Remember to Exercise Your Sense of Balance

*As a personal trainer for more than 13 years, I have seen the type of burnout described in Jeannine Stein’s article, “From Fitness Fan to Sure Sloth” (March 1) many times.

It’s what I call the “pendulum syndrome,” or the classic case of a person who overtrains, stressing the body mentally and physically to the point where the person stops exercising completely.

Burnout occurs when people are not at peace with themselves, placing too great an emphasis on their external appearance. Their lives become unbalanced and exercise is taken to an extreme in an effort to reach physical perfection.

This follows the typical American philosophy that if a little of something is good, then twice as much must be better.

Exercise is a tool to make people feel better, reduce stress and retard the aging process. When someone feels good about who they are, exercise will fall naturally into its proper place in their lives.

Unfortunately, this type of moderate approach is unpopular with many trainers, who are also guilty of taking their bodies to physical extremes and perpetuating this unhealthy trend of overtraining.

TODD PERSON

Los Angeles