Last spring, among the usual elementary school reminders about theme weeks and illicit peanut butter snacks (WE ARE A NUT FREE CAMPUS!!)��an email popped up that gave me pause. My kindergartner would be weighed in school, it said, and I could click on a link to opt her out.

It gave me the ick. I’d paid attention to young women like Mary Cain��and members of college cross-country teams speaking out against weigh-ins and body shaming in sport, and how the practice damaged their mental and physical health. That’s different from a kindergartner stepping on a scale then running back to recess, but I know how little minds absorb everything. I didn’t want my daughter to think her school cared about her weight.

Neither, it turns out, did our home state. In January 2022, California’s Department of Education suspended the body mass index reporting��it had required since 1996 as part of a fitness test. (BMI, calculated from height and weight, is often used as a proxy for body fat composition.) The state also axed collecting several movement-based measurements that, along with gender, height, and age, had been used to give kids “fitness report cards,” citing concerns about mental health, accessibility, and gender equity. Every measure, except overall participation rates, was put on hold pending the outcome of a large study the state commissioned to explore potential best practices for school fitness testing.

Then, in March 2023, the California Department of Education dropped a skewering school fitness testing as it’s been conducted for the past 25 years. In the report, experts in fitness, adaptive physical education, body image, and gender identity rejected the nation’s leading fitness evaluation. And so California became the first state to seek an answer to a simple and important question: What is the point of fitness testing?

Today, more than 10 million kids in over 20,000 schools across the U.S. take a test called annually. It’s been California’s official assessment since 1996. It’s also used in New York City, the country’s largest school district, and it’s the official assessment of the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, the current iteration of more than six decades of federal initiatives targeting youth fitness.

Created by the Cooper Institute, a Dallas-based health nonprofit, the test is made up of various activities like a one-mile run, pushups, and the sit-and-reach to determine muscular strength, endurance, and flexibility, and aerobic capacity. There’s also a weigh-in component to measure body composition through BMI, and it is this measurement, in particular, that’s most often used to shape public policy, influencing everything from city-wide free school lunch programs to the length and number of movement breaks kids get throughout the school day.

The main idea behind the testing, says Dr. Weimo Zhu, who is on the advisory board for Fitnessgram, is “what you measure is what you get.” Fitnessgram benchmarks, called “Healthy Fitness Zones,” are national standards set by age and gender, and are meant to inspire kids to be active.

“The standard isn’t to punish the kids,” Zhu says. It’s to tell them if they need to take action to improve their health and fitness. Without it, he argues, kids won’t know the goal behind being fit, implying that maintaining a certain BMI range, strength, aerobic capacity, and range of motion, is the goal.

But in the decades since Fitnessgram was first implemented, the scientific understanding of BMI’s relationship to health has progressed, and American culture has changed. Instead of physical measurement, many educators and politicians have become more concerned with inclusivity and kids’ mental health. “We’re focused on making sure schools are safe and inclusive for all kids,” says Cheryl Cotton, California’s deputy superintendent of public instruction.

Cotton also noted that the final concern triggering California’s legislative report involved BMI, school weigh-ins, and mental health. “A lot of researchers at universities across the state and the nation were really digging into the issue of body shaming.” Those factors put fitness testing in California legislators’ crosshairs.

Fitnessgram standards, the lawmakers believe, aren’t inclusive. The Cooper Institute is in the process of incorporating the Brockport Fitness Assessment, the most widely used fitness assessment for kids with disabilities, into its evaluation. But as of November 2023, the Fitnessgram test provided no benchmarks for those students. The test defines different Healthy Fitness Zones for girls and boys, but not for nonbinary kids, an issue that catalyzed California’s study after the state passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2017, allowing residents to identify as nonbinary on state documents. (New York enacted a similar law in 2021.)

In 2018, California asked The Cooper Institute to provide performance standards for nonbinary students, and the Institute partially complied. “With a push, Fitnessgram added a nonbinary option,” Cotton says, but it wasn’t equitable. Students who chose nonbinary would get a personal score, but couldn’t be included in annual reporting because the Institute wouldn’t create nonbinary benchmarks. Instead, the Institute published a position statement from their advisory board asserting that results are most accurate using sex at birth, though teachers or parents could decide which gender identity would be most appropriate. (When reached for comment, Fitnessgram shared a statement with �����ԹϺ��� reiterating this position.)

In 2005, a landmark report��titled Preventing Childhood Obesity was published. It was commissioned by the federal government and edited by a former CDC director; the report has been credited with launching��annual student BMI assessments nationwide.

Around the report’s debut, the language surrounding national interest in kids’ fitness��shifted. It already had morphed in the seventies from concerns about military preparedness toward general health and disease prevention. But now, in a rejiggering of combat jargon, fitness was becoming a weapon in a war on obesity.

Instead of fighting foes abroad, school health and fitness programs would prepare kids to tackle fatness, the “,” as it’s been dubbed in studies and scientific papers. BMI became public health’s favored metric used to do things like monitor and adjust kids’ health and fitness programs across the country.

The state of New York has the nation’s most robust BMI monitoring program, which was created in 2007 and operates through a partnership between the school system and the state’s public health department. State law requires that 50 percent of all public schools in New York conduct surveys annually. New York City runs its own BMI monitoring program, separate from the state’s, using Fitnessgram BMI data.

Around the same time, several states including Massachusetts, Texas, West Virginia, Florida, Maine, Arkansas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, also passed laws requiring BMI recording in schools. Other states gather childhood obesity information via phone or mail surveys��or through local health programs, such as those . Or they rely on for a glimpse into youth obesity trends.

But in recent years, scientists have found substantial evidence that children’s BMI is a poor predictor of future health—and even of current . “Even in the ‘overweight’ category, it’s not necessarily predictive of poor metabolic health,” says Dr. Hannah Thompson, an animated Berkeley professor who explores how youth physical activity can improve health. “Cardiovascular fitness is.”

Kids are naturally intuitive eaters, and “we disrupt that with messaging that weight equals health,” says Alisa Dodds, a registered dietitian and senior lecturer at Loyola Marymount University. Forming strong social connections, regular movement, and eating a variety of foods, she says, are behaviors associated with positive long-term health outcomes. “Weight is not a behavior.”

It’s also not linked to , nor has measuring BMI over the past two decades . (At best, it’s at which child obesity is increasing.) Weight is highly correlated with genetics and socio-economic status, two things kids have no control over.

Meanwhile, kids’ mental health has emerged as a primary concern, a crisis the pandemic exacerbated and that social media can fuel. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared kids’ mental health a national emergency, noting that suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 14. As of 2020, guns, cars, and drug overdoses are the top three leading causes of death��in kids under 20, with heart disease and chronic respiratory disease—two issues often brought up in relation to high BMI—in eighth and tenth places.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very act of weighing kids in school can harm their mental health. Thompson served as an expert panelist in the California study and also as a researcher on a 2021 study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, that found that elementary and middle school students who had been weighed in school were less satisfied with their bodies than those who hadn’t been weighed. It’s another point in a spate of recent studies challenging BMI’s relevance to overall health.

Exercise is part of the solution for improving mental health. In some cases, it can be at treating depression, and it’s a powerful . Daily exercise is , memory, and concentration. There are many compelling reasons besides body size to justify school fitness programs. Nevertheless, Fitnessgram published in 2020, doubling down on body composition as a vital metric, even as California’s researchers and legislators were questioning its utility.

“PE is not supposed to impact BMI,” says Thompson. “The whole idea of physical education—apart from recess or other physical activity opportunities—is to help younger students build the foundation and skills to go on and be active later in life.”

