Why are Americans single?

NYTimes

January 21, 2007
Ideas & Trends
Why Are There So Many Single Americans?
By KATE ZERNIKE

THE news that 51 percent of all women live without a spouse might be enough to make you invest in cat futures.

But consider, too, the flip side: about half of all men find themselves in the same situation. As the number of people marrying has dropped off in the last 45 years, the marriage rate has declined equally for men and for women.

The stereotype has been cemented in the popular culture: the hard-charging career girl who gets her comeuppance, either violently or dying a slow death by late-night memo and Chinese takeout. Think Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” and Sigourney Weaver in “Working Girl,” two enduring icons. In last year’s model, Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” ends up single, if still singularly successful.

But when it comes to marriage, the two Americas aren’t divided by gender. And it’s not the career girls on the losing end. It’s their less educated manicurists or housekeepers, women who might arguably be less able to live on their own.

The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers, sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about the wedded state call a “marriage gap” between the well-off and the less so.

Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two years later. The popular image might have been true even 20 years ago — though generally speaking, most women probably didn’t boil the bunny rabbit the way Ms. Close’s character did in 1987. In the past, less educated women often “married up.” In “Working Girl,” Melanie Griffith triumphs. Now, marriage has become more one of equals; when more highly educated men marry, it tends to be more highly educated women. Today, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver would live happily ever after.

Women with more education also are becoming less likely to divorce, or inclined to divorce, than those with less education. They are even less likely to be widowed all in all, less likely to end up alone.

“Educated women used to have a difficult time,” said David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. “Now they’re the most desired.” In Princeton, where he lives, men used to marry “way down the line,” Mr. Popenoe said. No more.

The difference extends across race lines: black women are significantly less likely to marry than white women, but among blacks, women with a college education are more likely to marry than those who do not.

Among women ages 25-34, 59 percent of college graduates are married, compared with 51 percent of non-college graduates, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s June 2006 Current Population Survey by Steven P. Martin, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. The same is true at older age groups: the difference is 75 percent to 62 percent for those ages 35-44, and 50 percent to 41 percent among those 65 and older.

The difference is smaller between men and women. According to the census, 55 percent of men are married, down from 69.3 percent in 1960, and 51.5 percent of women are, down from 65.9 percent in 1960.

The number of women living without a spouse is greater largely because women live longer, leaving them more likely to be widowed. Older men are also more likely to remarry. To control for these variables, consider 35-44 year olds. In 2005, according to the census, 66.2 percent of men in this age group were married, down from 88 percent in 1960; 67.2 percent of women were married, down from 87.4 percent.

The marriage gap exists for men, too. But particularly at younger ages, it is not nearly as wide as it is among women.

Commitment-averse men in their 20’s and 30’s, it turns out, look the same whether or not they have a college degree. In surveys and focus groups, they fit depressingly well into the old stereotypes: they fear marriage means a loss of liberty; they worry a wife will want to change them. They don’t trust women to tell the truth about past relationships, or they are waiting for the soul mate who hasn’t appeared. With the rising frequency of cohabitation, they can get sex without marriage, and they might lose their hard-earned money in a divorce, so what’s the rush?

As a Marriage Project report concluded, with no biological or sociological clock ticking, “boys can remain boys indefinitely.”

But that gap widens among older men. Among men ages 25 to 34, 50 percent of college graduates are married, compared to 47 percent of those who did not graduate from college. In older age brackets, there is a difference of 12 percentage points.

The class gap happens in large part because, as Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard, said, “like marries like.”

“If you wanted to predict the characteristics of who I would marry,” he said, “knowing my education, the strongest correlation you could observe is that someone who is educated is more likely to marry someone who is educated, and someone who is not educated is more likely to marry someone who is not educated.”

Why have things changed so much for women who don’t have the choices that educated women have? While marriage used to be something you did before launching a life or career, now it is seen as something you do after you’re financially stable — when you can buy a house, say. The same is true for all classes. But the less educated may not get there.

“Women are saying, ‘I’m not ready, I want to work for a while, the guys I hang around with don’t make enough money and they don’t want a commitment,’ ” Mr. Jencks said. “It’s the same thing a lot of African-American women in poor neighborhoods are saying. But there’s the difference that they’re having children.”

Women of all education levels figure their earning power will flatten out after they have children, he said. “The longer you wait, the higher the level it flattens out at,” he said. “That’s a good argument to wait. For the less educated, there isn’t a steep increase in salary, so there’s less incentive to wait.”

Maybe in the past, a man with little education nevertheless had a good-paying manufacturing job, with a health care and pension plan. He was a catch and represented stability.

Today, it may be hyperbolic to talk about the emasculation of the blue-collar man. But it is not only liberals concerned with the wealth gap who are watching these national trends with alarm. Social and religious conservatives have called on society to do more to address economic strains faced by this class.

“Marriage is more difficult today than it was in the past,” Mr. Popenoe said. “The people who excel in one area probably excel in that area, too. And people who are high school dropouts probably have a higher propensity to drop out of marriage.”

The last 30 years have seen a huge shift in educated women’s attitudes about divorce. Mr. Martin, who has written about women and divorce, said that three decades ago, about 30 percent of women who had graduated from college said it should be harder to get a divorce. Now, about 65 percent say so, he said.

But for less educated women and for men, the numbers have not changed; only 40 percent — a minority — say it should be harder to get a divorce.

