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Business firms have latched onto the new fitness with unmistakable sincerity. It is a backward business organization, in fact, that does not subsidize some kind of aerobics program at least for its executives. Fumble-fingered. soft ball, bowling and Ping Pong used to be the extent of business athletics, but now such firms as General Foods, Xerox and Life Insurance Company of Georgia have set up elaborate exercise regimes. The reasons are not obscure: employees who take 20 laps instead of four martinis at lunch make more sense when they return to their desks, and are far less likely to require payouts from company-financed health insurance.
There is a class distinction here, however. Not many factories sponsor aerobics programs (though Jogger Jesse Bell, president of the Bonne Bell cosmetics firm, built a running track near his Cleveland factory, and paid employees $1 a mile for paddling around it, until some began lapping at the rate of $250 or more a month).
In fact, not many blue-collar workers or their families take part in aerobic sports. Not all motorcyclists are blue collar, but almost all bicyclists and runners are white collar. In snow country, the line between white-collar crosscountry skiers and blue-collar snowmobilers sparks with animosity, and is seldom crossed. Factory workers are nearly as sedentary as bank presidents now, but clearly the conviction persists from the arduous old days that sweating is what privileged toffs pay you to do.
Lavish Gym. Class crackles in the clean, conditioned air at Dr. Kenneth Cooper's $2 million Aerobics Center, a lavishly renovated antebellum mansion in north Dallas. The center is a gym. and people sweat there, but the locker rooms are cozy with rust-colored carpet, and their smell is more Brut than Ben Gay. Cooper is the author of Aerobics, the exerciser's Old Testament, The New Aerobics, and two other books about the exercise system he developed while he worked as a health researcher for the Air Force.
The basis of Cooper's system is his use, as a measure of conditioning, of the amount of oxygen a circulatory system can take in and use in a given time. This he measured by positioning runners on treadmills and capturing their exhalations in plastic bags. The more oxygen used, the more work done before exhaustion, the better the subject's condition. Cooper found that he could approximate such tests by measuring the distance a runner could cover in twelve minutes over a track—1% miles for a man under 30 in excellent condition: 1.1 to 1.24 miles for a 45-year-old woman in fair shape, and so on.
Cooper devised aerobic exercise schemes for postulants at each stage of conditioning, aimed at keeping the heart working at 70% of its maximum rate. He advises that runners may subtract their age from 220, then take 70% of the result as an optimum heartbeat rate. Cooper then had the flash of genius that has earned him fame and wealth. Exercisers receive intangible but much prized rewards—aerobic "points"—for doing their routines. An evening of ' bowling? No points. Twenty pushups? No points. A round of golf (walking)? Three points. A 7:59-minute mile? Five points. Get running.