My kindergartner wasn’t, in fact, going to be weighed in school as part of state fitness testing, but for our local health department. It’s used BMI since 2007 to track the effectiveness of several school-based health initiatives, including a garden and nutrition program, and morning exercises. I met with administrators to ask them to stop the weigh-ins, showing them that our state had suspended BMI reporting—and every other metric associated with Fitnessgram testing—out of concern for kids’ mental health, pending the results of the legislative report. They were open to using a different metric to guide their programming. But they couldn’t think of one.

Every expert I talked to, from epidemiologists to physical education teachers, is in favor of some form of fitness testing, because they use the metrics to design programs, evaluate their efficacy, identify areas of need, and track student progress. Public health departments run on metrics. Fitness tests are, “for lots of states, the only source of state-wide data we have on youth health,” Thompson says.

BMI data from Fitnessgram testing in New York City allowed researchers to link socioeconomic status with weight. Fitnessgram data also has helped researchers see that kids’ aerobic fitness tends to decline from lower school to high school. And when physical education programs stop testing, says Fran Meyer, executive director of the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education, teachers and administrators can lose accountability for ensuring kids get that active time. “The focus on fitness diminishes,” she says, when progress can’t be measured.

But when the goal of physical education is to instill a lifelong love of movement, progress isn’t just physical. It’s not a math test, with a clear right, wrong, and class average. Test design must be sensitive to the fact that a kid’s body exists at the intersection of many factors, including culture, genetics, mental health, and socioeconomic status. Not every kid is motivated by comparison. Not every kid has the same opportunities for safe movement outside of school, or easy access to nature and whole foods.

So, California set out to reassess the point of physical education and school fitness programs. Only then could the state identify appropriate measurements for its students, ones that take into consideration the complex nature of health and the varied resources available to individual children.

Fitnessgram’s advisory board believes it’s put together the most accurate, comprehensive measurement of student fitness in a way that’s simple enough for schools to execute routinely. The California report, however, calls for measuring individual performance over time rather than comparing results against national standards. It also proposes eliminating BMI in favor of objective measures of aerobic capacity and cardiovascular fitness.

“Cardiorespiratory fitness is far more predictive of mortality than BMI,” Thompson says, though she couldn’t immediately come up with a simple way to gauge it. And simplicity is key when assessing thousands of wiggly kids.

Expert panelists cited in the California report suggested using wearable devices, like a FitBit, to more directly measure cardiovascular fitness, like VO2 max (the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise). Wearables can also approximate allostatic load, the amount of chronic stress in the body, through heart rate variability, the variation in the time interval between heartbeats. These metrics are not all perfectly inclusive, and take more time to gather BMI, but they’re a promising start.

“Health interventions can be done without using weight-loss as a goal,” Dobbs says. “It’s about being aligned with health-promoting behaviors versus a number on the scale.”

New York City is considering cutting their BMI program—the most comprehensive in the country—entirely, Thompson says. The move would signal that health officials are ready to move on to something different, though that may not��happen soon. “We are always reviewing our processes to determine whether they are the best way to assess and promote student health, which is what we’re doing now,” a representative from New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wrote in an email.

In California, legislators will review the fitness testing report and decide if they’ll move forward with recommendations, like allotting money toward developing the state’s own accessible and equitable test. “All of this work ties into that inclusive conversation, not just around physical fitness testing,” Cotton says, “but around our curriculum, and making sure our teachers understand our kids and have evidence-based strategies to really support them.”

Meanwhile, Fitnesgram’s 12-member advisory board continues to meet annually in an effort to improve the assessment, an act that shows measurement is not static. Fitnessgram can change. What metrics will reign supreme in the next chapter of kids’ fitness isn’t yet clear.

“It’s a huge challenge,” Dr. Weimo Zhu��says, of motivating kids to become lifelong lovers of fitness—and of finding the metrics that best promote that journey. “We’ll keep working on it.”

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Greg Sawicki is an associate professor of automation and mechatronics at Georgia Tech. His work focuses on robotic lower-limb exoskeletons designed to augment human locomotion. In other words, he’s trying to make it easier to walk and run with the help of, say, an external Achilles tendon. He dreams of breaking three hours in the marathon someday—aided by one of his own inventions—and that is why he’s stoked on an announcement from fellow researchers that may help bring his dream into reality sooner than he thought possible.

Last October, a team of Iranian biomedical engineers published a study in the on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, a journal published by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. In the study, they detailed the creation of a device that makes it easier to reverse the direction of the legs when running, reducing the metabolic rate required to run by 8 percent. Until this invention, powered exoskeletons had only achieved a metabolic rate reduction of just over 5 percent, and shoes about 4 percent.

“What makes it so exciting,” Sawicki says, “is that it takes an already efficient system—human running—and makes it even better without adding any external energy.” How an 8-percent reduction in metabolic rate might affect mile pace is tough to say, Sawicki says, but the major takeaway is it could make runners fatigue less over time. This could lead to faster times over long distances and allow to keep up their training later in life.

“As we get older, our tendons get more noodley,” Sawicki says. Those stiffness changes can drive up the energy cost of running. Biomedical researchers have been investigating the use of springs to do some of the energy storage and return that our tendons do.

It seems logical, but engineers have been trying unsuccessfully for over 100 years to create such an unpowered spring. Sawicki says imaging technology has allowed a better understanding of the relationship between muscles and tendons that led to this breakthrough. “There are spring mechanisms in the human body that make it so that our muscles, our power sources, don’t have to do as much,” Sawicki says. While we used to think of muscles as power sources, “many muscles are actually acting like clutches to hold onto tendons, which are like springs, so the muscles aren’t really acting like engines or motors very much.”

For example, “calf muscles don’t do a lot of energy injection,” Sawicki says. “Each time you take a step, the calf muscles activate to hold onto your Achilles tendon. Then imagine your Achilles tendon getting stressed by your body’s momentum, and then that tendon returns the momentum to you at just the right time to push you off.”

The Iranian exoskeleton invention is important because it can usher in a new era of studies done outside the lab, leading to applications more practical (think: military, physical labor) than theoretical. As for what it means for athletes, “rules are going to have to change,” Sawicki says. This exoskeleton in particular wouldn’t be easy to hide—it looks like a big wishbone coming out of the back of your waist.

But researchers are already at work on soft exoskeletons that could eventually be hidden under normal running attire or integrated into running clothes. In fact, since that wave-making journal article made headlines 10 months ago, inventors made strides toward creating powered exoskeletons that aren’t too cumbersome–more like a pair of very helpful shorts. from researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering that are “so low-profile you could wear [them] around the house.”

When they truly become that comfy—Sawicki is putting a four-year timeframe on it—athletes might just be signing up for races in a new “augmented” category.

Check out the Wyss Institute’s exoskeleton in their video below:

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The answer: It depends on the rules.

As the Daily Mail explains, humans set breath-holding records in water because they “can hold their breath twice as long underwater as they can on land.” The reason: the “diving reflex,” in which the body slows its heart rate and metabolism in order to conserve oxygen and energy when submerged in cold water. The pulse rate in an untrained diver, the Daily Mail says, will decrease 10 to 30 percent when underwater. But professional divers can reduce theirs by more than 50 percent.

This brings us to records. The event in question—holding one’s breath underwater for as long as possible without moving—is officially called “static apnea,” and there are two ways static apnea records are kept: for dives performed after breathing in pure oxygen, and for dives performed without pure oxygen.

