or viruses. Moderate exercise, on the other hand, may raise the immune system.

Compulsive exercise occurs in people who feel they need to work out several hours every day. To them, exercise is an addiction, and they feel guilty for missing a single day of exercise. Ask yourself, why you are exercising so much? Are you trying to escape your problems? Are you trying to punish yourself? When intense exercise is mixed with eating disorders or injuries, or when it becomes the most important thing in life, it is dangerous.

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Jake starts to cry again, “This was supposed to be the final four.” Penny gives a little pep talk and suggests that the four of them sleep together.

Jake hears this and thinks aloud, “That sounds almost… erotic.” He laughs but Erin, well… that same Erin who was so sympathetic and understanding just a bit ago rolls her eyes in an annoyed-at-the-lame-ass-male-who-always-makes-passes-at-my-beautilicous-self manner. I guess when it comes to anything related to eroticism, one cannot joke around Erin unless he happens to be a young, beautiful person who smokes so they look unhealthy-thin just like herself.

And this is too bad because I just started to like Erin.

They end with more team drama and the chicken hopes that they may have gotten sidetracked and have forgotten their plan to eat him. “No matter what it looks like, our team is loyal,” Jake says. “No matter how much crap we give the other team for their planning on picking us off one-by-one, we are loyal to each other.”

(Recall my little rule: If the quote is in italics, there’s a possibility I might just be making it up.)

Just when you thought there was enough Drama

Before I get into the drama, Day 24 pops up on the screen. Day 24? The day of the immunity challenge (and when the monkey ate a lot of their food) was Day 21. This is the same day people were sitting around complaining about not being to celebrate. The same day, it seemed, that Erin gave Jake the excellent advice.

Are they suggesting that not one significant thing happened on that island for almost three whole days? Or did something happen (like the missing reward challenge) that was for some reason not shown?

Then again, without Robb and Shii Ann, I can see how they’d have a difficult time finding interesting footage.

Jake and Jan (do these two names surprise you to be in the “just when you thought there was enough drama” section?) hold a funeral ceremony for the chicken. Jake quotes a little Buddhist philosophy. Both him and Jan fight back tears. Ted leaves to exercise. Jake hangs out but just thinks it’s silly. Brian stares at them painfully. (He had the same look as when Helen was doing her recipe thing.)

“So, chicken, thank you for giving your life,” Jake says.

Minarik stated that he had been practicing there for 18 years and that he saw four or five patients every day. “I’ve been treating people for twenty years already,” he said. He wore a white lab jacket throughout the session and came across as a moderately affable professional.

“What kind of problem do you have?” he inquired. I lied, stating that I had been diagnosed with high blood pressure a few years before but didn’t have symptoms. I said that I was “supposed to” take medication but didn’t, and that I treated my condition with exercise and diet.

“So, high blood pressure, you said?” asked Minarik.

“Yeah.”

“Anything else? Any pains?”

“No.”

The first phase of Minarik’s “reflexology treatment” involved his placing “acupressers” on my hands and feet: (1) a plastic device, indistinguishable from a spring clothespin, on each little toe, (2) a plastic helmetlike device on each big toe, (3) a plastic screw-device with Velcro on each foot, and (4) a “screw-on” plastic clamplike device on each hand and foot. As I lay in the reclinerlike armchair, I looked at the blowup of Minarik and Cuomo and observed: “That’s Mario Cuomo, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Minarik. “He was one of my patients.”

I told Minarik that years ago I had applied to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine; then I asked where he had studied.

“In California,” he replied.

“Is the school still there?”

“Uh, no…”

I asked the name of the school, and he said: “William Fitzgerald School of Naturopathic Medicine and Zone Therapy.”

Then I lay “adorned” for about twenty-three minutes. Minarik spent most of this time in what sounded like a kitchen. Six minutes before the end of the period, he declared that, whatever my blood pressure had been “before,” it was now lower. As he removed the devices, he asked for how long had I had a blood-pressure problem, and I said ten years.

