By Fred Hahn

Good morning!

I want to thank everyone here for attending the first NCES conference/workshop seminar. We have a very educational morning in store for you and hopefully a motivating one.

This meeting marks the beginning of a worldwide understanding and acceptance of rational and scientific exercise information and practice.

Realistically we all know that this will not and cannot happen overnight. It will take time. Other organizations have attempted to make inroads into this territory but have failed and continue to fail in their attempts. We intend to succeed. We have the information. We have the ability.

Optimistically with the help of everyone here in this room and those who will hopefully follow, it will happen sooner rather than later. The NCES realizes that a positive, cogent approach towards educating and enlightening the public and especially the fitness and medical community is crucial for success.

And what is success but education. We exist to educate. Education is a function of understanding. Understanding, true understanding, can only happen if the approach is constructive, polite and credible.

This is the mission of the NCES -- to educate the general public and exercise professionals as to proper, safe and effective exercise principles; to the difference between exercise and recreation, and most importantly to the fundamental difference between fitness and health

We want to re-educate the current governing bodies of exercise, not alienate them; for in doing so we only alienate ourselves from them.

I want to especially thank Tim Ryan for doing most of the important legwork in getting the NCES started and for coordinating the first annual NCES meeting here in Chicago. We owe him a good round of applause.

One might think that it’s rather easy to found, organize and promote a small organization such as this one, but let me assure you its not. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication, and above all immense patience.

Speaking of patience, patience is something that, several months ago, I think maybe even as long as a year ago, that Tim Ryan, Pat Zeibell, John Nall, Mike Wolf and myself all expressed mutual loss of with regards to the Super Slow Exercise Guild.

Though the Guild was founded, we believed, with what seemed to be a positive and powerful intention to change the face of exercise for the better, it has not delivered the goods. For many years Tim and the rest of us fought hard to dissuade the Guild from negativity and unconstructiveness and persuade it to hold higher standards and embrace a positive position stance. At the time, the Guild was the only voice crying out for standards and rationality in the fitness industry.

But as the years went on we saw through our eager but blinded eyes that the Guild was doing nothing except alienating itself from just about every possible area of the fitness community due to the coarse and abrasive nature of its educating process. In fact, I almost got a standing ovation on the day I gave a lecture on exercise at Princeton University for Matt Bryzscki when I said "Forget the SSEG." It was a tell tale sign.

Hard as we all tried to change the Guild, we lost the fight. To paraphrase a phrase terribly, though we lost a battle, the war is still winnable. We wish the Guild the best but we cannot wait any longer.

And anyway, now we have something better. The NCES pledges not to take a reproachful road towards educating the public or the health/fitness community and will not endorse any person or organization that does so. We encourage only constructive criticism of what we know to be either false or dubious exercise information. We ask that everyone who involves him or her with us to do the same -- educate gracefully, respectfully, honorably.

Look at the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Council on Exercise, the two biggest certifying agencies in the country. Though confused, they do mean well. Though we disagree with a lot of what they consider to be safe and productive exercise, they do not point and shake their finger at anyone else.

We want to make it clear that if suddenly, out of nowhere, the directors of these two top organizations woke up one morning and said "Aerobics -- what are we nuts?!" We wouldn’t point at them and say "See stupid, we told you so!" We’d give them a hardy slap on the back and help them to understand the other thousand irrational concepts they need to wake up about.

But seriously, in order to accomplish our goals we need to understand that sugar is a better flycatcher than vinegar. Though these entities may mean well, they are still part of the problem. A large part.

But what is this problem exactly? Isn’t it OK that people do and believe what they like? Isn’t it OK to do anything so long as we like it and feel it is good for us? Of course the answer to this is yes so long as the laws that govern our society are not broken in the process. But laws are sometimes wrong and need modification.

The current laws that govern the fitness society have serious flaws – flaws that hurt people, cost them their jobs, and even cost them their lives.

Follow me now, if doing what we like is a product of being taught we need to like it because we are brainwashed into believing that we need to do it, then the answer is a resounding NO! It is not OK to do what we "like" since what we like has no basis in reality.

As an example, recently a client of mine was forced to take a max stress test. His test involves him being injected with thallium and monitored performing a max treadmill test. The entire test will take 3 hours and cost him $2500 bucks.

The test will prove nothing. It may even give him a heart attack.

But because the doctors found a "non-serious, non-problematic "irregularity" in his heartbeat, his insurance company will drop him cold and not renew his policy unless he gets the stress test. Knowing what we know of the ACSM, the ACSM would support the insurance company. The NCES would not and we would not because we understand the fallacy of the stress test. If we could make the ACSM understand what we understand to be true regarding stress tests, they would change their minds. They have loved ones too.

Here’s another example. The recent issue of Athletic Business Magazine has a cover story titled: "Weighty Research How to take the Guesswork out of evaluating strength equipment." The picture on the cover is a woman dressed as a doctor examining the machine with various medical tools. Taking the machine’s pulse, listening to its "heart" with a stethoscope instead of a few legitimate photos of proper evaluative techniques. Anyhow, on page 90 the blowup quote says:

"The bottom line is, if it feels good, that’s what the member’s going to look for, and that’s what you should be looking for too."

This are just two examples out of the thousands of nonsensical health/fitness goings-on that take place everyday. To change this, we need to accomplish the following objectives. 

Specifically the objectives of the NCES are:

• To establish ethical, high quality standards of care and treatment in exercise instruction and orthopedic rehabilitation.

• To educate health/medical professionals and the general public that properly applied progressive resistance strength training is the most effective and the only necessary form of exercise

• To educate and promote the proper instruction and application of PRST

• To certify exercise professionals in the instruction and application of proper exercise

• To expose dangerous or flawed exercise/rehabilitative philosophies, methods, practices, research, and equipment

To accomplish these objectives we plan on doing the following:

1. Create a monthly or bimonthly newsletter. The newsletter will contain articles, written by anyone who wishes to contribute, edited by one of the officers, that address all of the above mentioned objectives and sent to hospitals, insurance companies, all of the fitness agencies as well as the general public
   
2. To speak publicly at the Club industry shows, IDEA conferences, etc. and continue with seminars such as this one
   
3. To build upon the existing website
   
4. To create a video
   
5. To create an instructor certification program

Each of these will take time. All of the officers of the NCES run successful businesses, have families so time is not something we have a lot of. But Rome was not built in a day. We’ve already made solid strides forward simply by removing ourselves from the mire we were in, and creating what we have today. Infancy is tough. Trust me I know. I just had a daughter. Lot’s of drool to clean up, education to implement, and patience to be had. It takes time to create anything worth while but again in order to do so, the process must be productive.

We encourage anyone who has other ideas to bring them up today, or to contact any of the officers at any time with them. We want and need you to participate. At present we do not feel that having a membership is necessary.

For now consider participation in our organization your complimentary membership. Contribution of ideas, articles for either the website or the forthcoming newsletter, putting together an idea for an IDEA conference lecture is all part of getting our objectives accomplished but we cannot do it alone.

I think we all agree that the present state of the fitness industry needs a major overhaul. We’re up for the challenge and I hope you are too. But let’s remember whom this overhaul will benefit and the importance of integrity, honesty and professionalism in our attempts at accomplishing these very important goals.

Thank you.