Exercise 1 minute X 4??? Believe it!

[Guest guest]

I thought you would dig this. Exercise doc shows high benefits of 1 minute

exertion followed by rest, repeated 4x over 30 min. Neat. Benefits are

substantial to cardiac health, but also to improvements on various disorders and

general health. I love the graphic(which probably won't show up in email - have

to go to the website, noted at end of this email). Interesting comments toward

end about doing the exercise at different times of the day depending on

relationship to the moon. The bicycle seems to lend itself to this cycling

system. Or exercising during commercial breaks. Take the stairs, not the

escalator. (Any other ideas?)

Anyway, a lot easier to motivate if all you need to do is a minute. Do 3,

they're small.

a

 

 

Making Waves: Tuning Biorhythms Through Cyclic Exercise

By Roger Lewin, PhD

Contributing Writer

 

 

The HeartWave, developed by former cardiovascular surgeon and

exercise physiologist, Irving Dardik, MD, is a dynamic rather than static model

of cardiovascular activity. This hypothetical HeartWave represents three sets of

nested waves: the first, represented by the blue lines, indicates rising and

falling heart rate at three levels of exertion intensity (low, moderate and

high). Nested on the blue lines, the red waves indicate cycles of systole and

diastole. The green waves represent biochemical oscillations within the heart

muscle during the systolic-diastolic cycles. Courtesy of Roger Lewin, PhD, and

Irving Dardik, MD.

 

Everyone knows exercise is good medicine. Far fewer people

understand how to optimize the health benefits of regular exercise. As with many

other things, it is not a matter of blindly doing more, but of bringing

physiological intelligence to the process.

 

According to Irving Dardik, MD, a former vascular surgeon and

founding chairman of the US Olympic Sports Medicine Council, the optimal way to

exercise is in brief alternating cycles of intense exertion and full rest. The

idea is to create a wave of high and low heart rate bursts over the course of an

exercise period. This is quite different from traditional exercise regimens

based on sustained exertion.

 

In Dr. Dardik's approach, an individual exerts intensely for a total

of just five minutes over a period of, say, 30 minutes. This will likely be good

news for your exercise-averse patients who dread the mere thought of

treadmilling or stair mastering for an hour.

 

Dardik's protocol is similar to what is known as interval training.

But it is different in several ways. For one, the individual has target heart

rates for each cycle, depending on overall health and fitness. Further, it

places as much emphasis on recovery physiology as on exertion. Down-regulation

of a revved up system is an active physiological process that also requires

exercise. It is as important to overall health as the ability to rev up. Over

the years, Dr. Dardik has not only applied his approach to improving athletic

performance, he has also taught people with a range of chronic diseases to use

cyclic training as a way of restoring health.

 

Revving Up and Cooling Down

A typical Dardik protocol involves one minute of high-intensity

exercise on a stationary bike or trampoline, for example, followed by complete

rest. During exertion, the heart rate is much higher than in traditional,

sustained exercise. When the heart rate falls to near resting, the person does

another exertion cycle, again followed by complete recovery. The cycles are done

five times over a period of half an hour. During an exercise period, the heart

rate rises and falls five times. Cycles are done three to four times a week.

 

One of the primary goals is to increase heart rate variability.

Simply put, the greater the heart rate variability (HRV), the better someone's

overall heart health; the more limited the HRV, the greater the cardiovascular

risk.

 

A high-performance sprinter himself, Dr. Dardik's take on exercise

evolved over several decades, catalyzed by several key observations. Early on,

he noticed sprinters tended to be far healthier than distance runners. The

latter are highly susceptible to infections, chronic diseases, heart problems

and, of course bone and joint injuries.

 

His suspicion was further heightened in 1985 by the shocking death

of his friend, Jack Kelly, a superb runner and Olympic oarsman. Mr. Kelly had

just been elected President of the US Olympic Committee weeks before he died of

heart failure after a run. Kelly died shortly after Jim Fixx, whose 1977

best-seller The Complete Book of Running, fueled America's fitness craze.

 

The HeartWave

In most exercise-related deaths, heart failure comes after the

individual stops activity, not during the exertion. This finding prompted Dr.