“The way we used to look at marriage was that if women were highly educated, they had higher earning power, they were more culturally liberal and people might have predicted less marriage among them,” Mr. Martin said. “What’s becoming more powerful is the idea that economic resources are conducive to stable marriages. Women who have more money or the potential for more money are married to men who have more stable income.”

All this leads to a happiness gap, too. According to the Marriage Project, the percentage of spouses who rate their marriage as “very happy” has dropped among those without a college education, while it has risen or held steady among those better educated.

The better educated husbands and wives tend to share intellectual interests and economic backgrounds, as well as ideas about the division of household roles. They also have more earning power. And as in so many other things, in marriage, money helps ease the way.

Condo demand down

NYTimes

January 16, 2007
Buyers Scarce, Many Condos Are for Rent
By VIKAS BAJAJ

WASHINGTON — David Franco’s illuminated model of a proposed 10-story condominium tower dominates a sales center that, in spite of the “Now Selling” banner still fluttering outside, is conspicuously closed for business.

“We could have waited it out and kept pushing and pushing,” Mr. Franco said about the decision to abandon plans to sell 180 luxury condominiums with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views of the Washington Monument and Capitol Hill. “But it would have taken significantly longer.”

After six weeks of failing to lure more than a couple of dozen buyers, Mr. Franco and his partner, Jeff Blum, joined the builders of nearly 6,000 condominium units in the Washington metropolitan area who have decided in the last three months to recast their projects as rental apartment buildings.

Since the middle of 2006, the frenzied condominium market here and in several other big cities like Las Vegas, Miami and Boston has collapsed. Once roaring sales have slowed to a trickle, sparse inventory has mushroomed into a glut and soaring prices have flattened out and started falling.

In many cities, banks have significantly scaled back loans to condominium builders. Some have demanded that developers sell half or more of the units in a building before even beginning construction.

In hopes of salvaging something from their costly plans, hundreds of developers like Mr. Franco are looking to the strong market for apartments, planning to rent their units for at least a couple of years while waiting for today’s condo surplus to shrink. Mr. Franco and Mr. Blum hope to break ground on what will be a somewhat less expensive building this spring.

In some cases, developers are even turning older buildings back to rentals after a brief or aborted attempt at condo conversion. Meanwhile, another 2,500 proposed condominiums in the Washington area have been scrapped altogether, according to Delta Associates, a real estate research firm.

The latest salvage operation on the part of condo developers is far from a sure bet, however. Condominium buildings generally cost more to build and operate than those built for apartments from scratch. And while rents are high and rising in most cities, in many cases they still are not sufficient to turn a profit.

Industry analysts also point out that rents may start sagging if too many condos are converted into apartments too quickly. While rents were rising at a robust 6.1 percent annual pace in the Washington area late last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some buildings in the suburbs have recently started promoting move-in specials and other incentives to lure renters.

“You can do it, but it isn’t as attractive,” Tom Meagher, a Boston real estate consultant, said about converting condos into apartments. “You are not going to get enough rent to cover the cost. You might have to go back and redesign the floor plans.”

In the Boston area, Mr. Meagher is tracking 600 condo projects representing about 49,000 units in various stages, from applying for permits to active construction. While the recent slowdown is forcing developers to consider converting their projects to apartments and offices, he expects as many as a third of them will never be built at all.

Mr. Franco said that he and Mr. Blum were able to cut 10 percent from the costs of their planned building, on land in the trendy U Street corridor. That should be enough to make a profit, he said. Beyond switching to some less expensive materials, they also decided to subdivide some larger units into smaller apartments.

The partners are now going through a similar financial exercise on another proposed building across the street, which was to house 225 condominiums but now could be recast as a rental building as well.

Lenders started tightening the purse strings for the condominium market in early 2006 as sales weakened first in cities like Miami and Las Vegas.

“Did the lenders pull back soon enough?” asked Robert Brennan, managing director of real estate finance at Credit Suisse in New York. “I don’t think we know yet.”

Real estate experts say condos are more susceptible to booms and busts than single-family homes are because they attract more investors who do not intend to live in them and are easier to build than a new subdivision in many cities.

And while there are tentative signs that the worst of the overall housing slump may be easing as builders cut back and interest rates remain relatively modest, condo markets continue to suffer.

Take the owner trying to sell a spacious two-bedroom condo for $879,000 in the former Columbia Hospital for Women, which closed in 2002, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington. In 2004, the investor was so confident that he would make a handsome resale profit that he told his agent, Thomas P. Murphy, he wanted to buy five condos. Mr. Murphy said he flatly told his client he would only assist him in purchasing one unit in any one building.

“He needs $890,000 to break even, but the offers are at $800,000 to $840,000,” Mr. Murphy said. “He does remember that I told him he was not getting five of them.”

Could he rent the condo? Yes, but that option is not appealing, either. Mr. Murphy estimates that the unit could rent for $4,000 a month, far short of the $6,800 a month the condo costs in mortgage interest, maintenance fees, insurance and taxes.

“They have a choice of how they want to lose it,” Mr. Murphy said of investors and condo developers. “Drip by drip or in one slap.”

Mr. Murphy said he believed condo sales had picked up somewhat lately and he even ran a four-way bidding contest on one well-priced condo in Foggy Bottom, near the State Department. But the supply of newly built condos is so large and so many of them are similar to each other that many sellers are having to sharply cut their asking price. Others have simply given up.

