Exercise Deficit Disorder

It has been a very busy stretch, and I have been unable to find time to do any posting.  This entry itself will be brief, but I have to share some of the excitement I feel after our group of doctors hosted a visiting professor from the College of New Jersey.

Dr. Avery Faigenbaum is someone I met when I did my fellowship in Pediatric Sports Medicine at Children's Hospital, Boston.  He has published literally hundreds of studies, articles, chapters and books on the subject of pediatric resistance training.  Not only is he learned, but he is a dynamic speaker.  I carry fond memories of the last time I heard him speak in Boston, in 2007.  Imagine Rocky Balboa giving an erudite lecture at Harvard, and you will have a vision of Dr. Faigenbaum lecturing about his research.

Well, now I have a more recent memory.

Last night and this morning, we were able to host Dr. Faigenbaum here in Columbus, and it was quite a set of talks he gave.  Energized me and all my colleagues.

If you want to learn more about his work, go to his website.  It's difficult to be brief when describing his work.  I can only skim the surface in this blog.

I can still recall memories when growing up in the 70's of the myths that weight training in kids would stunt growth or cause injuries, specifically of the growth plates.   Dr. Faigenbaum has dedicated his professional life to, among other things,  researching the safety of resistance training in kids, and he has found that no prospective study of a supervised weight program in kids has ever revealed a growth plate injury.  When supervised, kids can lift weights safely.  He has gone further, and designed cost effective, age specific resistance training programs for kids which combine play and fitness.  He has demonstrated the need to focus on strength training as well as aerobics in kids (and that goes for adults too).

But his work is much deeper than this.  It is actually quite radical.  He is looking at the epidemic of childhood obesity from the angle of physical (in)activity.  He has coined the phrase "exercise deficit disorder," and he has begun to publish studies in the medical literature investigating this condition, which he postulates is a precursor to pediatric and adult pathology such as obesity.  It is an intriguing concept, a hypothesis which needs to be developed with more academic rigor, but as he spoke about this I couldn't help but think I was witnessing the elaboration of a new medical diagnosis.  Really, I felt as if I were witnessing the beginning of a revolution:  a new paradigm, one which would address the problem of a condition such as obesity long before it became manifest.

Certainly I see this condition on an almost daily basis:  the kids who have trouble doing a push up, or a squat; the kids who spend much more time in front of an iPad than on a playground, the toddlers who are put in the back of a bicycle trailer only to sit while their parents pedal.

Exercise Deficit Disorder, arguably one of the great public health crises of our generation.  I'll be returning to this issue often in this blog, I expect.