ROTATION DIET: SOME ACTIVITIES ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS FOR WEIGHT CONTROL

When it comes to controlling your weight, you get the biggest payoff when you engage in any physical activity that requires you to move your whole body through space.

Just taking a brisk walk burns about twice the calories that you burn doing calisthenics. While swinging your arms and lifting your legs feels like hard work, when you move your whole body through space you move your entire body weight. Moving your whole body feels easier than those arm swings because your body was built for walking. Walking uses your largest muscles (in the buttocks and thighs), and these muscles are placed in the middle of your body. This placement makes for very efficient movement. In contrast, arm swings use smaller muscles and the weight that is being moved extends outward from the moving muscles. That makes for inefficient movement, which is experienced as being harder and is more tiring, in spite of the fact that it burns far fewer calories.

So, the first principle of the Rotation Diet activity program is: move your whole body through space to get the most calorie-burning benefit for every minute that you engage in physical activity.

This principle makes it easy to see what activities are best for weight management: walking, swimming, and gentle jogging (when you get down to desirable weight). These are followed by bicycling (because it also uses the major large muscles in the thighs and buttocks), bouncing on a mini-trampoline, and exercises that may move your whole body up and down, but generally in one place rather than through space. Thus, most aerobic dance routines do not give you quite the weight-management benefits of a brisk walk.

Racquet sports can be an excellent route to weight control, provided you learn to play at an advanced level and spend more of your time moving around than standing still and socializing. As you know, tennis was my daily sport for many years, until I discovered the joys of jogging. Racquetball is easier to learn than tennis, and you will tend to burn more calories at racquetball than at tennis in any given period of exercise time.

Rowing - usually on the machines found in many gyms and exercise studios - has recently become a popular weight-management and conditioning activity. It works in spite of your not having to move your whole body through space because it uses so many of the muscle groups throughout your entire body. Rowing can be a valuable activity for persons who cannot do weight-bearing exercise, such as walking, because of injury to their legs or leg joints. However, if you have back problems, discuss the benefits and risks of rowing with your physician, and be sure to start slowly against little resistance until you see how it feels.

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