The Giving Away of Exercise Physiology
Tommy Boone, PhD, MPH, MA, FASEP, EPC
Professor and Chair
Department of Exercise Physiology
The College of St. Scholastica
Duluth, MN 55811

“If you were [very] slow, you would think sports medicine taught Johnny to read, right?”  -- William T. Boone

I have a bias that leads me to believe that exercise physiologists have been “the” major thrust of getting people to exercise.  I believe this has been true for at least 40 to 50 years.  It is unsound reasoning to think that sports medicine is somehow responsible for the scientific conclusion by exercise physiologists.  

In early 1960s, it was common information that exercise had a significantly positive impact on heart disease and a host of other diseases and dysfunctions [1].  While athletics has always been popular, early on exercise physiologists felt it was necessary to place emphasis on how much exercise was necessary to produce predictable physiological cardiovascular changes.  

Exercise physiologists determined that at least 30 to 60 minutes of exercise was ideal to get the body in shape.  Exercise 3 to 5 days a week at a low to moderate heart rate intensity was found to be sufficient to keep muscles and bones strong.  Exercise physiologists understand the importance of maintaining an optimal body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 25.  

Today, the trick, of course, is to get the public and other healthcare professionals to embrace my bias (i.e., implied benefits of exercise defined by exercise physiologists).  It is not going to be easy since so many exercise physiologists are actually giving away the profession.  As far as I know, there is no other way to say it except that too many exercise physiologists are not supporting exercise physiology as an evolving healthcare profession.  Most do not even understand the 21st century battle of managing conflicts in between organizations [2].

Think about it!  How many articles have you read recently that spoke favorably about exercise physiology?  How many times have you read a book or an article that defined exercise physiology as a healthcare profession?  What I’ve found instead is that the exercise physiology authors actually define exercise physiology as human physiological responses and adaptations to physical activity [3].  

You probably didn’t know that exercise physiology was only just recently defined by ASEP [4].  By recently, I mean since 1997.  Sports medicine hasn’t changed its definition of exercise physiology for decades.  The principle here is also the question:  “Who is in charge?”  It is a fallacy that exercise physiology can survive or even grow within sports medicine.  In fact, it is impossible.  The idea that exercise physiologists are better off by association with sports medicine is foolish.  The fact that responsibility is fundamentally a matter of caring for the evolving profession and its members is demonstrated clearly in other healthcare professions.  It is therefore within this understanding that there is a legitimate sense of speaking about responsible acts, ethical thinking, and, as is often done, making it abundantly clear to everyone the need to be subservient to the profession first and to one’s needs second [5].

Presumably this is not what many academic exercise physiologists think.  Considering the size of sports medicine, they must think it is the [better] organization.  What is obvious is that if the academic exercise physiologists attend sports medicine meetings and avoid ASEP meetings, they are giving exercise physiology over to the sports medicine authorities.  It is basically another form of giving in.  What should be apparent, however, is that assisting others to work against exercise physiology is a decision that is hard to justify since ASEP is a reality.  Because ethics is concerned with the question of how we ought to think, it is a powerful reflection of our values [6].  Does sports medicine provide positive guidance for professional development of exercise physiologists?  Judging the past decades of sports medicine ethics suggests otherwise!  

Look around you.  Do we exist because of sports medicine-exercise physiologists’ effort or for sports medicine and academics?  Maybe what we have done is nothing but a fairy tale, or nothing more than trying to prove ourselves among the high-class sports medicine personalities.  Frankly, it is only too obvious that sports medicine wants very badly to be recognized on the backs of the hard work of physiologists, exercise physiologists, and physical educators.  It seems that it was their collective intention to provide a summary of the most recent information in the field of exercise physiology [7].  Interestingly, no one thought much of physical educators in the 50s and 60s, but those who believed in exercise found ways to help others understand that “exercise is medicine” [8].  They became the exercise physiology researchers and college teachers.  

However, what troubles me is the depressingly long list of findings and reports by exercise physiologists who, in effect, allow sports medicine to appear as though it found the truths we understood years ago [9,10].  Consumers need to know that exercise physiologists do research and publish in all facets of health and wellness.  But, frankly, when have you read a sports medicine article that identified the author as an exercise physiologist?  The pattern is clear:  there is a definite strategy for sports medicine to build itself from collaborative research.  

The focus of this article is about changing how people think about exercise physiology.  The whole idea of other professionals continuing to get credit for the importance of exercise does not make sense.  Perhaps a good place to start is to point out that the word “exercise” precedes the word “physiology” for professionals known as “exercise physiologists”.  Have you ever stopped to consider that exercise physiologists are seldom ever given credit for their work?  Does it manner that sports medicine is engaged in advertisements that depict the research and conclusions by exercise physiologists as their work.  Oh, they may not say it so convincingly, but it is true nonetheless.  

Do you see the inconsistency in the sports medicine quest?  A friend of mine pointed this out to me recently.  Although my friend found it unsettling, she was not willing to write about it.  One way to help others find out how people think is to say out loud everything on your mind.  Another way is to write about it.  It is important that we try to say out loud what we are thinking.  The public needs to know about exercise physiology as a healthcare profession.  This is not possible if the importance of exercise physiology is not recognized.  In fact, it is next to impossible if other professionals are taking the credit.  

There is always the possibility of overlap of the work of different disciplines and how the findings are reported.  The notion that exercise physiology gets the same recognition that sports medicine gets is incorrect.  Until exercise physiologists learn the importance of speaking up for themselves, there is no simple “how to” formula to find ways to reach our goals.  This may seem strange, but try to imagine how much better our students would be at graduation if they had our total support.  We should be more proactive.  But, for most of us, the idea that professionals must be proactive may be disconcerting.  

“Seeing is believing” and nowhere is this adage so obvious except in the sports medicine literature.  It may seem that it is unfair to point this out, but in everyday language most readers with their eyes open will come to the same conclusion as I have.  The point is:  the popularity of exercise as medicine is not due only to medical doctors or sports medicine.  A wealth of new books and scientific articles has appeared in the last several decades by exercise physiologists.    
 

References
1. de Vries, H.A. (1966). Physiology of Exercise for Physical Education and Athletics. Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers.
2. Rahim, M.A. (1992). Managing Conflict in Organizations. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
3. McArdle, W.D., Katch, F.I., and Katch, V.L. (2001). Exercise Physiology: Energy, Nutrition, and Human Performance. New York, NY: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
4. American Society of Exercise Physiologists. (2004). What is Exercise Physiology? [Online]. http://www.asep.org/
5. Gustafson, J.M. and Laney, J.T. (1968). On Being Responsible: Issues in Personal Ethics. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers.
6. Shanahan, T. and Wang, R. (1996). Reason and Insight. New York, NY: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
7. Falls, H.B. (1968). Exercise Physiology. New York, NY: Academic Press.
8. Watson, R.R. and Eisinger, M. (1992). Exercise and Disease. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
9. Wappes, J.R. (2003). 30 Years of Sports Medicine – and Sportsmedicine. The Physician and Sportsmedicine. 31:1:15-18.
10. Schnirring, L. (2003). Getting Patients Moving: Is Activity Promotion Paying Off? The Physician and Sportsmedicine. 31:2:19,46.