A Free Opportunity to Give Your Body and Your Brain a Boost

Tom Acklin is a physician whose favorite prescription isn't found in any pharmacy; it's in you. To be, as Acklin calls it, "an agent in your own well-being" isn't as easy as taking a few pills, but he promises it's a more effective and longer-lasting treatment.

So what does that, um, mean? A range of doctors, therapists and fitness instructors will try to provide answers during the National Institutes of Health CORE Week ("COnditioning and RElaxation Coming Together!"), an exploration of the benefits of physical activity and mental release geared to the NIH community, but open -- and, most important, free -- to anyone.

The slew of seminars that kicked off yesterday at the research agency's main campus in Bethesda are designed to help attendees find ways to take care of their bodies and minds, thus aging better, fighting off disease and generally turning into more pleasant human beings. (The fun ends Friday; specifics are at http://dats.ors.od.nih.gov/pdf/core.pdf.)

The offerings include a talk by Acklin, a neurologist and founder of All Is Well Yoga, on "Responsibility and Empowerment in Creating a Life of Vitality"; a time management workshop; an intro to the "energy-balancing" practice of reiki; a whole lot of Pilates classes; and a number of surprises, such as a hip-hop dance tutorial led by CORE Week organizer Rachel Permuth-Levine.

"When I take a hip-hop dance class, it's a time I experience more joy than any other," says Permuth-Levine, deputy director of the Office of Strategic and Innovative Programs at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. "Let's have a ball, feel uninhibited and burn calories."

Discovering how to gyrate like Beyoncé can be a first step toward the larger lesson: If you can manage to free your mind while working your muscles, you're actually engaging in powerful preventive medicine.

Esther Sternberg, director of the NIH's Integrative Neural Immune Program, has a calmer presentation planned for her talk on "How Stress Makes You Sick and What to Do About It." Apparently, what to do is stick with a regular, gentle exercise routine and find ways to give yourself a break.

Sternberg chooses swimming and walking. In addition, "I try to find the time every day for a moment of quiet," she says. "I sit in my sunroom and look out at my garden." And, she adds, never underestimate the value of a good night's sleep or eating right.

People have always known that these kinds of lifestyle choices make you feel good. In recent years, science has found that's because they actually make you better. Unbridled anxiety, Sternberg says, has been found to literally unravel your chromosomes. "If you're chronically stressed, your chromosomes can be 10 to 15 years older than your biological age," she warns. But institute a program of movement, relaxation and a healthy diet, and you'll get a boost in the enzyme that repairs those chromosomes. "To me, that's a very powerful argument."

Although any kind of relaxation scores points in Sternberg's book, Debbie Norris, director of Mind-Body Studies at American University, urges visitors to come to her "Mindfulness Meditation" session this afternoon. With greater mental awareness, she says, you'll have a better sense of your bodily needs. Need a better reason? How about it'll reduce your chances of chronic illness by altering your brain chemistry? "Your levels of serotonin go up. Serotonin bursts cancer cells. Ta-da!"

As this kind of research has seeped into mainstream exercise culture, it has heralded an evolution from the bigger-is-better bodybuilding past into a world where balance has become a critical component. Robert Sherman, the group fitness director at Life Time Athletic in Rockville, says clients now have different expectations of health clubs. "We're not going to the gym just to feel beat-up. We want to feel better," he says.

In addition to filling out schedules with options such as yoga, tai chi and Pilates, that has meant teaching with a focus on the entire spectrum of mind and body activity. In Sherman's cycling classes, for instance, he tries to instill in students the importance of alternating between bouts of high-resistance leg pumping and easy, restorative pedaling.

"The quality of the effort during the intervals," Sherman says, "is entirely dependent on the quality of recovery." Expect that to come up when he participates in tomorrow night's panel, "Shifting Toward Prevention: Integration of Health Modalities to Achieve Overall Well-Being."

He's also certain to bring up another aim of CORE Week that's hinted at in its name: the idea that stability in the body's core (the tummy, back and hips), not the number of biceps curls you can do, is the real predictor of strength.

For much of the 27 years he has been teaching, Sherman has been a leading proponent of functional training, which focuses on overall body movements rather than rigid exercises to sculpt a body that's not just strong but also flexible and capable of handling the tasks of daily life. "Instead of isolating muscles, we're now learning how to integrate muscles," Sherman says.

We're also learning that just as there are countless directions to take your body, there is an infinite number of ways to integrate conditioning and relaxation in your life. "No one way works for all people, and no one way works for a person all the time," Sternberg says. Permuth-Levine says she hopes that by stretching, posing, pumping and generally sampling a wide array of classes, attendees will manage to find a match for both their bodies and their brains, which will persuade them to make room in their schedules.

"If you feel better, that's self- motivating. It makes you want to do it more," Norris says. And the more you do it, the less time you'll need to make for standing in line at the pharmacy.