Fitness and sex

CEBU, Philippines – One of the immediate effects of fitness is what it does to one's performance in bed, first as to frequency and second as to quality. The more responsive your organism, the more heightened your sensual sensations. If you're fatigued and flabby, your response will match your physical state. But it's more than your sensory apparatus. Sex is a strength and endurance event. It makes demands on the neuromuscular and cardiovascular systems. There is a certain muscular fatigue from sexual postures. Perhaps the most demanding aspect of sex from a physiological point of view is that it produces an elevated heart rate and blood pressure. If you're out of shape, you performance will suffer.

When I was at the University of Iowa, I inaugurated a faculty conditioning program. One day, the wife of a professor of Spanish came to me and told me the following story. "Alberto has been under terrific tension. After his teaching, committee work and research, he comes home every night and tries to work on a book. Invariably, he's too tired. He dozes at his desk. But he's so overwrought that when he comes to bed, he can't fall asleep. We've had good sex during the first years of our marriage, but now it's good only on holidays. I feel deprived. Can you help?" I suggested that Alberto call me. The next day he did.

He said he needed to relax, so I enrolled him in my faculty conditioning program. Each professor was given specific exercises for his deficiencies, in addition to warmup calisthenics and a swimming program that extend him just a tiny bit each session. Alberto received nothing specific for his sexual deficiencies - nor, as it turned out, did he need anything. As the professor's wife confided to me weeks later: "Wow!"

What Alberto received, in addition to extra energy, was a new concept of his masculinity. Forgotten muscles filled out and became firm. He was again proud of what he saw in the mirror.

When a person has been put out of physical activity because of a heart attack or some other disabling disease, he never feels that he's whole again until he can resume sexual activity. It doesn't matter what else he can do; if he can't do that, he's not recovered. Once he can, he is.

Even among healthy people, there is no greater measure of manness or womanness than one's ability in bed. A person who is healthy - free of illness - may nonetheless be unfit for satisfactory sexual relations. The contrary is beautifully true. Herbert De Vries, a USC exercise physiologist and a former student of mine, did a series of studies on residents of Leisure World in Southern California. He found that exercise lessened the depressive states often found in older people - and that those with higher fitness scores also reported a more satisfactory sexual life in their later years.

If you like yourself as a physical being, this enables you to relate more readily to others. You're more willing to have them look at you, touch you and have relations with you. If you don't feel good about yourself, you can't send effective signals to another person. Those signals are sex appeal.

If you only do some exercise, then, you'll get something more out of life. You'll look somewhat younger, feel somewhat better and probably live longer than you would have had you done no exercise at all. If you don't exercise, you're taking the risk of becoming a dependent organism. When a demand is made on you, you'll have to depend on someone else to do your job. If no one does, you won't survive.

Given the alternatives, the choice seems easy. If your psychological perspectives are in order, you'll want to get fit. Nature has made a provision for that by giving the organism fantastic adaptability, so that you can upgrade your condition in a few days to a point where you will no longer be prostrate in the face of demands.

If looking and feeling better, and probably living longer, aren't sufficient arguments, there is yet another to consider. Exercise is the key to painless and permanent loss of flab - the excess fat we accumulate when we slacken.

- from Total Fitness in 30 Minutes A Week By Laurence E. Morehouse, Ph.D. and Leonard Gross (Pocket Books)