Looking for a way to get fit without getting up from your chair? Yeah, so’s everyone else — even folks in the armed forces, and even five decades ago.
“The symptoms are turning up everywhere,” TIME wrote, in the Jan. 31, 1964, issue. “A commuter puts down his paper and his eyes glaze as if with some interior rapture; a stenographer stops typing and stiffens in her chair; waiting for the children’s hamburgers to brown, a housewife suddenly presses her hands on the kitchen table until the knuckles show white. These are not the victims of some new virus, nor has the strain of modern living sent them around the bend. Instead, they are practicing the very latest wrinkle in body culture: isometrics.”
See the 10 Healthiest Cities to Live in America
Honolulu, Hawaii Best Place for Lifelong Health The heavenly climate helps, but the key to well-being here also includes enviable health care and a rich cultural tradition of looking out for one another.Colin Anderson—Blend Images/CorbisSan Francisco Bay Area, Calif. Best Place for Eating Right. The "farm to table" movement began here. The region's bounty of produce and year-round growing season make eating healthy—and local—a natural.Getty ImagesBurlington, Vt.Best Place for Raising Healthy Kids
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The urge to get outside and get moving is contagious in these Rocky Mountain cities, where physical challenge is built into the landscape.Celin Serbo—Aurora Photos/CorbisPlano, TexasBest Place for Staying Safe
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Small, walkable neighborhoods, 300 miles of bike paths, and urban policies that foster active living and sustainability make for one clean, green city.Getty ImagesBoston, Mass.Best Place for Health Care
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Isometric exercise, the article explained, involved creating an immobile muscle contraction using the resistance from an unmoving object. The height of fad exercise at the time, it was credited by the Green Bay Packers with their winning seasons in the early ’60s and was endorsed by the Navy, which originally published the diagram seen here.
“Executives can build up their biceps when their secretaries aren’t looking simply by sitting up straight, sliding their open palms against the underside of their desks, and pushing up for six seconds,” TIME raved. So go ahead and try it — nobody will notice.