The Guinness Book of World Records allows divers to hyperventilate for up to 30 minutes with pure oxygen before they submerge for their record attempt. This practice, Discovery News reports, helps the body expel carbon dioxide, buying time before carbon dioxide levels become toxic. Boosting oxygen stores, on the other hand, buys time before oxygen levels fall too low, which leads to brain and tissue damage.

Current Breath Holding World Records

of 24 minutes 37 seconds.��

• In 2012, German freediver Tom Sietas held his breath underwater for 22 minutes and 22 seconds, besting Dane Stig Severinsen’s previous Guinness record by 22 seconds.
• The women’s record is 18 minutes, 32.59 seconds, set by Brazillian Karoline Meyer in 2009. Prior to the attempt, she hyperventilated with oxygen for 24 minutes.
• The International Association for the Development of Apnea, which records all freediving world records, does not allow the use of pure oxygen before a static apnea attempt. The current non-oxygen aided records stand at 11 minutes, 35 seconds for men (Stéphane Mifsud, 2009) and 8 minutes, 23 seconds for women (Natalia Molchanova, 2011).

Severinsen has said that he hasn’t suffered any brain damage from his breath-holding record attempts. Still, Discovery News notes, “studies of freedivers have turned up abnormalities in brain scans and markers that suggest brain damage. No one knows what the long-term consequences will be of feats like these.”

Watch Severinsen’s Guinness World Record Breath Hold

Wonder what a static apnea record-setting attempt looks like? Check out this Discovery video of Severinson’s 22-minute breath hold:

How Do Humans Compare to Other Breath-Holding Mammals?

When it comes to our mammal brethren, homo sapiens��are no match for aquatic creatures. The unheralded Cuvier’s beaked whale has a . That tops the list of whales and seals, the gold-medal standard for breath holders. Many species can comfortably hold their breath for over 100 minutes including Elephant seals, Sperm whales, and Weddel seals.

For land mammals, the surprise champion is—get ready for it—the sloth! , making them adept underwater explorers. Beavers have a good showing as well, clocking in at 15 minutes.

The average human can hold their breath for about two minutes, though most of us would struggle to get one minute without practice. Don’t feel bad though. Dolphins can only last about seven to ten minutes, which is far less than the human world record (the dolphin world record is currently unknown).

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Gwen Jorgensen felt calm. Happy, even. It was an odd pre-race emotion for the 30-year-old triathlete, especially considering she was minutes away from starting the most important race of her life, at the Rio Olympics.

Since she raced her first triathlon, just six years earlier, plucked from a tax accounting job at Ernst & Young by USA Triathlon’s nascent Talent ID program, Jorgensen had qualified for two Olympic Games and earned two world champion titles. This was all during a 13-race winning streak from 2014 to 2016—the longest in the history of the sport for a female athlete. She crushed a qualifying event in Rio the year before the games, and now the world expected her to win again, this time to much greater fanfare.

Jorgensen, her lean 5’10” frame putting her a head above many of her 54 competitors, coolly adjusted her goggles and almost grinned while the other women shook out their legs, arms, and nerves. In the minutes before the athletes all ran down Copacabana Beach into the turquoise saltwater, the TV cameras hung on Jorgensen for a second. Soon they’d turn their focus to the Red Bull–sponsored Wisconsinite and keep it there for most of the run as Jorgensen kicked away from her closest rival with roughly two kilometers to go. She never looked back until she broke the tape. Then, for the first time ever at a finish line, she cried.

“I enjoyed those moments after Rio. I wanted to soak in those four years of hard work,” Jorgensen says. Her immediate post-race goal was to start a family, she said, as her Swiss rival and Rio silver medalist Nicola Spirig had done after the London Olympics in 2012. Jorgensen and her husband, , got tested for Zika and waited the doctor-recommended three months before trying to conceive. Their son, Stanley, made his appearance almost exactly one year to the day after Jorgensen won gold.

But a baby announcement was just the beginning of Jorgensen’s headline news of 2017. She had something else percolating that would shock her fans, sponsors, coaches, and even her family when she finally let it out: Jorgensen didn’t want to be a triathlete. She just wanted to run. And not only did she want to run, she that fall, but she wanted to win gold in the Olympic marathon.

The triathlon and running worlds immediately began armchair analyzing everything from collegiate stats to her body type to decide which sport was right for her. Jorgensen ignored it all. “I just wasn’t motivated to do the same thing again,” she says. “My heart wasn’t in it.” Lemieux puts it more bluntly: “It’s no secret that triathlon found Gwen. She was never super in love with it.”

Her husband is right. But pursuing triathlon glory transformed Jorgensen from a conservative accountant into a risk-taking, unbreakable champion. It gave her the confidence to risk giving up everything from sponsorships to prize money and follow a different path. And if she could win gold in a sport she merely liked, what could she achieve in one she truly loves?

Gwen Rosemary Jorgensen grew up the younger of two sisters in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a bucolic working-class Milwaukee suburb where high school life is defined by the typical Midwest football games and homecoming parades. Her mother, Nancy, taught choir at the local high school and had a reputation for baking a mean sourdough focaccia. Joel, her father, worked as a handyman, installing custom countertops and shower basins, usually getting started before sunrise.

Elizabeth was the gabby, somewhat rebellious sister. Gwen, three years younger, was a quiet rule follower. “She let her sister do the talking for her,” says Nancy, who required the girls to play a musical instrument through high school. They both chose violin. Gwen wasn’t passionate about it, Nancy says, “but she had to do it well. She’s always had this personality where she doesn’t do anything unless she does it well.”

Jorgensen developed an early affinity for water at her grandma’s pool, which evolved into becoming a competitive swimmer at age eight. Over the years, that dedication would dictate every choice she made through most of her college years.

“There was something about being in the water,” Jorgensen says. “I’m an introvert, and being immersed in the water—it’s a very solo thing. I liked getting the work in and knowing that I was the one helping myself improve.”

Jorgensen also showed promise in running, though she’d only ever do it if it didn’t interfere with swimming. In elementary school PE—the only class she ever got a C in, because she couldn’t do a somersault—she had to run a mile around the school track. In a story her family loves to retell, she ran it so fast that her teachers didn’t think she’d completed all four laps and made her run one more.

When Jorgensen started high school at Waukesha South High, the track coach, Eric Lehmann, noted her effortless stride as well-suited for distance running. He asked Elizabeth, a senior on the team at the time, if she thought her sister would join. “I thought, good luck getting her to run!” Elizabeth says. “She’s going to swim.”

In those days, Jorgensen was known to have faded Sharpie marks permanently staining her forearms, remnants of where she’d inked her heat, lane, and event for swim meets. In her blue bedroom, among photos of her swim team, Jorgensen had arranged phosphorescent stars on the ceiling to write “5:15,” her goal time in the 500-yard freestyle. She fell asleep flat on her back every night looking up at the glowing numbers. Her priorities were clear.

Lehmann understood that swimming had to come first and allowed her to pop in for running workouts as she could, training during swimming’s off-season. It was the beginning of a lifelong pattern of people making accommodations for Jorgensen because, as Elizabeth says, they recognized her innate talent as a runner.

In swimming, Jorgensen was more determined than naturally gifted. She had her sights set on going to the Olympics as a swimmer, though she rarely scored at the state meet, which meant she couldn’t get a swimming scholarship to college. But she chose her school based on her swimming goals anyway, knowing the only way she’d improve was to swim with women who could kick her ass. Despite being an introverted homebody, Jorgensen initially thought she’d branch out for college. But she fell in love with the campus at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, and that settled it.