At the end of 2006, 24,200 units were on the market in the Washington area, up from 13,000 at the start of 2005. Sales have slowed to 663 in the fourth quarter of 2006 from 3,520 in the first quarter of 2005, according to Delta Associates. Recorded prices have been flat, which probably masks an effective decline since only the most attractive properties are selling and many owners throw in extra inducements that do not show up in official figures.

One of the few exceptions to the trend is in Manhattan, particularly at the high end. Condo and co-op sales increased to 2,441 in the fourth quarter, from 1,574 a year ago, and inventory was relatively flat at 5,900, said Jonathan J. Miller, an appraiser. Much of the increase can be attributed to a legal change in how sales of co-ops are recorded, but Mr. Miller said a 5.5 percent drop in prices from the third quarter also helped.

Nationally, condominium sales have fallen further than those of single-family properties, 13.6 percent from November 2005 to the same month in 2006; free-standing homes showed a 10.7 percent decline in the same period. Inventories have risen 38.1 percent for condos and 29.6 percent for individual homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. The national median price — half the condos sold for more and half for less — was $224,600 in November, unchanged from November 2005.

But there is no comprehensive, national source of data for new condominiums sales. The Realtors group only measures sales of existing units and the Commerce Department, which tracks sales of new single-family homes, does not collect data on condominiums.

In the recent housing boom, many cities welcomed condos, hoping the young, upper-income set they attract would help revitalize older neighborhoods. In some cities, condominium construction also gave municipal officials an opportunity to demand that developers set aside some units for affordable housing in exchange for zoning and building approvals.

In Washington, the area around 14th and U Streets was one of several formerly run-down neighborhoods to get a facelift largely from new condo projects. The area was once a hub of African-American civic and cultural life, but the neighborhood was ravaged by riots in 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and fell into decades of neglect and disrepair.

The area has now become home to trendy cafes, a Whole Foods grocery and other stores. But signs of its hardscrabble past linger on in dilapidated apartment buildings and storefronts. The influx of transplants from nearby Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan has also raised the usual strains that accompany gentrification — rising rents, increased traffic and the displacement of local residents.

Mr. Franco, who lives in the neighborhood, said he was sensitive to those concerns. His company, Level 2 Development, contributed $1 million to help a group of tenants in low-income apartments buy their building as part of a deal with the local government for the approval of his condo project.

He had hoped to take up residence in a 3,200-square-foot corner unit with an expansive terrace, which will now be cut up into smaller rental apartments.

But as he drove around the neighborhood recently pointing out rows of redeveloped buildings, he acknowledged that the market might have reached its limit for now. As an example, he pointed to a used car lot that seemed to be a vestige of a bygone era.

“The reality is not everything can make way for condos,” Mr. Franco said. “This guy may be doing so much business that it has far more value than what a real estate sale can fetch.”

Majority of women living without spouse

NYTimes

January 16, 2007
51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse
By SAM ROBERTS

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

In addition, marriage rates among black women remain low. Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared with about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women.

In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military or are institutionalized. But while most women eventually marry, the larger trend is unmistakable.

“This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives,” said Prof. Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. “Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage.”

Professor Coontz said this was probably unprecedented with the possible exception of major wartime mobilizations and when black couples were separated during slavery.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, described the shift as “a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women.”

“For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage,” Dr. Frey said. “Younger women understand this better, and are preparing to live longer parts of their lives alone or with nonmarried partners. For many older boomer and senior women, the institution of marriage did not hold the promise they might have hoped for, growing up in an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ era.”

Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, said she was not surprised by the trend.

“A lot of my friends are divorced or single or living alone,” Ms. Zuzik said. “I know a lot of people in their 30s who have roommates.”

Ms. Zuzik has lived with a boyfriend twice, once in California where the couple registered as domestic partners to qualify for his health insurance plan. “I don’t plan to live with anyone else again until I am married,” she said, “and I may opt to keep a place of my own even then.”

Linda Barth, a 56-year-old magazine editor in Houston who has never married, said, “I used to divide my women friends into single friends and married friends. Now that doesn’t seem to be an issue.”

Sheila Jamison, who also lives in the East Village and works for a media company, is 45 and single. She says her family believes she would have had a better chance of finding a husband had she attended a historically black college instead of Duke.

“Considering all the weddings I attended in the ’80s that have ended so very, very badly, I consider myself straight up lucky,” Ms. Jamison said. “I have not sworn off marriage, but if I do wed, it will be to have a companion with whom I can travel and play parlor games in my old age.”

Carol Crenshaw, 57, of Roswell, Ga., was divorced in 2005 after 33 years and says she is in no hurry to marry again.

“I’m in a place in my life where I’m comfortable,” said Ms. Crenshaw, who has two grown sons. “I can do what I want, when I want, with whom I want. I was a wife and a mother. I don’t feel like I need to do that again.”

Similarly, Shelley Fidler, 59, a public policy adviser at a law firm, has sworn off marriage. She moved from rural Virginia to the vibrant Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., when her 30-year marriage ended.

“The benefits were completely unforeseen for me,” Ms. Fidler said, “the free time, the amount of time I get to spend with friends, the time I have alone, which I value tremendously, the flexibility in terms of work, travel and cultural events.”

Among the more than 117 million women over the age of 15, according to the marital status category in the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey, 63 million are married. Of those, 3.1 million are legally separated and 2.4 million said their husbands were not living at home for one reason or another.

That brings the number of American women actually living with a spouse to 57.5 million, compared with the 59.9 million who are single or whose husbands were not living at home when the survey was taken in 2005.