Dardik to look seriously at how people exercised. " People have been running for

thousands of years, and they didn't die like that. It must be something in the

way people run now that causes heart failure after exertion. " In looking at

lifestyles of technologically primitive peoples, and wild animals such as

cheetahs, he realized that alternating cycles of exertion and rest were the

norm, extended exertions the exception.

 

Strapping on a heart monitor, he began to study his own heart during

exercise. This led to a discovery he termed the HeartWave. When someone

exercises, the heart rate climbs. When activity stops, it comes back down. The

heart muscle itself is constantly in an alternating cycle of exertion (systole)

and relaxation (diastole). Within the heart muscle, and in all tissues, there

are waves of biochemical exertion and recovery.

 

" I saw it as waves within waves, " Dr. Dardik says. He created a

graphic representation of the nested orders of waves—biochemical cascades,

alternating systole and diastole, and repeating periods of exertion and recovery

over the course of the circadian cycles. The result is an example of fractal

mathematics in action.

 

In 1977, Dardik was asked to head the US Olympic Committee's Sports

Medicine Council, a position he held until1985. He spent much time at the

committee's Sports Training Center and Elite Athletes Project in Colorado, a

meeting ground for top athletes and sports medicine pioneers. His work there led

to the Rhythmic Interval Training Exercise (RITE) system, which forms the basis

of his current approach.

 

Restoring Rhythm

For many years, Dr. Dardik led a dual life: vascular surgeon by day

(first at Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, and later at Englewood Hospital,

NJ), sports physiologist by night. This led to an important realization: from

the perspective of improving physiologic performance and engendering health, the

sick patients he saw in surgery were not so different from his high-performance

athletes. The physiology that optimizes athletic performance can also enable

sick people to return to health. This idea changed his thinking about the

underlying causes of illness. A prime cause, he believes, is a loss of

connection with the basic rhythms of life.

 

Humans, like all organisms, evolved in a universe of rhythms:

ultradian, circadian, lunar, and seasonal. Health, as Nobel Prize winning

systems scientist Ilya Prigogine argued, depends on full expression of these

rhythms in our behavior, in our physiology, in the oscillating biochemistry of

our cells. When these rhythms are flattened, as they are in the non-stop 24/7

culture in which so many of us live, sub-optimal health or illness is the

result.

 

People in simple foraging societies, who live in tune with the

rhythms of nature, do not suffer the high incidence of type 2 diabetes, heart

disease, cancer and other chronic diseases that characterize modern life. This

is not, as some claim, because they don't live long enough to develop them. Many

do. Further, young people in these societies do not show incipient signs of

these diseases, as is the case in young people in Western societies.

 

To enhance health, we need to reconnect to the rhythms of nature.

Going back to hunter-gatherer ways is not an option, of course. But Dr. Dardik

found that by using exercise to shape healthy waves in our heart's activity,

which cascade through all physiological systems, we reconnect with the natural

rhythms in a fundamental way.

 

From Core Concept to Clinical Trials

Though his exercise strategy emerged from work with Olympic level

athletes, he began to apply what he learned to help people with advanced chronic

diseases. He found he was able to attenuate a range of diseases, such as

diabetes, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue, and heart disease, as well as

psychiatric conditions such as anorexia and depression.

 

Irving Dardik is a very intuitive thinker. Initially his conviction

that cyclic exercise would " cause health " as he puts it, was just that:

intuition. Scientific support came later, first with publication of data from

the Framingham Heart Study showing that reduced HRV is associated with aging and

disease (Tsuji H, et al. Circulation. 1994; 90(2): 878–883). The corollary is

that enhancing HRV will enhance health.

 

Working with Ary Goldberger, MD, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical

School, Dr. Dardik showed that his cyclic exercise protocol increases HRV in a

way that traditional aerobic exercise does not. It also enhances the complexity

of dynamics of the heart's activity, which are associated with health, again in

a way that traditional aerobic exercise does not.

 

" This is not something cosmetic, like putting a Jaguar body onto a

Hyundai engine, hoping you now have a car that can perform better, " says Dr.