The next phase involved manual massage of my feet, calves, and shins; the next, massage of my soles and toes with a vibrator that had a tapered head, and of the left and right sides of my feet with the Hitachi Magic Twin-Head Massager. The following phase involved my sitting on a footrest with my hands on the “roller”; the next, getting a massage from the mechanical couch; and the last, Minarik’s cracking my neck. I somewhat disliked Minarik’s cracking my neck, knuckles, and toes, especially since he had not stated his intention beforehand.

Minarik sold me the Acupresser for $40: junk consisting of four plastic clamplike devices and a pair of Velcro devices. I asked him why the Velcro on one device was white and on the other, black. He said the difference balances yin and yang.

Minarik stated that he would thenceforth charge me $30 per visit. He recommended two visits weekly for several weeks (purportedly to break up calcium deposits), followed by one visit per month.

On August 3, I again happened to meet the 63-year-old naturopath at the health spa. He asked me how I felt after the “treatment.” I said “fine,” omitting that I thought his treatment was irrelevant. Indeed, the euphoria his brochure had forecast had missed me with a vengeance.

The Bottom Line
Reflexology is a highly variegated practice whose theories lack scientific substantiation. It can be pleasurable or unpleasant, a massage or an invitation to quackery, or just a waste of time.

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In 1990, the brochure included a photo of Minarik and Mario Cuomo, shoulder to shoulder in front of a gas station. The caption described Cuomo as looking “very contented after getting his ailing back cured with a foot reflexology treatment” from the “famed” foot reflexologist.

However, in August of that year, Governor Cuomo responded that he “in no way “endorsed “Mr.” Minarik’s work and that Minarik had never treated him. Brochures distributed between late 1993 and August 1995 do not mention or depict the former governor.

I first laid eyes on Minarik on July 29, 1995, when I chanced upon him in a steam room. This was in a large health spa in Woodside, New York, that had displayed his promotional materials for years. I recognized Minarik from a photo in a copy of a tabloid clipping I had recently seen at the club. The man sitting beside him asked about his cellular phone, perched just outside the window ahead of them. Minarik told the man he was expecting a call from a patient. Before I left the club, I obtained his brochure from a display case.

The cover of the brochure stated:

Foot Reflexology is a science which deals with the principle that there are reflexes in the feet relative to each and every organ and all parts of the body.

As a person gets older, inorganic calcium builds up on these nerve endings causing a shortage of nerve energy back to the corresponding parts of the body. By skillfully stimulating these reflexes, these inorganic calcium deposits can be gradually dissolved enabling renewed nerve energy and blood circulation to previously sluggish glands, organs or other parts of the body. Even after the first treatment, the patient experiences a profound sense of well-being and euphoria.

These assertions are scientifically footless.

The cover further states that foot reflexology has “successfully alleviated” anxiety, arthritis, back pain, bursitis, constipation, depression, fatigue, “female problems,” glandular disorders, headaches, intestinal ills, neck stiffness, sciatica, and more than a half-dozen other health problems.

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Forms and variations of reflexology include auricular reflexology, body reflexology, chakra energy massage, the Laura Norman method, the metamorphic technique, the Original Ingham Method™, the reflexology workout, Vita Flex, and zone therapy. Proponent and quasi-proponent identifications of reflexology vary substantially, for example:
zone therapy

a descendant of zone therapy

zone therapy, comprising (1) macroreflexology (e.g., acupressure and acupuncture) and (2) microreflexology (e.g., ear reflexology, foot reflexology, and hand reflexology)

foot reflexology

a type of shiatsu that focuses on the hands and feet

I first experienced foot reflexology in 1993. The practitioner, evidently a teacher of the Laura Norman method, applied lotion to my feet before massaging them. She stated that she generally used lotion even though the method excluded it. The form of reflexology she performed during the one-hour session consisted of manual massage, almost exclusively of the feet. I rather enjoyed it. The reflexologist told me I had “some tightness” in my intestines and remarked that many reflexologists have no compunctions about rendering diagnoses. My second reflexology experience, which I describe below, was very different.