Jorgensen threw herself into swimming during her first three years as a Badger. While out of the pool, she discovered her analytical personality was a good fit for accounting. But at the end of her junior year, she found herself questioning her athletic goals for the first time. All of Jorgensen’s roommates were going to NCAAs, but she hadn’t placed high enough to score a spot at the national meet. “I felt like I had put everything into it, and I wasn’t improving,” she says. “I honestly got sick of swimming.”

Lehmann put a call in to the Wisconsin running coaches, even though Jorgensen was equivocal. She knew what it took to go from high school to college swimming. “I thought there’s no way I could make that jump to college running when I haven’t run in three years,” she says. But it turned out the Wisconsin coaches had already been talking about her.

“Her swim coach came into my office one day and said, ‘Hey, I think I’ve got a runner for you,’” says Jerry Schumacher, the men’s head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Wisconsin at the time. (He left in 2008 and eventually became the head coach of Nike’s Bowerman Track Club.) Jorgensen’s passion for swimming was sapped, but her coach knew she loved to run and that she was built for speed on land.

Schumacher had no idea if Jorgensen had what it took to run Division I, but he spoke with the head coach of the women’s track and cross-country teams, Jim Stintzi, who gave Jorgensen a call, asking her to do a time trial of 400-meter repeats. Her efficiency and natural leg speed impressed him, so he threw her into the 1,500 meters in a meet the following week. “Not sure exactly what she ran,” Stintzi says, “but it was good enough that I was confident she had very solid potential. By the end of the season, I knew she could be really good.”

Jorgensen stayed on at Wisconsin for her masters in accounting, giving her two years of running eligibility, during which she accomplished more than she ever had in swimming. She earned All-American honors in both track and cross-country. She became the Big 10 champ in the 5,000 and 3,000 meters and went to the NCAA championships three times in track and twice in cross-country. It was a gratifying experience, but not one that led her to consider pursuing sports beyond college.

“I wasn’t good enough to go to the Olympics in swimming, so I gave up on my dream to go to the Olympics at all,” Jorgensen says. She had interned at Ernst & Young as a grad student and had a job offer lined up as a tax accountant. She settled into a post-collegiate routine of working 80-to-90-hour weeks and hobby jogging, hoping to pick up a few hundred dollars here and there at local 5Ks.

Then a representative from USA Triathlon reached out and planted the idea that she still had a shot at the Olympics—in a sport she’d never raced.

USA Triathlon was struggling after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. American triathletes hadn’t won a single medal, and the governing body had missed its most prominent opportunity to fulfill its mission to “grow and inspire” the triathlon community. It was experiencing a crisis of spirit, and it was also potentially missing out on extra cash from the U.S. Olympic Committee. (The organization favors proven winners and high-profile sports, and triathlon was neither.) USAT’s system for developing world-class athletes wasn’t optimal, and its recruitment strategy needed an overhaul.

“Top athletes from other sports just sort of found us,” says Scott Schnitzspahn, USAT’s sport performance director at the time. “We thought, let’s stop being lucky and go find these athletes.”

Leading the recruitment charge was , a 2004 U.S. Olympic triathlete who began to ping college running and swimming coaches across the country. One of her first finds was Jorgensen, whom she met in June 2009 at the NCAA championships.

It seemed like an opportune time to suggest triathlon; a stress fracture had forced Jorgensen to drop out of her last big collegiate meet. But Jorgensen already had her job lined up at Ernst & Young—an accomplishment not lost on her as a millennial graduating into a recession—and the pragmatist refused to be swayed: “I said I’m not going to be an athlete if I can’t support myself financially,” she says. Plus, she had officially put the pool behind her. And there was the not-so-small detail that she’d never ridden a road bike.

“It had to be a soft touch with her,” says Lindquist, who didn’t mind Jorgensen’s lack of cycling know-how. Think of Olympic triathlon as basically one long struggle to make it to the run in a good position. To have a shot at winning, an athlete has to be fast enough to stay with the lead pack through the 1.5K swim so they make it into the lead pack of cyclists. The 40K bike leg is like one big draft-legal circuit race. (As opposed to the typical amateur triathlon, in which athletes must not draft off other cyclists.) Drafting makes it difficult to break away and forces competitors to make tactical decisions: Should they pull away or tuck in and conserve energy? If a participant comes off the bike in the lead group, it all comes down to how fast she can run the final 10K, making Olympic triathlon favor those, like Jorgensen, whose strongest sport is running.

Lindquist tried to get Jorgensen into triathlon that fall, but she refused, not fully understanding that Olympic triathlon was vastly different than the ultra-distance Hawaii Ironman highlighted annually on NBC. She finally acquiesced in early 2010, thanks to Lindquist’s persistence and reassurance that it didn’t have to interfere with her job. Jorgensen could have a local coach and do the training in her own time. If she didn’t like it, she could walk away. Lindquist sealed the deal with a heartfelt truth: “I told her that, on paper, she had more potential than I did at draft-legal triathlon.”

Jorgensen started getting up between 3:30 and 4 a.m. to train before work. When she couldn’t make it to the local aquatic center, she’d tether herself in the pool at her downtown Milwaukee condo complex and swim in place. USAT set her up with Wisconsin-based coach Cindi Bannink, who largely sent workouts through the digital coaching platform TrainingPeaks for Jorgensen to execute on her own. Bannink also sent Jorgensen on group rides to work on her shaky bike-handling skills. On one of those rides, in June 2011, she met Lemieux, a pro cyclist from North Dakota who was getting in a workout as he passed through town. He was intrigued, and after post-ride burgers at Milwaukee’s Café Hollander, she was too. The two eventually began long-distance dating.

Soon after that, just 17 months after racing her first triathlon, Jorgensen placed second at a test event for the 2012 London Games, securing a spot on the Olympic team. “When I got back, I sat down with USA Triathlon and someone said to me, ‘Do you want to go?’” Jorgensen says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I have a choice. I don’t have to go—but if I do, I want to prepare, and I want to be successful.’” She took a leave of absence from her job and dove into training full-time. She hasn’t worked in an office since.

Heading into London, the United States looked to Jorgensen for a medal. Her family, who had rarely traveled until that point, came to London wearing T-shirts emblazoned with her face, which Jorgensen found terribly embarrassing. But she flatted on the bike, her first-ever flat in a race, and it killed her shot at the podium. She ran hard for a disappointing 38th place.

Jorgensen and Lemieux discussed next steps. “I said I wanted to go to Rio and I wanted to win gold,” Jorgensen says. With Lemieux’s help, she realized that wouldn’t happen while training alone in Wisconsin. Once again, she’d have to surround herself with athletes better than she was to get to the next level—to make the leap from a natural talent to a true champion. She’d also have to rewire her stereotypical accountant’s cautious mindset. “To do that,” she says, “We knew I had to take some big risks.”

Jamie Turner is an affable New Zealander known for building mentally unbreakable athletes. The 46-year-old former triathlete, now a bit soft around the edges, loves to speak in metaphors gleaned from lifelong study of performance. He picked up his favorite from legendary San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich (who got it from turn-of-the-century journalist Jacob Riis): “I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not the blow that did it but all that had gone before.”

Jorgensen had worked out with Turner’s squad when she was in Australia for a race. After interviewing coaches around the world, she felt she identified best with Turner’s mental strength–focused training method. He thought Jorgensen had the potential to be one of the best in the world—if she would commit to living in a daily performance environment with other dedicated athletes. She put the next four years of her life in his hands.

She packed up for Australia with Lemieux, who by then had quit his job as a cyclist to support her. (They weren’t yet engaged, but a proposal would come nearly a year later during a snowy mountain bike ride in St. Paul, Minnesota. They married in October 2014.) Lemieux sensed that Jorgensen needed the emotional support. “I just knew my not being there wasn’t helping her performance on race day,” he says, citing Jorgensen’s fourth-place finish at a race in Madrid. He’s certain she would’ve won if he had been there to help her adjust to the new, foreign environment before the race.