Goldberger. " This is something fundamental. When you see complex (heart)

dynamics (in an individual on the protocol), it is not that the heart just looks

more youthful; the person is more youthful, because these dynamics are coupled

to the functionality of the system at all levels. "

 

Prompted by early results, Dr. Goldberger undertook a preliminary

trial involving 11 healthy female nurses at Hunterdon Medical Center, NJ, who

went through the protocol for just eight weeks. Even this short program had

significant impact: increased efficiency of oxygen metabolism (VO2 max increased

15.5%); a 13% increase in ventilatory breakpoint (the point at which ventilation

increases disproportionately to O2 consumption); a 9% increase in HRV; and a

7.5% drop in diastolic blood pressure. Measures of immune function and stress

also improved, as did measures of anxiety and positive affect. The women also

reported that they slept better and had more energy (Goldsmith R, et al. Am J

Med and Sports. 2002; 4: 135–141).

 

The efficacy of the Dardik protocol was further demonstrated at St

Luke's Hospital, Kansas City, in a study involving 19 people with advanced

Parkinson's disease. In every case, mobility and affect improved dramatically,

much more so than is typical with exercise in Parkinson's patients. In addition,

anti-inflammatory signaling molecules, such as IL-10 and adrenocorticotropin,

were elevated (Cadet P. Int J Molecular Medicine. 2003; 12: 485–492). As in the

first trial, HRV increased as well.

 

A third trial, at the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, involved three

groups of 18 HIV/AIDS patients: one group did the Dardik protocol; the second

did traditional exercise; the third did no exercise at all. " We decided to focus

primarily on quality of life measures, " said Dr. Luis Montaner, who ran the

trial. " That's not trivial, because anti-HIV drugs are quite toxic, and patients

suffer a lot of detrimental effects, such as lack of energy, and depression. "

 

" The results were impressive, " said Dr. Montaner. " Those in the

cyclic exercise group did better than people in the two control groups. " When

asked to rate, " How much I enjoy life, " people in the cyclic exercise group

moved from a baseline of " some of the time " to " most of the time, " at the end of

eight weeks. Responses to the statement, " My sleep was restless, " moved from

" most/some nights " to " some/rarely. " They reported needing less effort for daily

activities and felt happier. No such changes were seen in the other two groups.

Dr. Montaner's trial has not yet been published.

 

Major Advances, Major Setbacks

Irv Dardik's personal and professional life has been almost a model

of wave dynamics, a dizzying sine curve of profound achievements and desperate

setbacks.

 

A championship sprinter in high school and college, he forsook an

Olympic career to follow his brother, Herbert, to med school (Herbert Dardik is

now Head of Vascular Surgery at Englewood Hospital, NJ). On graduating, Irv

joined Herbert at Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, for a surgery residency.

 

The Dardiks saw a lot of patients with vessel grafts. Many had

problems several years out. The grafts, especially in the legs, would become

clogged, leading to severe disability, even amputation. In 1971, while treating

a woman with a clotted bovine graft, the younger Dardik became convinced there

had to be a better way.

 

A burst of outside-the-box thinking led the Dardik brothers to

pioneer the use of human umbilical cord veins for vessel grafting. Their

studies, done on their own time outside Montefiore, led to a patent on the

umbilical vessel biograft, now a mainstay of vascular surgery. The procedure

benefited tens of thousands over the decades, and the Dardiks were ultimately

awarded the American Medical Association's highest honor, the Hektoen Gold

Medal.

 

The success of his surgical practice and the royalties flowing from

the biograft enabled Irving Dardik to spend more time studying exercise

physiology and wave dynamics. Eventually, he devoted full-time to practicing

exercise as medicine. The ensuing years were marked by major ups and downs:

excellent clinical results, but extreme financial difficulty; major conceptual

advances but intense personal and family turmoil.

 

In 1991, New York magazine ran a cover feature on Dr. Dardik's

success in treating everything from anorexia to MS solely with exercise. This

catapulted him into the public eye—and into a vat of medicolegal trouble.

 

Prompted by what she'd read, Ellen Burstein, a consumer advocate and

" fraud buster " for a Florida TV channel, called Dr. Dardik. She'd been diagnosed

with MS in 1986, and was largely confined to a motorized wheelchair. Though she

was skeptical, she wanted to try the Dardik approach, but was told she'd have to

wait, as there was already a waiting list of 2,000 chronically ill people.

Burstein insisted, offering a sum of $100,000 to be treated immediately.

