Running can be new life for asthmatics

Press, 31 October 1979, Page 16

Running can be new life for asthmatics

When the great New Zealand wrestler, John da Silva brought one of his troup’s mighty musclemen to Christchurch, I trailed along to find out what, made them tick.

It was one of these genial giants. Bruno Bekker, who presented me with the idea that asthmatics can cure themselves by fitness training.

Bekker was a Hawera boy who took up weight-lifting training to cure his asthma.

The weight training cured his asthma all right. But in the process Bekker became so powerful that a wrestling talent scout, who one day noticed his magnificent physique, offered him a job with a professional wrestling troup.

Like most wrestlers Bekker trains on the professional circuit whenever he can with heavy weights to maintain strength and fitness. He has never had a recurrence of asthma.

Meantime a young Christchurch married man who has combined weight training with running to cure his asthma, has turned up with equally startling results.

David Smith said that asthma had made and kept him a weakling and almost an invalid before he began his own systematic weight training programme he developed at the YMCA weight-lift-ing gymnasium.

Smith • said the training cured his asthma and, as in the case of Bekker, increased his strength and muscular physique so that now, a fine figure of a man, he plays competition soccer.

But the training which Smith made himself able to do is not just “namby pamby” stuff.

Smith finds that one of the most effective lifts he uses is the bench press.

It’s rather like a floor press-up but done by lying on a bench and pressing the bar bell away from your chest. Smith uses the heaviest weights he can handle for three successive separate sets of 10 successive movements.

He uses the proper wei g h t-lifters forcedbreathing technqiue. He takes a deep breath before each movement, holds it

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throughout the lift and puffs it out, under pressure, through pursed lips at the conclusion of each lift.

For beginners much of the same effect can be gained from floor pressups. When you get too strong for three or four sets of 10 in this movement. try doing your press ups off chairs: feet on one chair and hands on two chairs. This gives you as much as 6in of extra dip. When you can perform say three sets of 10 on this movement you are getting a pretty sound sort of a conditioning session.

If you can’t do any press-ups at all to start with, just do press-ups with your knees on the floor. You will probably find you soon become strong enough to cope with the more advanced movements.

Patrick O'Reilly, of Greymouth, tells of rehabilitat-

ing himself by regular, gradually increased running, from being what he calls a "two-stone overweight asthmatic wreck’’ to be able to perform with credit in sprint events on the track. A week or two ago, while on a light training run in Hagley Park I was overtaken by a young man who agreed to reduce speed to my pace for socialibility’s sake. He turned out to be Tony Gordon, an announcer at Radio Avon, who had cured his asthma with only about four months of regular running.

Before that, he said, he was often in fear that one of his frequent and severe asthmatic attacks would pur. him off the air when at the microphone.

Tony Gordon said: ‘T am no doctor but I have been an asthma sufferer for 15 years. It excluded me from all sports that require exertion, and most of them do. "I have heard over the years about different socalled cures for asthma. “I was myself for years addicted to a proprietory line of throat and lung spray; but when you have an attack this kind of spray relief is

only a temporary thing. "Because my job in radio involved no physical activity I had an ever-in-creasing weight problem as well.

"And, as any asthmatic knows, excess weight and breathing troubles do no mix.

“I went to a Christchurch doctor who told me that running would cure me. I took it up as a last resort.

“That was four months ago. I cut down on fattening foods and I began grading up gradually to two light runs a day.

"1 lost nearly 14 stone in two weeks. The asthma

left me. I threw the throat spray away. “But make no mistake it is not easy for an asthmatic to cope with running at first. But I made my body do it. I pushed it, and pushed it and finally I made my body beat the asthma.

“I now eat better foods than ever I have eaten in m" life. I eat lots more 1 and vegetables.

Show week-end in Christchurch — November 9, 10 and 11 — the Long Distance Runners’ Club will hold a family training week-end at Hanmer Springs.

The recently opened forest. camp will be the base. For run details Phone 558663 before 9 p.m. A significant proportion of injuries occur among runners who train in the early morning and who are inclined to exert themselves before their physical machinery has had time to wake up properly. So it may pay you to back off the pace in your morning outings and do your more demanding runs later in the day or at week-ends when time permits longer, slower and thus probably more beneficial running.