Some of those situations, which the census identifies as “spouse absent” and “other,” are temporary, and, of course, even some people who describe themselves as separated eventually reunite with their spouses.

Over all, a larger share of men are married and living with their spouse — about 53 percent compared with 49 percent among women.

“Since women continue to outlive men, they have reached the nonmarital tipping point — more nonmarried than married,” Dr. Frey said. “This suggests that most girls growing up today can look forward to spending more of their lives outside of a traditional marriage.”

Pamela J. Smock, a researcher at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, agreed, saying that “changing patterns of courtship, marriage, and that we are living longer lives all play a role.”

“Men also remarry more quickly than women after a divorce,” Ms. Smock added, “and both are increasingly likely to cohabit rather than remarry after a divorce.”

The proportion of married people, especially among younger age groups, has been declining for decades. Between 1950 and 2000, the share of women 15-to-24 who were married plummeted to 16 percent, from 42 percent. Among 25-to-34-year-olds, the proportion dropped to 58 percent, from 82 percent.

“Although we can help people ‘do’ marriage better, it is simply delusional to construct social policy or make personal life decisions on the basis that you can count on people spending most of their adult lives in marriage,” said Professor Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

Besse Gardner, 24, said she and her boyfriend met as college freshmen and started living together last April “for all the wrong reasons” — they found a great apartment on the beach in Los Angeles.

“We do not see living together as an end or even for the rest of our lives — it’s just fun right now,” Ms. Gardner said. “My roommate is someone I’d be thrilled to marry one day, but it just doesn’t make sense right now.”

Ms. Crenshaw said that some of the women in her support group for divorced women were miserable, but that she was surprised how happy she was to be single again.

“That’s not how I grew up,” she said. “That’s not how society thinks. It’s a marriage culture.”

Elissa B. Terris, 59, of Marietta, Ga., divorced in 2005 after being married for 34 years and raising a daughter, who is now an adult.

“A gentleman asked me to marry him and I said no,” she recalled. “I told him, ‘I’m just beginning to fly again, I’m just beginning to be me. Don’t take that away.’ ”

“Marriage kind of aged me because there weren’t options,” Ms. Terris said. “There was only one way to go. Now I have choices. One night I slept on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this side.”

She said she was returning to college to get a master’s degree (her former husband “didn’t want me to do that because I was more educated than he was”), had taken photography classes and was auditioning for a play.

“Once you go through something you think will kill you and it doesn’t,” she said, “every day is like a present.”

Some median home prices

Homes still unaffordable for many

Despite a decline in prices, Americans aren't finding it easier to buy homes because of rising mortgage rates and relatively stagnant wages, a nonprofit group says.
By Reuters

Home prices may have dipped over the past year, but many U.S. workers would still struggle to afford a median-priced home in many cities, according to a study released today.

"American workers are really not gaining ground, and they're so far behind in the first place," said Barbara Lipman, the research director for the nonprofit Center for Housing Policy, which conducted the study.

The median home price in the 202 biggest metropolitan areas declined 2% in the third quarter of 2006 from a year earlier. But homes actually became less affordable, the study said, as mortgage rates rose and workers' pay did not keep pace.

"The real story is what happened to salaries," Lipman said. "Lower-paid occupations -- such as in retail or home health workers -- their salaries went up only about 3%."

The study said an annual income of nearly $85,000 was needed to afford the median-priced U.S. home.

In the New York area, a $500,000 median-priced home required a $171,000 annual salary. The median-priced home in San Francisco, the most expensive U.S. market, was $759,000, requiring income of $260,000. In less expensive Chicago, the median-priced home cost $254,000, requiring an $87,000 salary.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Mansfield, Ohio, homes cost a median $85,000, requiring $29,118 in income.
Why families lack health insurance
The study assumed homebuyers needed a 10% down payment and could afford to pay 28% of their income on mortgage payments, property taxes and home insurance.

In reality, many households expend a much higher percentage of their incomes on mortgage payments, Lipman said.

To afford that, consumers cut other expenses, such as for health care and transportation, she said, citing research indicating that the cost of housing is the major reason families lack health insurance.

Other ways families cope with high housing expenses is to work longer hours or extra jobs, or by crowding in more income producers, she said.

Lipman's group found in an October 2006 survey that families that seek to buy less expensive homes in more distant suburbs -- adding to urban sprawl -- pay so much more for transportation that it eliminates the savings.

Though home prices range widely across the country, wages for low-wage jobs -- from teachers to janitors -- are about the same no matter where they are, Lipman said.

The report cited housing-aid programs offered by some big-city hospitals that have plenty of modestly-paid workers.

"For the low- to moderate-income individuals that we're talking about, they're not going to be helped by marginal declines in home prices," Lipman said. "The only way to address the problem is to create more affordable (homes), which may mean higher density units, townhouses and condos."

Positive psychology

NYTimes

January 7, 2007
Happiness 101
By D.T. MAX

One Tuesday last fall I sat in on a positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being — essentially a class in how to make yourself happier — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. George Mason is a challenge for positive psychologists because it is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. Many students are married and already working and commute to school. It’s a place where you go to move your career forward, not to find yourself.

The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.

The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.

When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.

Though Kashdan brought up published studies that optimistic people live longer and that certain regions of the brains of positive people show more activity (“Have a very active left prefrontal lobe day,” he joked at one point), in class they didn’t spend a lot of time on clinical research. Absent were the rats with electrodes, data charts, syndromes and neuroses. The main experimental corpus seemed to be the students themselves, with Kashdan assuming the role of therapist, asserting that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.