Later that year, the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology published a report of a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study of reflexology. The authors — Terry Oleson, Ph.D., and William (Bill) Flocco, founder of the American Academy of Reflexology, in Burbank, California – defined reflexology therapy as “the application of manual pressure to reflex points on the ears, hands, and feet that somatotopically correspond to specific areas of the body.” What somatotopic correspondence is, is unclear. According to the report, the objective was to determine whether reflexology, relative to placebo treatment, could significantly reduce premenstrual symptoms. All 35 subjects individually attended one half-hour session per week for eight weeks. “Trained reflexology therapists” pressed specific “reflex points” and two specific acupuncture points of subjects in the “true” group; but, to subjects in the placebo group, they gave “uneven tactile stimulation” to areas (on the same appendages) “not considered appropriate” for the treatment of premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

The researchers concluded that their findings “support the use of ear, hand, and foot reflexology for the treatment of PMS.” However, they described the placebo treatment as “either overly light or very rough,” leading me to suspect that it had been tactually inferior to the reflexology performed. (Enlisting nonreflexologist practitioners of a tactual method, such as craniosacral balancing or jin shin do, to treat subjects in the placebo group would eliminate the difficulty the researchers said reflexologists had when they pseudo-treated subjects.) At all events, the study certainly does not validate any theory of reflexology. One of the most cockamamie reflexology theories posits “crystalline deposits” linked to disease: allegedly, crystals form subcutaneously in the “relevant” foot zone when a physical disturbance occurs, and their breakdown relieves the affected part of the body.

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Rub-off lettering can also be used. These letters appear on a large waxed sheet of paper and can be rubbed onto whatever surface you are using. This does not work effectively on fabric, but will work well on most other surfaces. You can find rub-off lettering in artist supply stores and craft shops.

Finally, there are vinyl letters. These are letters that have adhesive on the back. They become relatively permanent once affixed. You”ve probably seen them used to number mailboxes. They come in packages of all sizes and colors, and are available in simple versions and limited size selections at hardware stores. More extensive choices in colors, sizes and fonts are available at artist supply stores, craft shops and office supply stores.

Keeping it fresh
Rotate some of your signs every few days. Each time you move to a new location, it will be as if you put up an entirely different sign. If you have main spaces where information is always found, that is the area to decorate. Other flyers and posters which can be placed on easels, can be moved around for maximum effectiveness.

If your bulletin boards look like a collection of scrap paper in five or six colors, people are probably immune to reading anything. If print on your signs is too small, people will walk right by. The goal of your bulletin boards is to make people stop and ask questions. You cannot communicate everything on one sheet of paper. The ultimate test of your bulletin board is to walk by your board quickly.

If you did not remember anything you saw, or if you weren”t able to read anything as you walked past, neither will your members. Use large type (46 point or above) to capture the attention of your members. Save the small print for brochures.

Here is how I finally resolved my bulletin board dilemma: I covered a large board located in the lobby with teal fabric (our color scheme) and stenciled “CLUB PROGRAMS” in all caps onto black construction paper. The letters were each at least 10 inches high by 5 to 6 inches wide. I enlarged the club logo on the copy machine to about 300 percent of its original size, cut it out, and placed it in between “Club” and “Programs.” I then printed “cover sheets” on white paper from my laser printer. Each cover sheet was the title of an upcoming event or program. I backed them with a piece of construction paper. I then put an information sheet and registration list under that. When members wanted to know more about an event, they merely lifted the top sheet and took a look. If they liked what they saw, they could register right there. For programs requiring a fee, they would go to the front desk, which was located within 25 feet of the program board. It became a very effective tool for membership and it cleaned up the lobby, which was too “busy.” Most importantly, it increased program registrations.