Jorgensen joined Turner’s squad of eight Olympic hopefuls from around the world, who had dubbed themselves the Wollongong Wizards, after the coastal city south of Sydney where they lived during the U.S. winter. Then she got to work.

Turner encouraged her to start a journal, documenting every day what she had done well and what she could improve upon, focusing on process rather than outcome: “I executed to the best of my ability” versus “I won.”

Turner asked her tough questions she’d never asked herself: Are you going to go last on the bike or will you be more assertive? What are you willing to change? He taught Jorgensen to see her decisions—to join the team, to leave her family and the comfort of home, to dedicate her life to Rio—as an investment, rather than a sacrifice. “We worked to move her away from the accounting mold into someone prepared to take risks and be accepting in her mentality, never to block something out,” Turner says. “We can accept that we’re not feeling very good and—not but—be able to perform.”

The results started coming that summer, when Jorgensen won a race in Stockholm, Sweden, on a technical bike course that tri pundits would have said didn’t favor a conservative rider like Jorgensen. “That race, I was like, ‘Wow! I’ve become a world-class swimmer, a world-class biker, a world-class runner,’” she says. But despite the gains she’d made physically and mentally, Jorgensen was already dreaming of ditching her bike and swimsuit to run full-time. Starting in 2013 and right on through the start of her winning streak, she was calling up running coaches to ask what they thought of her prospects as a pro marathoner.

Several said it would be an impossible task, but one left the door open: former Badger coach Jerry Schumacher, now one of the most lauded and respected coaches in the country.

When Jorgensen runs, it’s perhaps the only time she seems relaxed, her long, fluid stride balancing out the tension in her shoulders. Just like she had once loved the water for how it left her alone with her thoughts, she’s most comfortable out on remote roads with Lemieux towing Stanley in a bike trailer behind her. When she talks about marathoning, her voice perks up. “There’s something so special,” Jorgensen says, “about an entire city shutting down to let you do something that you love.”

Schumacher doesn’t mince words when he talks about why he brought Jorgensen into his Bowerman Track Club team, home of top American marathoners Amy Cragg and Shalane Flanagan. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, I wouldn’t be interested in doing this,” he says of bringing an athlete from another sport onto the team. Schumacher knows it would be a cute story to say it’s because they’re from the same hometown or because of the Badger connection. “But the truth of the matter is she carries herself with such a high level of professionalism. She wants to do everything right and be the absolute best she can possibly be.”

Flanagan says Jorgensen’s dedication and big goals helped their friendship develop quickly and allowed Jorgensen to fit in naturally with the rest of her training group. “She wants to be pushed by other women. Not everyone wants that.”

But Jorgensen’s switch to running wasn’t without concrete consequences. In the three years up to and including Rio, Jorgensen averaged about $220,000 a year just in prize money, not counting a sponsorship with powerhouse sports brand Red Bull. Jorgensen speaks diplomatically about her tri sponsors, but it’s clear from that Red Bull is no longer involved. “I’m a gold medalist in triathlon, not in marathon,” Jorgensen says. “It would be naive of me to expect the same salary. I’m chasing after the dream, not the money.”

Still, several sponsors stayed with her as she inked a deal with Nike, including Specialized, Oakley, and Polar. In the secretive world of pro running, it’s also tough to tell whether appearance fees could cover the prize-money income lost—but when it comes to winnings, Jorgensen would have to break the tape in at least two major marathons annually to get close to the pay she was enjoying as a dominant triathlete.

So far, Jorgensen’s switch to full-time running has yielded impressive results. In February, she ran a 15:15.64 5K, 35 seconds faster than her best collegiate time, and one that only nine U.S. women have beat this year. She followed that up with a 10K win at the Stanford Invitational in March, then finished fourth at the USA Track and Field Half Marathon Championships in May. For her first “real” shot at the marathon distance, Jorgensen’s tackling the Chicago Marathon on October 7. (In 2016, roughly two months after Rio, Jorgensen ran the New York City Marathon on little distance-running training, but she doesn’t consider it her official debut at the event. “I have harsh memories from the NYC Marathon, and I’m excited to run another marathon where I have properly trained,” Jorgensen says.)

Rather than setting a time goal for Chicago, the objective is to pace it right so Jorgensen has some speed left for the final 10K. Even with late scratches from top American contenders and Jordan Hasay, this edition of Chicago features a highly competitive elite women’s field, including two-time champion Florence Kiplagat.

Despite Jorgensen’s promising times so far, some members of the running peanut gallery may insist that her chances at dominating the marathon are slim. “It’s not about mindset,” says Robert Johnson, co-founder of the running website LetsRun.com and a former Cornell University cross-country and track coach. “Usain Bolt couldn’t even make himself the best 400-meter runner. You have your own event that you’re good at.”

Still, if Jorgensen could pull it off, Johnson says, “It would be the most amazing athletic feat of my lifetime.” One he believes even her greatest naysayers are internally rooting for. “Part of you wants to believe it’s possible, like it’s reminding us of what we dreamed as a little kid. That’s the goal: to dream big.”

Whatever happens in Chicago, Jorgensen’s fast-growing fan base will be proud. “I think people see in her what they want to do themselves—like those people working a job they’re good at but don’t love,” Lemieux says. “Here’s a woman who was literally the best, and she left to do something that she’s probably not going to be the best at.”

But then again, maybe she will be.

The post The Total Reinvention of Gwen Jorgensen appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

The past four decades have transformed this sunny city of 1.4 million from a lonely military hub into one of the world’s greatest coastal playgrounds. Beyond the 25 miles of beautiful beaches and killer surf, visitors can peruse��an eclectic mix of colorful neighborhoods, hip eateries, and more than 114 craft breweries and brewpubs. Here’s how to make time for sand, sun, and the freshest fish tacos you’ve ever tasted.

7 a.m.��

Head to in Pacific Beach early for the best chance at beating the hangover line, then pile your plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, and a big fluffy pan­cake.��

8:30 a.m.��

Explore 1,750-acre . “It’s an easy, classic San Diego hike,” says Jené Shaw, a local Ironman triathlete and travel editor. “All the trails have epic views and lead down to the water.” If you’re up for it, make the 300-foot descent to the ocean and back.

10:30 a.m.

Pick your thrill—paragliding or hang gliding—at the . A 25-minute tandem flight over the cliffs will run you $175 or $225, respectively, and land you right back in the grassy field where you started.��

11:30 a.m.

At , near Ruocco Park, be sure to try the Zucchini and Cactus, a veggie taco loaded with corn, tomatillo, and melted cheese. “All of Puesto’s tacos have some twist,” Shaw says. Other varieties come with chile-marinated pork, braised lamb, filet mignon, chicken, lobster, and, of course, market fish.��

1 p.m.

Book an hour lesson with at La Jolla Shores ($85). The water in August averages a cool��71 degrees, so plunk down $6 for a wetsuit.��

3 p.m.

Just east of Ocean Beach, the rustic-chic is the city’s newest hot spot. Head to , where you’ll find��24 beers on tap. Start off with a��San Diego classic:��Bal­last Point’s Grapefruit Sculpin.

5 p.m.

Check in to your digs. ��(from $90) is a fan favorite for its 1880s architecture and proximity to nightlife in the Gaslamp Quarter.��

7 p.m.