I sat in on the course a few more times during the semester, and when Kashdan was done with pleasure versus selfless giving, he took up gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love, then spirituality and well-being and finally “meaning and purpose in life.” “I never use the word morality,” Kashdan said. Rather his goal was to show that “there are ways of living that research shows lead to better outcomes.”

More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I started thinking maybe law school wasn’t for me,” wrote one graduate, Elizabeth Peterson, in her biographical précis for the masters program in applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She had decided to take the class on a whim. “I was pretty much hooked from there. I realized that what I loved the most was talking to people about their problems.”

Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says.

Sitting in Kashdan’s classroom, you might wonder whether psychology had abandoned its proper territory or found a new one, and if a new one, whether it owed more to science or to Sunday school. Perhaps that was because the class reflected the discipline’s own tension between simplicity and complexity, “good tough science,” as Seligman calls it, and airier talk of values. With its emphasis on the self in the world, positive psychology is already an ethics seminar. Which is fitting, given that it has its roots in a Socratic dialogue of sorts. Seligman likes to tell the story of how his daughter Nikki, when she was 5, accused him of being a grouch. She reminded him that he had criticized her for being whiny and that she had worked hard to stop whining. If she could stop being whiny, he could stop being grumpy. He realized, he says, that she was right, that he was “a pessimist and depressive and someone of high critical intelligence” and that he needed to change. Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”

Though positive psychology is only beginning to be used as an educational tool in classrooms and secondary schools, in the nine years since Seligman’s epiphany it has taken a firm hold in academia. The field’s steering committee includes a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have done highly regarded clinical work: Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specialty is “subjective well-being”; Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, who has made a study of admired character traits around the world; George Vaillant, who has long headed a Harvard project tracking success and failure among the college’s graduates; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so, as well as a children’s programming director, who was working to imbue her cartoons with positive psychology messages, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the relationship between economics and perceptions of happiness. In addition there were a lot of “life coaches,” independent consultants who hire themselves out to help clients achieve their life goals.

Despite its seemingly American emphasis on self-reliance and self-expression, positive psychology is also proving popular in England and the British Commonwealth. Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University, helped found the Well-being Institute there last year and is consulting with Wellington College, a private boarding and day school, on how to apply positive psychology to its curriculum. The Geelong Grammar School, a prestigious boarding and day school in Australia, is planning to shape its curriculum around the precepts of positive psychology in 2008, and the government of Scotland has also been in touch with Seligman to see whether the discipline might help its citizens. “Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment,” one government official announced.

Positive psychology is popular with educators because if happiness is something that can be learned, it can be taught. And because being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. Another study, by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley, correlated the smiles that the female graduates of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., displayed in two mid-20th-century yearbooks with life satisfaction and found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying the marriage and the greater their well-being. Inspired by studies like these, positive psychologists have developed “interventions,” or practices, designed to maximize positive emotions and have tested them on thousands of people. One such intervention is to think every night about the good things that happened to you that day. Another is to make sure in any given day that you either work or play in a new area that draws on what positive psychologists call your “signature strengths” to create a sense of well-being. Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology, too; this last intervention, studies show, gives the biggest increase in happiness of all.

In the first few weeks of the semester, Kashdan asked his students to keep a record of their thoughts and experiences. He then gave them “experiential assignments” to make them happier, working their emotions the way an athletic coach might work their muscles. One week they were to report on attempts to go into “flow.” “Sex, drugs and chocolate are all highly useful avenues for people to attain flow states,” Kashdan said. To enter flow, students were asked to do something that they were good at, be it writing, playing basketball or talking to their friends. According to positive psychology, your signature strengths play a special role in building your confidence and thus bringing you happiness. Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else. In class, one student recounted going into flow during a fistfight; another told of being at her father’s grave. A third talked about being with a friend watching TV and suddenly having a profound conversation. “We had so much love for each other,” the student remembered in class, “and suddenly we were crying.”

Several studies undertaken by positive psychologists have suggested that meditation enhances well-being, so another class assignment was to meditate for 15 minutes three days in a row, attend a free yoga class (Kashdan’s wife, a yoga instructor, arranged this with her studio), be mindful twice a day and report on the results. The mindfulness exercises — excercises in heightened awareness and openness to experience — are central to positive psychology and made a big impression, according to Kashdan: “Some said they just noticed for the first time how many types of trees there are on the way to campus.”

The following week, students were asked to watch “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the former, the two fall in love through intense conversation during one long evening in Vienna and then part. The sequel catches up with them nine years later. The students had to write about the first time they fell in love. The next assignment was to pay a gratitude visit or write a gratitude letter. After that, the students were to exercise their curiosity by doing something “novel, complex, and uncertain . . . epistemic, sensory and social” — that is, they were to use their signature strengths to try something new. One student tasted a pomegranate for the first time; another went to a book reading by Carly Fiorina, the former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard. Finally, the students were asked to select one memory they would be willing to spend an eternity with, an intervention inspired by the Japanese movie “After Life.”

Kashdan’s enthusiasm — he is a passionate teacher — ate up class time, and so the students never got to other parts of the syllabus, among them optimism exercises and exercises that would make them better teammates. On the last week, students handed in their final papers, describing how they had tried to enhance their lives toward, in Kashdan’s words, “a specific, personally meaningful positive outcome” during the semester. There was no final exam; the students’ grades were based in large part on the paper and class participation.