 

Dardik agreed to work with her, and initially, Ms. Burstein

responded well. Within 6 months, she was walking again and able to get her

exertion heart rate up to 160 bpm. Her hometown paper, the Orlando Sentinel, ran

a profile headlined, " Back On Her Feet. " Several months later, however, her

condition declined, and she became convinced Dr. Dardik was a fraud.

 

Ms. Burstein hired a private detective, and tried to enlist others

of Dr. Dardik's patients in a legal action. Ultimately she took her case to the

New York State Board for Professional Medical Misconduct, which, in 1995,

revoked his license, charging him with fraudulently practicing medicine,

exercising undue influence, and exploiting patients by promising cures. This was

despite the fact that Burstein had signed a contract stating that the Dardik

program was experimental and couldn't guarantee cure.

 

Dr. Dardik believes the Board's action had more to do with bias

against anything outside conventional medical thinking, than with principles of

science or clinical practice. " Here I was saying that … chronic disease can

result from a flattening of the waves, with a cascade of ill effects … (and)

that people can take charge of their own health by restoring healthy waves

through cyclic exercise. But in traditional (conventional) medicine, a person

has a disease, and it is the role of the physician to cure that disease using

the tools of traditional medicine. I was threatening their belief system. "

 

He stands by the efficacy of his approach, but says he's always

avoided the word cure. " I have seen so many sick people benefit from the

program. I was then, and still am confident that the cause of chronic diseases

is disrupted wave patterns, and that cyclic exercise can reverse these

disorders. You can call what I do a cure. I prefer to call it reversing disease.

What I do is help people connect with their bodies in a different way. "

 

From Clinical Trials to Patient Care

What does any of this have to do with primary care? Everything, says

Robert Lindberg, MD, a primary care physician in Connecticut. " I have had some

of my patients do the cycles for five years now, " he says, " and I've seen some

very positive health benefits. Many people with physical problems shy away from

exercise. They think they can't do traditional sustained exertion. I show them

in the office that they can get a good work out in just one minute. " Dr.

Lindberg said patients' heart rate data during exertion and recovery give

insight into their overall health.

 

Dr. Dardik's most recent refinement is to tune exercise cycles to

the lunar cycle. He reasons that because lunar rhythms are so important in the

lives of other animals, they probably are for us, too. Here's how it works:

 

In the week before the New Moon, the lowest energy segment of the

lunar cycle, exercise cycles are best done in the early morning, between 6 and 9

a.m. This is the lowest energy segment of the day, in terms of circadian rhythm.

The cycles themselves are also very gentle, maybe just 3 or 4 moderate bursts of

exertion and recovery, 3 times a week; these cycles are designed to kick start

metabolism, to help people pull out of the early morning energy trough.

 

The week after the New Moon, a time of rising lunar energy, the

cycles are done later, between 9 and noon, a time of rising energy in the

circadian rhythm. The intensity is kicked up a notch. Again, the plan is for 3

or 4 bursts of exertion and recovery, 3 times a week.

 

Finally, in the week before the Full Moon, the time of maximum

energy in the lunar cycle, exercise is done between 3 and 6 in the afternoon.

The cycles are now done at maximum intensity, reaching the highest heart rate

appropriate for the individual. The week following the Full Moon is a period of

recovery, leading down toward the low-energy trough. After a week's rest, the

cycling starts over again.

By mapping the intensity of the exercise cycles onto the lunar

energy wave, this monthly protocol brings us as close to reconnecting to the

rhythms of nature as we're likely to get without donning bearskins and flint

tools and heading for the bush. The result is what was demonstrated in the

clinical trials, and with scores of individuals with whom Dr. Dardik has worked

privately: it causes health.

 

 

Anthropologist Roger Lewin, PhD, is the best-selling author of many

popular science books, including Bones of Contention, Principles of Human

Evolution, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, and his award-winning

collaborations with Richard Leakey, Origins and The Sixth Extinction. His most

recent book is Making Waves: Irving Dardik and His Superwave Principle (Rodale),

an in-depth exploration of the ideas presented in this article. It is available

at www.amazon.com and quality bookstores nationwide.

 

found at www.holisticprimarycare.net

 

here's the specific page:

http://www.holisticprimarycare.net/app/2_101.jsp;jsessionid=104F8D4495CE3C5BBFDA\

F18020B658FD

 

 

 

 

 

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