Description:
So you listened to the doctors and public-health professionals and Nike commercials, and you believe it's a good thing that you're still exercising and playing sports well into your fourth or fifth or even sixth decade of life. You know all about the problems that accrue with inactivity: a weak heart, clogged arteries, and atrophied muscle tissue and bone mass, all of it adding up to a precipitous decline in physical abilities. But maybe you weren't expecting the problems that accrue with activity: the wear and tear on your knees, pain in the arches of your feet, irritated bursa in your shoulders, inflamed nerves in your back. Athletic Forever is as good a guidebook as there is for the men and women who plan to take their jockstraps, jog bras, knee braces, and orthotic shoe inserts to the grave with them. It spans the gap between layman's language and that used by medical professionals--pointing out, for example, why terms like "slipped disc" aren't really accurate, and why "herniated disc" better describes the injury. The book's organization allows you to jump in wherever your interest takes you. If you want to know more about a specific problem--shoulder, knee, ankle--you can go straight to that chapter. It would be a shame, though, for anyone interested in lifelong health and fitness to skip the opening chapters. These provide not only the scary facts about how an untrained body degenerates through the decades, but also how a trained body literally beats the aging process. --Lou Schuler
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