But I urge you to linger for just a minute longer and really look at Ultimate Fitness. Examine the top, left corner of the cover, where it says "Gina Kolata, Science Reporter, The New York Times." She's not one of those overbearing hunks, you see, but rather a professional assimilator of careful research. And she's not out to sell you something "new and improved", but to question what you think you already know.
"Exercise is my obsession," Kolata claims in the introduction, and to prove it joins a "Spinning" class (a form of exercise on machines that simulate bike riding), which propels her to research the Spinning movement, which launches her into a whole investigation of different exercise movements, and their creators, and how those creators use their own--often questionable--research to advertise their products. Along the way, she also takes a fascinating look at muscles (endlessly mysterious tissue fibers); deconstructs every aspect of the business side of fitness (you'll never trust the certified "trainer" at your gym again); and thoroughly examines endorphins, and the "runner's high" some people claim to glean from exercise.
Kolata threads all this information together with insightful personal anecdotes, and the result is compulsively readable. Part expose, part memoir, Ultimate Fitness is nothing like the canned self-help books it will be paired with, but rather their arch nemesis. Those books argue that they are the truth, the best way available for you to get in shape. Ultimate Fitness shows there is no truth about exercise and health. Like any great piece of investigative journalism it doesn't tell you how it is, but explains what there is. The rest is up to you. JUSTIN WESCOAT SANDERS
