The Power Within… Just Change Your Mind

Beachside “Stimulants”

So during my first workout back from our family vacation, I was talking to my girlfriends about the need for a “pill” to be invented with all the right (healthy) stimulants that could help individuals stay in shape while on vacation. One of my friends, who happens to be a pharmacist, told me that there is such a pill. She’s heard about it and knows of it in Mexico and it’s not yet available in the United States. My first response was to book a flight down to Mexico and load up on them but then I decided it’d be smart to learn more about it. Here’s what I found out.

Apparently, there is a pill that has combined a series of natural stimulants designed to help individuals keep in shape and possibly lose weight. It’s supposed to stimulate a cardiovascular response that will keep the heart beating at a rate that will elicit cardiovascular conditioning without even having to move a muscle. If the heart is able to pump at an increased intensity (training heart rate zone) for twenty to thirty minutes then the entire cardiovascular system will receive the same benefits that twenty to thirty minutes on the treadmill would achieve.

If you think about it, it’s an interesting concept and could actually really work. For the heart to become stronger it must work harder (pump faster) due to the increased stress that is put upon it. The heart doesn’t know how, where or what kind of stress is causing the increased workload, it’s just going to respond because it’s being demanded to do so.

I’m imagining how this pill will work because if the heart muscle is pumping harder due to a stimulant, then that means the lungs must react by breathing faster so that the oxygen exchange remains in direct proportion to the increased stress being applied to the heart. Picture this; you’ve just taken this “pill” in order to achieve some exercise while lying on the beach, as the exercise session begins your breathing increases and your heart rate increases up into your “target” training zone (still lying in your beach chair), if you’re a sweater (meaning in perspiration) you begin to sweat and continue to breathe really hard for as long as the prescribed amount of time indicated on the “pill” bottle (still lying in your beach chair). Hmmm, very interesting. I’d encourage you to not be reading the latest Danielle Steele romance novel while doing your beachside cardiovascular exercise in your beach chair or else people will be thinking something else!

The pill would allow you to be completely cardiovascularly fit without even moving a muscle! After using this “pill” for a number of months or years you’d become a big pile of “mush” with your muscles, bones and joints not getting the same stimulation. You couldn’t even get yourself out of that beach chair if you wanted to, because your strength would deteriorate. So this “pill” is not all good!

I start thinking about those little “electro-stem” units used by physical therapists for certain muscle & joint ailments. These are units which require electrodes being attached to the muscles directly and then the machine generates an electrical pulse that forces the muscles to contract and release in regular intervals. Yes, it is a muscular contraction that occurs when these units are turned on, which is the same thing that happens to muscles when lifting or pushing weights during a strength training session; muscular contractions. Maybe this could be our beachside answer to avoiding the “mushy” muscles in addition to the “pill.”

How perfect! How perfect that the conversations generated while having dinner on vacation with my family would allow us to come up with these crazy ideas that a “pill” and a “machine” could possibly keep us all in shape without even moving a muscle. We found ourselves laughing at all the visual and physical possibilities of such “stimulants” while lying in our beach chairs and found ourselves honestly wishing that health and fitness could possibly be so simple. Yes, this is another April Fools article that has kept you reading through until the end and I’m guessing that it’s also got you wishing and hoping that “just maybe… someday!” P.S. my pharmacist friend said that the “pill” she’s heard about in Mexico is a bunch of hogwash!

Deborah Holmes

March 26, 2008