In an era when psychology is seeking to become a hard science of fM.R.I.’s and evidence-based therapies, when, as Seligman says, “if it doesn’t plug into the wall, it’s not science,” positive psychology can seem like a retro endeavor with the appeal of a cure that fits on a recipe card. While this may make it particularly adaptable for use in the classroom, critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools,” Julie Norem, chairwoman of the psychology department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said in an e-mail message. “It pays scant attention to individual differences.” For all that the open, 1960s-style classroom has fallen out of favor, it allowed a child to find his or her own way. In the words of the founder of the famous Summerhill school in England, a child should be free “to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.” Children were treated as unique, which you might think would result in a more capable, independent adults. By comparison, positive psychology can seem as if it is laying out a road and asking the adherent to follow. “If I could wave my magic wand, there would be no positive psychology — there would be positive psychologists,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, whose own work in the science of affective forecasting suggests that what we think will make us happy rarely does, or at least not for long. “I guess I just wish it didn’t look so much like a religion.”

Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off when watching classes like Kashdan’s or even when reviewing the record of the field’s beginnings. When Seligman was first trying to establish the discipline, he and his colleagues invited 25 young psychologists to the Yucatán to discuss the positive side of life. They snorkeled and talked philosophy and then swam some more. They summarized their work and listened to others’ reactions. One evening, the group devoted itself to poetry and song. Seligman recited Ezra Pound’s “Immorality”; a colleague named Sonja Lyubomirsky read some of Prospero’s speeches from “The Tempest.” Seligman’s daughter Lara — Seligman educates his five younger children in part by traveling with them — recited a Delmore Schwartz poem, “I Am Cherry Alive.”

The talk under the palapas was not just about happiness but also about engagement. Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.” To find the qualities that gave life purpose, the team examined Western religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Bushido as well as the mores of 70 nations. Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership. “The agenda comes from the world,” Seligman told me. “These are universals we’re after.”

The search for what unites humans in virtue was an ambitious effort to integrate psychology with those fields that have long sat alongside it: ethics, religion, philosophy. Before the retreat in Mexico, Seligman met with one of his former professors, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. His book “The Examined Life,” written late in his career, looked at how questions of value might be related to everyday experience. It was Nozick who suggested a “taxonomy of character,” by which he meant, as Seligman put it, a list of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values.” Lyubomirsky remembers that many of the young scientists were uncomfortable doing so. “There was a lot of debate about it,” she said. “We were trained as hard scientists.” Seligman wasn’t so sure himself that he wanted virtue to be part of positive psychology either: he was wary of science becoming prescriptive, but Csikszentmihalyi was enthusiastic, Seligman recalled, and in the end Seligman agreed.

Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway. True, there have been attempts to marry psychology to ethics, to enlist it in the service of decoding what it means to be fully human, throughout its history. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others, established humanistic psychology to focus on what gave meaning to life, looking at the very subjects positive psychologists now take as their own. But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground. The idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. “I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,” he says.

When Todd Kashdan asked his students at George Mason to tell him which they liked better, experiencing pleasure or doing good, he cautioned, “Don’t give me the Miss Universe answers.” But when I met the participants in the nation’s only master’s program in applied positive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt the spirit of Gandhi was hovering over us. One woman wrote in her application essay, “My strange and energetic career has included activism for peace and justice; teaching safety and self-defense skills to 10,000 students.” She was also a founder of two nonprofit organizations and taught “Swedish massage and stress-reduction skills.” Another sold her Mercedes and was using her savings to pay for the course. A third left banking to find the meaning in life.

There were, in all, about 30 students in the master’s class at Penn on the Saturday in September I attended. MAPP, as the program is known, is organized around intensive days of class time, online work and conference calls. Seligman, who runs the program, says that he likes to invite others to lecture so he can learn what’s going on in the field, and so that day Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” theory, while Seligman sat at a little table nodding and taking notes. “It’s a neat design that allows humans and other organisms to grow and become more resourceful versions of themselves,” she told the class.

The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones.

For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)

This was only the first part of Fredrickson’s theory. But it could be that thinking broadly has no effect on happiness or well-being — it might even be a deficit. To show that broadening led to building, she then described an experiment she had undertaken on a group of employees at Compuware, a progressive information-technology firm in Detroit. With the company’s assistance, she followed two groups — one that was taught a loving-kindness meditation (a meditation in which the practitioner repeats phrases that cultivate a caring attitude toward all life) and one that was wait-listed for the meditation. After eight weeks, she compared the two groups’ responses to questions about well-being. Those who meditated reported higher mental resources than before; their mindfulness, freedom from illness and connectedness to others all increased. But interestingly, their sense of well-being hadn’t, at least not immediately. It dropped at first. “It’s like you started a gym membership and then you realize you have to go,” Fredrickson theorized. But once their sense of well-being increased, they retained their edge over those who only wanted to meditate even after the meditation program was over.

All this interested Seligman’s students, but what Fredrickson says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her.

With its emphasis on universals and practical applications, positive psychology fits these divided times: it preaches values without linking them to a particular value system and embraces spirituality without making you go to church. When positive psychology was introduced into the language-arts program at Strath Haven High School outside Philadelphia in 2003, the left-leaning parents welcomed it because the values were internationally accepted; all but the most conservative ones were reassured that there were values at all.