Little Italy has been dubbed Top Chef Alley, thanks to stars from the popular Bravo show who’ve launched ventures here, starting with Brian Malarkey’s . Try the gnocchi with oxtail and horseradish.��

10 p.m.

Time to hit up ­, a food-centric lounge with the vibe of a recording studio. Go crazy on the collection of vintage video games while you sip a Black Sail, made with rum, Kahlúa, fruit juice, and cinnamon.��

1 a.m.��

Crash. Luckily, you’ll wake up 3.6 miles from the airport and around the corner from an Amtrak station, so it’ll be easy to head home—or to your next adventure.

The post 24 Hours in San Diego appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

Quick geek lesson: “persistence of vision” is the optical illusion in which rapidly flashing static images blend together to look like they’re in motion. It’s how films work, and it’s the trick behind ��($80), which uses 23 LEDs embedded in the cord to display your jump count in real time in front of you.

“At our office, we took every ­ex­cuse not to work out—we were too busy, it was raining outside,” says Tangram cofounder Joen Choe. He and his business partner, Deokhee Jeong, wanted an effective fitness routine they could do on the office patio in five ­minutes. “But if your reps are getting into the hundreds, who wants to count them like a hamster in a wheel?” Choe says.

He promises that the rope’s movement tracker, located in the polycarbonate handles, will never short you on double unders, and thanks to a recent firmware update, the rope now displays calories burned. You can also view your stats on the company’s (Android and iOS), which hosts Strava-like competitions, leader-boards, and awards.

��

The post Tangram Factory Smart Rope appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

The pilates class starts with a prayer. “I just pray, Father… to be strong and to be healthy, and just have the right focus… in Jesus’s name, amen.”

“Amen,” whisper 11 women over low-volume praise music and the hum of 9 a.m. traffic on Houston’s 10-to-610 interchange. Then instructor Debbie Brown, a spunky 56-year-old with a halo of bright red hair, gets to it. Flanked by two wooden crosses, her amplified voice sounding like a holy directive, she leads us through 45 minutes of stretches and strengthening exercises that’ll leave me face-flat on my Houston First Baptist Church–branded yoga mat.

This is my first time doing pilates. And my first workout in a church gym. I spend the top half of class worrying that my triathlon shorts are flashing too much thigh in a sea of calf-length black yoga pants. I spend the rest of the time wondering if I’ll be sent to hell because I thought it was funny when the band on the stereo sang “We press into you, God!” while we were all doing bridges.

I’m here because health-minded Christian pundits have hailed First Baptist as a shining example of what’s possible when religion and fitness unite. In late 2009, the church invested a quarter of a million dollars to renovate its existing 25,000-square-foot rec center, making it a viable alternative to the city’s upscale health clubs. Besides the Group X room—a full-size basketball court where 14 instructors teach pilates, TRX, high-intensity interval training, “Godspeed Spin,” and other classes throughout the week—the facility has two weight rooms with HFB-branded , a cardio room, an indoor track, sprawling locker rooms, a hydromassage bed, and, for good measure, six bowling lanes.

The walls throughout are adorned with snippets of health-related scripture: God gives power and strength to his people (Psalm 68:35, in the weight room); For in Him, we live and move and exist (Acts 17:28, in the Group X space); Strength and honor are her clothing (Proverbs 31:25, in the women's locker room). The place gives new meaning to the mantra “The gym is my church.”

“God wants us to be healthy and strong and to shine out his light for others to see,” Brown said as she took me on a tour before class. She’s First Baptist’s fitness-ministry associate, as well as its most popular pilates instructor. “We should be the fittest people on the planet!”

Athletics and the Christian faith have not always been mutually exclusive. In the mid-1880s, the Muscular Christianity movement arose in the UK, preaching that participation in sports could help develop morality and manly character. And since 1963, , funded by the famed evangelist, has ­espoused “whole-person education.” At its strictest, this meant that obese students could be suspended until they lost weight. That policy is no longer enforced, but in January the university announced that all freshmen in the class of 2019 would be required to wear Fitbits monitored by professors.

Still, in the U.S. organized religion has largely focused on developing followers’ minds and spirits, leaving the body to team sports and athletic clubs. Now that’s changing. American churches are getting into the workout biz, and the effort is blowing up. The American Council on Exercise named faith-based fitness one of the top trends of 2016. There’s a magazine dedicated entirely to the cause () and a website that helps churches set up their own exercise ministries (). Last year, , a nonprofit best known for producing health-related listicles, ranked (number one: in Houston)—and that only covered congregations with more than 2,000 people attending weekly services.

Make no mistake: in an era of declining church membership, one of the main reasons faith-based gyms exist is to draw people to the gospel, whether they’re parishioners or not. “We want people to come,” says First Baptist fitness minister Dave Bundrick. It’s the exact opposite M.O. of big-box gyms that base their business models on people not showing up. Church fitness centers do charge fees, but they measure their success not in dollars but in what Bundrick calls ministry opportunities—interactions in which there’s a chance to “positively impact a person’s perception of our ministry, church, and ultimately, our God.”

Academics see another explanation for the trend. “It’s a response to the social and cultural problems of the age we’re in,” says Nick J. Watson, senior lecturer in sports, culture, and religion at in the UK, whose research focuses on the role of the church in public health. That’s a nice way of saying we’re fat. In August, he is gathering some of the world’s top Christian academics to meet with politicians, clergy, and athletes at the inaugural Global Congress on Sports and Christianity. The event’s goal is to encourage collaboration and improve public health through multidisciplinary research on effective interventions.

Watson, along with a growing number of other observers, is buoyed by the belief that church exercise programs could be a powerful weapon in America’s flailing battle against obesity. Ironically, the greatest challenge to the rising movement is coming from the mainstream fitness industry, which is doing everything it can to contain what it views as an existential threat.

It’s just before nine in the morning when the techno beats start pumping into a 147-seat conference room on the second floor of New Orleans’s Morial Convention Center. Attendees are gathered here on a drizzly Wednesday the week before Thanksgiving for the first-ever Faith and Fitness Conference, an eight-hour slate of presentations preceding the , one of the nation’s largest gym conventions. Tomorrow there will be meatheads everywhere. Today’s crowd looks more like a middle school PTA meeting.

Most attendees hail from the South: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia. The woman sitting next to me, Rhonda, teaches K–8 PE at a local Lutheran school. She’s also going to the larger expo, to look for fun kids’ sports equipment. Other participants work for church-based fitness ministries they hope to improve. A few would like to incorporate their faith into their own non-church-affiliated gyms. They’re all looking to conference organizer Brad Bloom, of Faith & Fitness magazine, and his panel of seven experts for enlightenment.

Bloom shuts off his EDM pump-up soundtrack and briefly takes the stage to introduce the first speaker, Rob Killen, the short and shredded owner of Church­Fitness.com. Killen kicks things off by reminding attendees about the value of a church gym. “We want church to be the go-to place seven days a week,” he says. “Not just Sundays.” Like many of the speakers that follow him, he dis­cusses the ­religious duty Christians have to focus on exercise: “You could have a great heart, but your ability to serve is ­going to be impacted by your fitness level.”

Debra B. Morton, pastor of a Baptist church in New Orleans, explains what could be labeled the Jesus Is Jacked theory: “If we had to do what Jesus and his disciples did, walk miles and miles to minister, he would have very few followers today.” Another speaker argues that physical exercise mirrors what Jesus does for believers in the spiritual realm, breaking them down only to build them back stronger. And Laurie Graves, a personal trainer for NBC’s The Biggest Loser, laments the fact that pastors have long prioritized spiritual over physical health. “The message has been, ‘Don’t have affairs!’ ” she says. “But you can do food like nobody’s business.”

