How To Keep Fit Without Exercise

By Martin Jensen

Fitness Without Tears:

Here's the lowdown on exercise that other books take long chapters to express, collated in one jaunty, jiffy digest. Read about everything from hormones and health myths to diet and your parasympathetic system. Can you really laze your
way to fitness? This book tells you how.

Martin Jensen worked for years in the medical field and has the dirt on facts that the fitness industry doesn't want you to know.
This quirky, quick reference guide to not busting your gut gives you the latest facts on fads and proves that moderate activity makes sense but that dogged exercise rituals and physical heroics are counterproductive, harmful and bunk. In short - that the pendulum's swung too far.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buzzword Books
• Release date: May 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301436286

Martin Jensen

Bestselling Danish novelist Martin Jensen was born in 1946 into a working-class family and worked as a teacher and a headmaster in Sweden and Denmark before becoming a full-time author in 1996. He and his wife collect mushrooms, enjoy bird watching, and are botany enthusiasts. Martin Jensen is the author of twenty-one novels. The King’s Hounds is his first title to be published in English.

Book preview

Who needs a stitch in the side?

5. Your body hates exercise.

Kids enjoy dashing madly off in all directions but an elderly body has other needs. It tolerates unavoidable tasks, like putting out the garbage, but resents being used for artificial acts.

Which proves that old people who compulsively exercise have the physical-feedback of dead slugs. Listen to your body and it will mostly recommend that you do nothing as fast and as often as you like.

6. It's irritating, and annoying.

There are many aspects of fitness and motor function's only one. So why work out when you could be going out, eating out, breaking out, making out...? Anything's better than shelling out for exercise bikes.

7. Muscles get used anyway.

You have over six hundred muscles that are 40% of your bodyweight. And, as over half are above your waist, you get a workout just carrying them around.

8. You're an isometric expert right now.

Life's always making you tense. Check yourself now. Tense gut, tense jaw, tense face. Another name for that is isometrics. Think of all the static fitness you're developing!

Unfortunately, that tenseness wastes energy.

The autonomic nervous system is divided into sympathetic and parasympathetic. The first sends blood to the brain, heart, lungs and muscles and prepares us for extreme activity. The second operates when we relax, reducing heart-rate, promoting digestion and regeneration.

So, as life mostly keeps us in fight-or-flight mode, the solution's clear. We could always be