Healing Moves: How To Cure, Relieve, And Prevent Common Ailments With Exercise

This is an indispensable, readable, science-based resource for people who wish to improve their health with exercise. Special chapters target metabolic disorders (such as diabetes and obesity); mental health conditions (stress, depression, anxiety); orthopaedic disorders (back pain, repetitive stress disorder, osteoporosis); immunological conditions (colds, cancer, HIV); cardiovascular disorders; men's health; women's health; and respiratory disorders. For each, the authors explain the condition and how it is affected by lifestyle, its risk factors, and how exercise helps. Then they give an exercise prescription with general and specific guidelines, cautions, and additional resources. Each chapter offers specific 'healing moves' that include specific aerobic, strength, relaxation, mind-body, breathing, stretching, and daily-life recommendations. The illustrations are line drawings of refreshingly real looking people, complete with paunch, neck wrinkles, and eyeglasses.

Western and Eastern medical professionals, alternative practitioners, and science researchers all agree: exercise is therapeutic. Physical activity can assist healing, and specific types of exercise can improve health and combat illness. Carol and Mitchel Krucoff have dissected the research and created a series of practical, motivating plans to incorporate "healing moves" into your lifestyle, whatever your health conditions.

"Physical activity can help some diabetics come off insulin and some hypertensives quit their high-blood-pressure medication," write the authors (Carol Krucoff is a science writer and health columnist for the Washington Post; husband Mitchel Krucoff is a senior staff cardiologist and director of the Ischemia Monitoring Laboratory at Duke University Medical Center). "It can lower cholesterol, ease arthritic pain, lift depression, relieve anxiety, and help asthmatics breathe more easily." Moreover, exercise helps slow the aging process, improves heart and lung function, increases metabolism, and strengthens the immune system.

Healing Moves is an indispensable, readable, science-based resource for people who wish to improve their health with exercise. Special chapters target metabolic disorders (such as diabetes and obesity); mental health conditions (stress, depression, anxiety); orthopedic disorders (back pain, repetitive stress disorder, osteoporosis); immunological conditions (colds, cancer, HIV); cardiovascular disorders; men's health; women's health; and respiratory disorders. For each, the authors explain the condition and how it is affected by lifestyle, its risk factors, and how exercise helps. Then they give an exercise prescription with general and specific guidelines, cautions, and additional resources. Each chapter offers specific "healing moves" that include specific aerobic, strength, relaxation, mind-body, breathing, stretching, and daily-life recommendations. The illustrations are line drawings of refreshingly real looking people, complete with paunch, neck wrinkles, and eyeglasses.

The Krucoffs back up their recommendations with plenty of science, but the writing is still reader friendly, warm, and simple to understand. They offer commonsense advice, too, such as asking you, "What's the point?" of exercising when you have a cold: "If you're exercising for your health, because it makes you feel good, and to boost your immunity, why work out when your body is telling you to rest?" Healing Moves is a must-have book that promotes seeing exercise as "recess": a "play break" rather than a "workout," keeping it fun and flexible. --Joan Price