Seligman recently held a meeting with the leaders from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the KIPP program, a national network of public charter schools, at which the educational leaders discussed introducing positive psychology into their schools. They are all looking to restore “wholeness” to the teenage years, to replace the supposed sense of certainty that the ’60s removed and that returned in the ’80s as a national political objective but that teachers are now too bogged down in the fundamentals to teach and adults, working longer and longer hours, are simply too busy to shore up at home. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for June, this time with a dozen schools; one item on the agenda is to add personal strengths and virtues to admissions criteria. (Educational Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn’t be able to fake.) “What this is about is building character,” Seligman says.

Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology’s drawing board is at the Geelong School. “As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,” Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls “Australia’s Eton,” wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, “When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.” The Australians “have had a lot of depression in kids, that’s half the reason they want it,” said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.

What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong’s support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the “three pathways of happiness,” “the four ways to promote savoring” and “the five ways to overcome” adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try “savoring with a friend.” The students would have journals to record their emotions, their “grudges and gratitudes.” They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel “their well-being” and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback.

This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?” It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school’s students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with “books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,” like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”)

Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. “I did not think the science was ready to be applied in that big a way,” she told me. Linkins acknowledges that happiness may come at the cost of a full understanding of literature and human complexity. But, he said, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”

The question is, Can positive psychology actually fulfill its promise of making people happier? If positive emotions widen the sphere of what it is to be human, as positive psychology asserts, then positive psychology, at least as it is taught in the classroom, can seem to narrow it. If you are not optimistic, fake it. If you do not have friends, make some. I wondered what sort of student positive psychology would create. Was he or she more likely to be a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or J. P. (Gus) Godsey, the Virginia Beach stockbroker, dad and Craftsmen-tool enthusiast whom USA Weekend Magazine declared in 2003 “the happiest person in America” (“You are a blessed, happy person, Gus,” Martin Seligman commented in the article. “You’ve created many of your blessings on your own.”)

When I e-mailed various graduates of Penn’s first master’s class, I found that they continued to take positive psychology’s emphasis on the engaged life very seriously. One woman was using positive psychology to teach first-year medical students better patient-communication skills, citing Fredrickson’s optimal flourishing ratio as a benchmark. John Yeager, who has a doctorate in education and runs the Center for Character Excellence at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Indiana, wants to “help teachers ‘broaden and build’ character strengths and positive emotions in children, young adults and themselves.”

Of course the master’s students were a self-selected group, willing to pay almost $40,000 for a degree with no clear career track. The students at George Mason, though they, too, had chosen the course, were perhaps more relevant to the question of what positive psychology can really teach. There I found a mixed response. They seemed remarkably sure that they had undergone an important experience but less sure what the nature of that experience had been. Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen, an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”

Diabetics' unequal treatment in the workplace

NYTimes

December 26, 2006
Diabetics in the Workplace Confront a Tangle of Laws
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

John Steigauf spent more than a decade fiddling with the innards of those huge United Parcel Service trucks until an icy day two years ago when the company put him on leave from his mechanic's job. A supervisor escorted him off the premises.

His work was good. He hadn't socked the boss or embezzled money. It had to do with what was inside him: diabetes.

U.P.S. framed it as a safety issue: Mr. Steigauf's blood sugar might suddenly plummet while he tested a truck, causing him to slam into someone.

Mr. Steigauf considered it discrimination, a taint that diabetes can carry. ''I was regarded as a damaged piece of meat,'' he said. ''It was like, 'You're one of those, and we can't have one of those.' ''

With 21 million American diabetics, disputes like this have increasingly rippled through the workplace:

A mortgage loan officer in Oregon was denied permission to eat at her desk to stanch her sugar fluctuations, and eventually was fired.

A Sears lingerie saleswoman in Illinois with nerve damage in her leg quit after being told she could not cut through a stockroom to reach her department.

A worker at a candy company in Wisconsin was fired after asking where he could dispose of his insulin needles.

In each instance, diabetics contend that they are being blocked by their employers from the near-normal lives their doctors say are possible. But the companies say they are struggling, too, with confusion about whether diabetes is a legitimate disability and with concern about whether it is overly expensive, hazardous and disruptive to accommodate the illness.

The debate will probably intensify. The number of diabetics in America swelled by 80 percent in the past decade. Experts say the disease is on its way to becoming a conspicuous fact of life in the nation's labor force, raising all sorts of issues for workers and managers.

Even an outspoken advocate for diabetics like Fran Carpentier, a Type 1 diabetic and a senior editor at Parade magazine, understands the implications for business. ''Knowing what it's like to live with the disease hour by hour, day by day, I wonder if I owned my own company if I would hire someone with diabetes,'' she said. ''I'm being bluntly honest. And it kills me to say this.''

Doctors, though, say that with improved medications and methods of self-testing blood sugar, most diabetics can do almost any job if they properly manage their illness. Yet myths about the disease persist, advocates say, leading many companies to shun diabetic employees.

''It's not all about ignorance, but if I can get rid of ignorance, I can get rid of a lot of discrimination,'' said Shereen Arent, the director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association.

Part of the confusion is a byproduct of the disease itself, a capricious illness of elevated, damaging levels of sugar in the blood. Type 1 is a malfunction of the immune system that usually appears in childhood, while the far more prevalent Type 2 is closely associated with obesity and inactivity. Many people with diabetes will face withering complications like blindness, amputations and heart disease. Others will not.

For some, particularly insulin users prone to the abnormal drops in blood sugar known as hypoglycemia, the illness can cause dizziness, fainting or muddled judgment. Doctors, however, say those constitute a tiny number of readily identifiable cases.