At other moments, discussions touch on the many deep-­seated issues that church gyms bring up for ministry leaders. Is fitness vanity or a way to glorify God? Will it encourage evangelism or lustful thoughts? When a magazine runs a story on Joel Osteen, pastor of Houston’s Lakewood megachurch, and calls attention to his abs (as ), is that an opportunity to win over more converts or a triple whammy of lust, vanity, and pride? Even if a church’s leadership gets behind building a fitness center, these concerns don’t simply vanish. “We didn’t install any mirrors,” says Amy Johnson, a conference attendee who runs the fitness ministry at a Baptist church in Arkansas. Bloom, a slender, energetic guy in a mustard-colored polo, recalls the struggles that Faith Community Church in Indiana had when it wanted to put in an aquatic center. “They’re Baptists, and they really had to come to terms with the fact that, ‘Hey, we’re going to have girls running around our pool in bikinis! Can we deal with that?’ ” (Apparently, they could—the pool opened in 2007.)

And what about music? “You have to be super careful about what you listen to,” says presenter Michelle Spadafora, the toned, blond owner of Christian exercise-video conglomerate Faithful Workouts. “Music is alive and powerful, and it is a sword.” If you’re listening to, say, , your workout might cross the line from glorifying God into booty shaking. Baptists, meanwhile, have long had a complicated stance on dancing (remember Footloose?), making many trendy cardio classes a challenge. When I ask one ­leader of a Baptist church about this, he expresses relief that Zumba isn’t as popular as it once was.

For all these reasons, getting into the fitness business has been decidedly easier for non-institutional churches. Namely, megachurches—those supersized bastions of faith that have at times been accused of practicing a fluffy, self-indulgent brand of religion, among other things. They have been leading the charge in building new gyms and unabashedly telling members that their unhealthy bodies are hindering their full potential to serve God. Osteen’s Lakewood is the nation’s largest, with an estimated 43,500 people attending weekly services. In 2012, Osteen teamed up with his wife’s personal trainer, fitness guru Samir Becic, to create the church’s first Health Fitness Challenge. The eight-week program, launched that January, featured fitness and nutrition classes designed “to help families live a healthier, more active lifestyle,” according to its Facebook page. Parishioners resisted the health directive that first year, feeling a bit put-upon. “But after we had ten, twenty people see a tremendous difference” in their weight, Becic says, “they became ambassadors.” They started bringing their friends to Lakewood’s campus, the former home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. The program has continued ever since, changing its name to Total Life Challenge, enrolling around 2,000 people this year, and earning Dr. Oz’s endorsement.

Similarly, California megachurch pastor Rick Warren has been crushing the diet market with his 2011 creation the Daniel Plan. Before expanding into waistlines, Warren shot to fame with his bestselling 2002 book and his heartfelt sermons at 36,000-­member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest. The diet is named after the prophet Daniel, who rejected the rich food and wine of King Nebuchadnezzar in favor of veggies and water. Its widespread adoption has been hailed as a massive public-health victory. In the program’s first year, the church claimed that 15,000 members lost a collective 250,000 pounds. The “secret sauce,” Warren told the Los Angeles Times, “is faith, friends, and focus.” He preaches that mind, body, and spirit must be in harmony for people to be good stewards of the body God has given them. (Incidentally, Zumba is one of Saddleback’s most popular fitness classes.)

Social scientists look at the impact that megachurches like Lakewood and Saddleback are having and see huge opportunities for faith-based health interventions. “How sport and Christianity relate with regard to health, fitness, and wellness is an emerging area in academia,” says Watson, a fit 44-year-old who loves indoor bouldering and became a Christian at age 30. He and others have published numerous papers on the topic, with titles like “Health Promotion in Megachurches: An Untapped Resource with Megareach?”

According to the Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of Americans still attend church every week. That number is thought to be higher in the South, where obesity rates are the worst. As was repeatedly pointed out during the Faith and Fitness Conference, a dozen cities in Louisiana consistently rank among the nation’s fattest, with Opelousas residents tipping the scales at 42.3 percent obese. “Food is ingrained in the culture here,” said Nettye Johnson, a conference attendee determined to help her fellow parishioners at New Hope Baptist Church in Baton Rouge stay healthy. When you take away local favorites like beignets and po’boys, she said, “it’s like you take away who I am.”

Watson and other researchers make a compelling argument for the potential of churches to change that attitude, and now ­public officials are beginning to support their efforts. Last year the mayor of Trenton, New Jersey (obesity rate, 39 percent; religiously affiliated, 52.6 percent), ­awarded seven local churches grants totaling $56,445 to help them promote exercise and healthy eating as part of a Faith in Prevention initiative by the state’s Department of Health. The department has since pledged to give qualified faith-based organizations up to $900,000 to implement community health programs.

“Our vision for a healthy city can’t be achieved in isolation,” mayor Eric Jackson said at a press conference where he announced the grants. “Our faith-based organizations play a vital role in making this a reality.”

Creating a church fitness center that can compete with a regular gym is expensive and time-consuming. “It’s a business,” Debbie Brown told me during my visit to Houston’s First Baptist. Just like any other gym owners, the church’s leadership has to keep tabs on employees, day-to-day details like membership-card scanning, and marketing strategies to recruit, engage, and retain new participants. First Baptist’s Fitness and Recreation Ministry is a $1-million-a-year enterprise that generates about three-quarters of its income on its own, partly through the $25 per month it charges roughly 1,200 members. (The gym also offers scholarships.) The other $250,000 comes from church revenues gathered through offerings at Sunday services. The gym isn’t profitable as a stand-alone business, but the cost of running it is still less than 1 percent of the church’s $31 million annual operating budget.

In the secular business world, First Baptist’s fitness center is known as a loss leader. Bundrick points to the 43 percent of its gym members who aren’t affiliated with the church; by his estimate, visits to their workout facilities generate more than 9,000 ministry opportunities per month. “It helps our church be relevant in a culture that’s very health-minded,” he says, “better than any other aspect of the church.”

Maybe so, but many lawmakers and leaders in the fitness industry argue that religiously affiliated fitness centers are using their tax-exempt status to offer rock-bottom membership fees that help them siphon off customers from for-profit gyms. It’s unfair competition, critics complain, and it’s time to level the playing field. In 2004, Nashville’s Christ Church opened a 104,000-square-foot family life center and began charging a $100 annual fee—the amount many for-profit gyms charge per month. Half of the 800 people who signed up weren’t part of the church. The State Board of Equalization filed a lawsuit, claiming it was a commercial enterprise. After an extended court battle, Christ Church agreed to pay a 50 percent property-tax rate on the building.

“I’m not anti-government—there has to be a tax base,” says Dan Scott, pastor of Christ Church, which sees about 4,500 attendees at weekly services. He makes it clear that he harbors no resentment toward the state and recognizes that some ­megachurches do take unethical advantage of their tax status. “In the end,” Scott says, referring to the settlement, “the city and state didn’t get why a church needs to have a gym.”

It wasn’t an unusual outcome. Church fitness centers have had a rough time in court recently. In 2014, an Ohio appeals court denied tax exemption for the gym at Vineyard Community Church, near Cincinnati, on the grounds that it wasn’t warranted because the facility wasn’t primarily used for worship. The same thing happened in 2011 to Northmoreland Baptist Church in Pennsylvania, but the decision was overturned the following year. The appeals judge ruled that the church’s gym wasn’t in direct competition with for-profit businesses, in part because its basketball court doesn’t have wooden floors or locker rooms.

