Sitting Can be as Deadly as Smoking

Recent studies show prolonged sitting is bad for your health, and bloggers sit a lot, so this especially bad news. Gretchen Carlson had a segment on Fox News, but see also Ann Althouse: "'Linda had no idea her desk was so deadly, noting how 'sitting is probably killing me'.'"

Althouse bought a desk, which is part of the solution. I'm going to do some walking this week:

Summer Movies, Male Bodies

Interesting piece, and funny.

At Los Angeles Times, "Ripped Ideals: Muscular Summer Action Heroes Have Swaggered Back Into Style, But What Do They Say to Male Audiences?" It's long. This quote goes with the video, and I'm looking forward to Captain America, so what the heck?

In the World War II-era comic book Captain America, a weak and sickly young man named Steve Rogers is injected with an experimental serum designed to build a super-soldier. In the movie “Captain America: The First Avenger,” directed by Joe Johnston and due in theaters July 22, dozens of tiny needles inject the serum into Rogers’ major muscle groups, and then he enters a pod where “vita rays” stimulate his growth. On paper and on screen, the result is the same: Rogers emerges as a picture of physical perfection, a gleaming, rippling, flag-wearing, Nazi-killing machine.

“The transformation is absolutely key to understanding Steve Rogers as a character,” said Johnston. “He is essentially Everyman, a 98-pound weakling who is chosen for the rebirth program not for his physical attributes but because of who he is as a human being, with his sense of justice and compassion. It’s crucial that we know and love Steve as the kid who’s been bullied and rejected all his life so we’ll appreciate and relate to who he is as Captain America.”

Evans, the actor playing Captain America, has the kind of square-jawed good looks that lend themselves to roles as prom kings and superheroes — he’s best known for playing the football star in the spoof “Not Another Teen Movie” and the Human Torch in the “Fantastic Four” films.

To achieve the dramatic transformation “Captain America” required, Johnston relied on a combination of techniques, including shrinking Evans’ body with CGI and using a smaller actor as a body double for the “weakling” stage. For the “after” scenes, Evans did push-ups in between takes to pump up the broad new chest he’d built for the role.

For any real-life 98-pound weaklings — or even for the average 5-foot-9, 194.7-pound American male — all this physical perfection can potentially create the kind of body insecurity that was once considered the exclusive province of women.

“Men are increasingly getting the message that their muscles are important, that appearance matters too,” said Katharine Phillips, co-author of “The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession” and professor of psychiatry and human behavior of the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. “Men want to be bigger and want on average 15 more pounds of muscle than they have.”

Oh brother. Overthink that much?

Jack LaLanne, 1914-2011

A man whom I admired from a very young age. When he was on television, as a child, it was a simpler age. Not necessarily better, just simpler.

At Sippican Cottage, "Muscles Didn't Make Jack LaLanne Mighty."

And at Los Angeles Times, "Jack LaLanne dies at 96; spiritual father of U.S. fitness movement":

Jack LaLanne, the seemingly eternal master of health and fitness who first popularized the idea that Americans should work out and eat right to retain youthfulness and vigor, died Sunday. He was 96.

LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia at his home in Morro Bay, Calif., his agent Rick Hersh said. He had undergone heart valve surgery in December 2009.

Though LaLanne was for many years dismissed as merely a "muscle man" — a notion fueled to some extent by his amazing feats of strength — he was the spiritual father of the health movement that blossomed into a national craze of weight rooms, exercise classes and fancy sports clubs.

LaLanne opened what is commonly believed to be the nation's first health club, in Oakland in 1936. In the 1950s, he launched an early-morning televised exercise program keyed to housewives. He designed many now-familiar exercise machines, including leg extension machines and cable-pulley weights. And he proposed the then-radical idea that women, the elderly and even the disabled should work out to retain strength.

Full of exuberance and good cheer, LaLanne saw himself as a combination cheerleader, rescuer and savior. And if his enthusiasm had a religious fervor to it, well, so be it.

"Well it is. It is a religion with me," he told What Is Enlightenment, a magazine dedicated to awareness, in 1999. "It's a way of life. A religion is a way of life, isn't it?"

"Billy Graham was for the hereafter. I'm for the here and now," he told The Times when he was almost 92, employing his usual rapid-fire patter.

Another time, he explained, "The crusade is never off my mind — the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think — all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America."