Executive Guide to Fitness

Blair Thompson was Adult Collections Co-ordinator at the North Vancouver District Library.

Athletically speaking, Brian Budd is something of a “renaissance man,” having participated in and excelled at everything except kite flying and the martial arts. He has starred in the North American Soccer League and is currently a fitness consultant. Together with broadcaster-journalist Val Clery, he has fashioned a comprehensive how-to book for anyone who wants to plan and carry out a program of regular exercise. This is not, as the title might suggest, only for the corporate brass. The name of the book must derive from an attempt to give it a measure of singularity in the flood of fitness books on the market today.

In diet and exercise books, it seems de rigueur nowadays to be descriptive as well as prescriptive, and the Executive Guide is no exception. In addition to the expected chapter dealing with why you should get fit, and how to evaluate your present deplorable state of flab, there are brief explanations of the working of the “vital systems” and what goes on when exertion is vigourously applied to them. A section on diet is included, but both this chapter and the calorie chart that is appended to it are probably too brief to be really useful. (The reader may, however, want to try the author’s hangover cure.) From the foregoing, one might correctly infer that Brian Budd’s ideas on diet —  “fuelling the system” — are not all that spartan.

For a general fitness book, Executive Guide devotes an unusual amount of ink and space to stretching exercises. These are followed by recommended progressive resistance and muscle strength activities. Weight training, and working out on high-tech gymnasium equipment such as the Nautilus system, are prominently featured as well. Executive Guide is extravagantly illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the recommended exercises, complete with clear, accompanying directions. Other areas covered include: sports medicine, equipment and attire, activities to complement particular sports, and consumer tips to help the reader resist the blandishments of the neighbourhood health spa which would like to sell him a lifetime membership in the whirlpool. A useful book for any Canadian in pursuit of that disgustingly fit, 60-year-old Swede.