Are you hooked on sweat ?
The phrase ‘Horses sweat, men perspire and ladies glow' is thought to
have originated from Victorian etiquette guides. Kobe University in
Japan have found out that ‘men lose twice as much moisture per square,
from forehead, chest, back, forearm and thigh, at any one time and women
need to work much harder to build up sweat than men.
An American psychiatrist once managed to trace an extraordinary and
alarming development among his patients who were complaining about an
appetite grievance. Many of his patients were obsessed with food and
exercise. When this was brought to the notice of the American Medical
Association they candidly refused to acknowledge it, but the marvelous
ability of the psychiatrist managed to invent an avowal for the malady
and named it Hyper-gymnasia.
What is hyper-gymnasia and who suffers from it? According to the
psychiatrist, they are all ‘hooked on sweat’, the last frenzy in human
bodies. Even in Sri Lanka we see a variety of such folk who are out and
about at dawn and in the evenings, on the park opposite the
Parliamentary complex at Sri Jayewardenepura, along the road adjacent to
Diyawanna Oya, right round the Independent Square and in numerous towns
jogging or doing brisk walks imitating military cadences in silence,
which has become a vogue or an obsession.
‘Keep fit’ obsession
For the young and the ‘celluloid’ types it is meant to develop their
muscular profiles and to show off their six packs! For the mature and
executive types, it’s just a routine physical exercise to keep them fit
and to avoid sudden heart attacks due to the sedentary nature of work
they do by sitting most of the time inside air-conditioned offices;
their only physical exercise being a short walk from the comfortable
revolving chairs up to the car in the evening; once they get home, from
the car to their comfortable sitting rooms again!
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A jogging
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For those fashion orientated young and daring female executive types
it is meant to tone their mussels at right places. Many who can afford
to buy exercise equipment spend a good fortune in building up their own
gyms at home (some hardly use them but left those only for show and dust
to collect!). Basically, all in all, it boils down to ‘keep fit’
obsession and to be in the ‘pink of health’!
This is more so prominent in the West where majority of women have
their gyms in their own garages or in special (gym) rooms where they
breathe heavily swinging their arms violently side to side while
jogging, walking fast or running on treadmills, exercising to music
making hips bump and grind and skip in lustrous skin tight
French-cut-leotards engaging themselves in calisthenics causing their
pelvic to thrust.
In many parts of the world ‘work out’ classes have become a thriving
business supplemented by innovating and advertising a variety of
equipment ranging from normal cycling to heavy weight lifting and
releasing video tapes.
An international health magazine survey once revealed that the
average of 94 percent of Western women typically belonging to
professional stratum between 25 - 30 years of age work out to extremes
because of some deep rooted psychological problems. They seem to enjoy
the delight of sweat, the ecstasies of muscle and hot breath and where
once they released tears upon peach blossom cheeks, now they spray sweat
stains, under arm pits and across aching breasts. They are said to cheer
in celebrating strength and the ‘wet patch’. To them everything opposite
becomes always true. The fittest leap and undulate while the fattest
overwork gorging on extras. On one hand the thinnest, on the other the
most obese; Obscenity here; Puritanism there. Vast numbers of women who
are into aerobics live and giggle.
Warning
It is a general concept that physical exercises are essential to
maintain good health but it should be done in moderation - say 45
minutes a day and only four times a week. The vital factor in physical
exercise is that one should be mindful of one’s health condition and
listen to one’s body and to know when to curtail to suit one’s fitness
level and mainly to avoid over exercising.
‘The love affair with fitness’ is undoubtedly fanned by TV as well as
women’s glossy magazines. The image of an ‘ideal woman’ the media and
the fashion world are trying to portray is as skinny as a murunga stick.
Hyper-gymnasia sufferers seem to concentrate one thing - “I am going
to work out to lose weight.” They get obsessed with weight and calories.
They feel high because of the endocrines they get from working out but
when they stop they go through exercise attacks such as withdrawal,
anxiety and insomnia at which point they become unable to stop running
and doing aerobics even when it hurts.
Just imagine a nine stone aerobics fan thrashing about with a sweaty
fervor, in a ten minute session. The person can produce a shock loading
of 378,000 - the equivalent of 25 elephants on each foot. Manufacturers
of world renowned and expensive sports (trainer) shoes warn about the
dangers of exercising in bare feet. They always have thought that
aerobics was an unusual activity. University of California in a study
once criticized almost all aerobics video and audio tapes containing
harmful verbal and visual symbolism. The report added that ‘a good
percentage of aerobic engagers were said to use video tapes. Over
several millions of such tapes have been sold all over the world and the
numbers are increasing by the day’.
Research done over a period watching tapes, sometimes as much as 15
times each, they have come out with their verdict: “Aacademia is
wonderful but concerned about females sitting on their buttocks with
legs in a ‘V’ raising serious questions of posturing”!
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