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 Medical experts now say inactivity poses as great a health risk as smoking.

 1. Introduction

 If you go through the Transformation program, you realize that he takes a holistic approach, that is, he works on transforming all of the four areas below:

The first chapter covers all four areas. Subsequent chapters are usually built around the transformation of one particular area, and the case of second chapter is a “body” chapter that focuses on the specific practices of exercise.

 2. Sea-change in medical community towards exercise

Bill Phillips recounts that 25 years ago, many in the medical mainstream community argued against strength training. It’s hard to believe, but the reasoning was that overdeveloped muscles might limit physical performance by making you “muscle bound”.

The fact that medical science has changed so much on the subject of exercise reminds me of a scene from Woody Allen’s film Sleeper, where he plays a health-food store owner Miles Monroe who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the future. Miles is astounded to find that medical science now says something totally different than the things they were telling people in his time, like extolling the health virtues of miracle foods such as “steak” and “cream pies”.

Anyway, the medical community is somewhat keener on strength training than it is on long-distance endurance running, which seemed to be more popular a few decades ago than it is today. But the one thing that medical science is definite about is that inactivity, doing no exercise, poses as great a health risk as smoking. That sentence was the most impactful one of the entire chapter for me, and it’s why I highlighted it at the beginning.

3. Benefits of exercise

The chapter is replete with statistics about how beneficial exercise is, but the key thing to remember here is, if the benefits of exercise could be reproduced in a single pill, it would outsell any other drug (even Viagra, I’d wager). This isn’t Bill’s conclusion, of course, it’s just my opinion, but if you read the statistics, you will be impressed. The reason for focusing on the benefits of exercise towards the beginning of the 18-week program is so that, when you drag your body to the gym the first two weeks before the benefits kick in, you’ll have a mental picture of what good you’re actually doing for yourself.

4. US Dept of Health and Human Services Exercise Guidelines

Here are the guidelines set by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ study on the benefits of exercise. The number of minutes per week has been divided by five days, to get the number of minutes of exercise per day.

High Intensity for aerobics means varying the pace of one’s jogging, cycling, stairclimbing, or whatever form of exercise you use. Use walk, jog, and then run in cycles. It is this “shifting gears’ form of aerobics which really cranks up the metabolism, and allows you get greater health benefits for half the time. For time-conscious people, high intensity exercise is the way to go.

Bill Phillips recommended exercise program is as follows, which he writes in the form of a promise to himself.

I will exercise for a total of 3 hours weekly. I’m going to do 3 intense, 20-minute aerobic workouts each week for a total of 1 hour. On alternating days, 3 times per week, I will do 40 minutes of strength training for a total of 2 hours.

The challenge exercise of the chapter is to search within yourself and find the answers to these questions:

The point of the first question to is to make sure you understand what benefits you personally will receive from the exercise. The second question makes you write a promise to yourself, as if a doctor had handed you a prescription with the amount of exercise written on it. It’s more important to write down a doable goal, which should be five or six days of exercise. Perhaps you can’t do 40 minutes of strength training: put yourself down for 30 minutes, then, but do SOMETHING and do it CONSISTENTLY. Once you get into the groove, you can adjust the amount of time you are doing strength training and the distribution of which muscle groups you work on which days.

Questions three and four have to do with the Transformation community, either the virtual community on the online program, or your family and friends in the actual world.

Once you do the program for two weeks, however you will start to see the benefits, and it will be easier for you to get up each day and exercise, knowing that the reason why you slept like a baby last night was exactly because of this program.

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