For Christ Church, the 50 percent prop­erty tax made it financially impossible to continue operating its own gym. But the facility didn’t close. “The YMCA took it over,” says Scott. “They’re not questioned.”

Indeed, the YMCA retains an unofficial, grandfathered status as a nonprofit fitness and community center, despite functioning very much like a standard gym in most ­places. Revenues, including those from membership fees, are typically not taxed, while many Y’s also receive millions of dollars annually in government subsidies to build and maintain facilities. Since as early as 1950, Y’s across the country have been repeatedly challenged over their tax-exempt status but have almost always prevailed in court. In one recent battle in Kansas, when lawmakers failed to knock down the YMCA’s tax status, they took another tack, attempting to win tax exemption for all health clubs in the state. The proposal didn’t pass.

But the battle in Kansas and across the U.S. is not over. Y’s continue to face an offensive from the , a powerful industry group with 10,000 member gyms in 75 countries. For more than a decade, the group has mounted an aggressive effort to have YMCAs taxed like any other health club. “Selling adult fitness services is a business,” says IHRSA spokeswoman Meredith Poppler. “We support identical tax treatment for identical business activities.”

In 2015, Kansas lawmakers passed House Bill 2109, requiring all YMCAs in the state to pay sales tax starting in 2020. The IHRSA would like to make that happen nationwide, and if the effort succeeds, it could abruptly end Christianity’s fitness awakening. In the meantime, whether megachurches are building gyms to attract parishioners or dollars, they are getting a whole lot of people to start exercising. And if the pilates class at Houston’s First Baptist is any indication, they’re going to get righteously fit.

As we wind down from our 45-minute session, we sit cross-legged, eyes closed, in the glow of two tower lamps that light up the wooden crosses at Debbie’s sides. She whispers a final prayer into her mic before sending us back into the world with sore thighs and a sense of inner peace: “We thank you, God, for giving us this time to come meet with you, to enjoy one another, and to be strong, and to be healthy. Amen.”

The post Thou Shalt Work Out appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

A low-carb style of eating called the ketogenic diet has quietly become the rage among ultra-endurance athletes and elite soldiers. Here's how they fuel up.

7 a.m.

Sweeney starts with��a blendered combi­nation of ­Mayorga ­Organics coffee, coconut oil, grass-fed but­ter, heavy cream, and a raw organic egg. He follows that up with three baked eggs, three ounces of smoked salmon, and a few avocado slices.��

�����ԹϺ��� Fitness Special

127 radical tips for total health.

Read the entire issue

10 a.m.

Mid-morning, he eats a bowl of full-fat plain Greek yogurt topped with walnuts or maca­damia nuts.

12 p.m.

Lunch is a large bowl of spinach with a sprinkling of blue cheese, four ounces of buttered grilled flounder, crumbled bacon (sometimes), and a tablespoon��of olive-oil-based dressing. He has a��few ounces of cheese on the side.��

Is the High-Fat, Low-Carb Ketogenic Diet Right for You?

The diet is a surprisingly��yummy��way to fuel up.

See more

3 p.m.

Sliced cheddar or Mont d’Or cheese wrapped in prosciutto serves as Sweeney’s afternoon snack.

7 p.m.

For dinner he eats three to four ounces of salmon with asparagus, broccoli, or cauliflower, and a salad topped with a few ounces of cheese. Dessert is more cheese or a square or two of dark chocolate—preferably salted and above 70 percent cacao.
��

Total: 2,800 calories, 80 percent from fat, about 12 from protein, and 8 from carbohydrates.��

Wash It All Down

Sweeney drinks about a gallon of water a day, much of it lime-flavored Poland Spring sparkling water. “Most people on the keto diet don’t get enough water,” he says. “When you’re ketogenic, especially if you’re eating a lot of cheese, water is super important to keep your digestive tract cleaned out.”

How to Avoid��the Keto Rut

Sweeney eats eggs for breakfast every day, but he changes his protein sources for lunch and dinner, swapping in chicken, duck, and occasionally lamb.��

Do keto in phases. For six to eight��weeks before an event, Sweeney is strict, measuring his ketone levels three times a week and keeping his carbohydrate intake below��50 grams per day. During the off-season, he’s more laid-back. After a strict phase��of keto, he says, “you’re adapted, and it takes almost as long for your body to go back to burning glucose as fuel.”��

Half a glass of��red wine with dinner now and then helps the cheese go down.

You can learn more about Patrick Sweeney and follow his adventures by visiting his website��.��

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monitor muscle activation, effort, balance, and heart rate on an app (iOS only), helping you coach yourself to perfect form. $547 for compression shirt, shorts, and sensors

Get out of that strawberries-and-yogurt rut. delivers weekly boxes of fresh fruit, veggies, and superfood powders like antioxidant-rich maqui berry and cacao—everything you need (including recipes) to make ten nutrient-rich smoothies. $176 a month.

�����ԹϺ��� Fitness Special

127 radical tips for total health.

Read the entire issue

A coach from will custom-build a cycling, running, or triathlon schedule with weekly check-ins and analysis of your power, heart-rate, and GPS training files. $165 a month.

Book a one-hour sports massage online with and a therapist will arrive at your house an hour later. $99, tip included.

Body Need an Upgrade? Surrender to the Higher Powers at EXOS.

Want to perform like a pro, even with the years piling up? Nick Heil got the deluxe treatment at Exos, a cutting-edge outfit that works with NFL players and soccer stars.

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The offers thousands of workouts and training plans with interactive audio coaching from Olympic and world-champion athletes, including Mirinda Carfrae, one of the best Ironman racers of all time. iOS only; $30 a year.

Get hundreds of hours of brain training from the , including ten-minute sessions of guided meditation designed to enhance mindfulness and performance. Android and iOS; $13 a month.

Do you have trouble finding the motivation ��to train alone? Join the , a grassroots, interval-loving fitness group, for a free dawn workout.

The post Build Your Own Training Camp appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

FitSkuad Speedure��Jump Rope��($49)

Featuring a slim, adjustable ten-foot cable and light aluminum grips, will help��you master double-unders and blast your lungs. The ball bearings connecting the cable to the grips spin smoothly at speeds up to��300 rotations per minute.

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Yogo Ultralight 2.0 Mat ($68)

Super-grippy rubber is secret ingredient, keeping you in place during the sweatiest down-dogs. It’s also easy to rinse off after you haul it to and from Instagram-worthy spots. A cotton-mesh inner layer prevents stretching.

Hummingbird Folding Bike��($2,250 and up)��

Billed as the lightest folding bike��in the world, weighs just 14.3 pounds. The wheels tuck but keep the chain tensioned, so it doesn’t drop, saving you headaches in elevators and crowded subway cars.

Always Be Moving

Reprogram your life with nonstop motion.

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BlenderBottle GoStak��Containers��($13)

Four sizes of let you customize your own snack tower. Twist the carry handle on top to lash your protein powder, gorp, or carrots to your bag.

Portable KettleBell��Sandbags��($40 and up)��

The beauty of is that you can fill them with just about anything—sand, gravel, dirt, or mud. Weights range from 15 pounds to upwards of 45. When not in use, they roll up to the size��of a baguette.

Perfect Pushup Stands ($20)

Sure, you could just drop and bust out 20. But reduce wrist strain and make your chest, shoulders, and triceps work harder, so you��get more out of every rep.��

�����ԹϺ��� Fitness Special

127 radical tips for total health.

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WorkoutLabs��Exercise Cards��($25)

Draw a card and start sweating. The features 40 body-weight exercises, ten stretches, and six full workouts that take the guesswork out of getting fit.

The post Forgo the Gym with These 7 Pieces of Workout Gear appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.