Nonetheless, the risk of plunging blood sugars has fueled a longstanding reluctance to employ diabetics in jobs like those of truck driver or police officer, if they are on insulin. Until this summer, the National Fire Protection Association cautioned against making it too easy for even non-insulin-dependent diabetics to become firefighters. Now the association recommends an individual assessment.

Federal law bars diabetics from joining the armed services and prevents diabetics on insulin from becoming commercial pilots.

Innumerable diabetics, though, are engaged in more mundane jobs uninvolved in matters of life and death. For these people, secretaries and factory workers and programmers, a ''reasonable accommodation,'' like permission to eat at one's desk or to be excused from fluctuating shifts, can make the difference in whether they can function.

When disputes can't be resolved, the cases often land in court or before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission, which enforces the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, says diabetes-related complaints have been on the rise, one of the few conditions generally showing an increase in complaints. Diabetes accounts for nearly 5 percent of the 15,000 annual allegations that the commission gets under that act, trailing only back impairment, other orthopedic injuries and depression.

Often the courts are of scant help in bringing clarity. Mr. Steigauf has spent two years trying to thread his way through the disability discrimination law. The federal law can be fuzzy, for it mentions no illness or handicap by name but supplies a legal test under which plaintiffs must usually demonstrate that a ''major life activity,'' like walking or vision, is ''substantially limited.''

This is easy enough for anyone who has lost sight or a limb. But the restrictions of diabetes are often invisible. Diabetics thus can find themselves teetering on a balance beam, needing to prove they are disabled enough to fit under the law but not so impaired that they can't do a job.

Judges in nearly identical cases have ruled in completely opposite ways, leaving diabetics bewildered and businesses unsure what, if anything, they should do. While some courts, for example, have held that the eating restrictions diabetics face satisfy the substantial limitation, others have disagreed.

''Usually the battle is over that word, 'substantially,' '' said Craig A. Crispin, an Oregon employment lawyer. ''If you say the person is disabled because of the impact on eating, the other side will say: 'Hey, look, she's eating a sandwich. Where's the disability?' ''

Seeking Accommodations

The quarrels are as varied as working life: a musician rejected for a cruise ship's cabaret band, baggage handlers and plane cleaners fired by an airline, a blackjack dealer dismissed by a casino.

The American Diabetes Association fields about 100 calls a month about workplace tussles like these. Many of them revolve around accommodations, though the changes sought tend to be modest: predictable hours, a place to test blood, freedom to snack when sugars get unbalanced.

Companies often cite workplace safety as their paramount concern, though there is little hard evidence to suggest that diabetics are a risk.

In one case in 2002, ConAgra Foods withdrew a job offer to Rudy Rodriguez at a Texas baked bean plant after a physical suggested that his Type 2 diabetes was so out of control that he was a hazard. Mr. Rodriguez had performed fine as an interim laborer, but the examining doctor declared there was nowhere he could safely work ''outside of a padded room where he could even then fall and break his neck from dizziness or fainting.''

An appeals court found otherwise and held that ConAgra had violated the law. The case was settled, and Mr. Rodriguez now works for a printer.

''Some people who have a problem with hypoglycemia should not be doing public safety-type jobs,'' said John W. Griffin Jr., a lawyer from Texas with Type 2 diabetes who handles discrimination cases. ''But I guarantee you that that baked bean factory was not public safety.''

There has been other progress for diabetics: the San Antonio Police Department's barring of diabetics on insulin was struck down. Insulin-using diabetics in good control of their illness can get private pilot's licenses.

In the lingerie saleswoman's case, Sears agreed to a consent decree awarding the woman $150,000 and stipulating that the store train supervisors about disability discrimination.

Employers, however, prevail in a vast majority of cases (many are settled). It is hard even to get lawyers to pursue complaints since prejudice is tricky to prove. Establishing discrimination has become harder since 1999, when the Supreme Court held that if a disability can be corrected with medicine or things like prostheses, it is not necessarily protected. Advocates for the disabled say the ruling warped the intent of Congress.

Ruth Colker, a law professor at Ohio State University who studies disability discrimination, said that very few working people with diabetes now find themselves guarded by the law.

Judges, in fact, have deemed these diabetics not disabled: a Maine store manager who had trouble walking because of poor circulation, and a New York security guard without vision in one eye and declining vision in the other who had four episodes of hypoglycemia in two years.

In some instances, employers have said they took action against an employee because of diabetes, but the court still found that the worker was not disabled and threw out the case.

''There's not a remedy for every wrong,'' said David A. Copus, a lawyer who represents employers and specializes in disability issues. ''There are employers who don't like ugly people. They're not protected by the law.''

Mr. Copus said he was not unsympathetic. His father had diabetes; it was very debilitating.

Wary of bad outcomes, many diabetics conceal their illness on the job. Brian T. McMahon, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies workplace discrimination, said: ''You get to the question of whether or not to disclose you have diabetes. Most people opt not to, for they fear: Am I inviting more trouble?''

Figuring Employer Costs

There was a time, four or five decades ago, when you wouldn't find one diabetic on the entire floor of a factory. Now, Type 2 diabetics are commonplace. It is not only the ascendancy of the disease, but also the fact that a condition once considered a corollary to old age is striking people sooner, catching them long before retirement. And this comes as companies are already struggling to balance productivity in the workplace with soaring medical costs.

To understand the brutal math of diabetes, all a business has to do is consult the Web site diabetesatwork.org, set up by the government to furnish advice on addressing diabetes in the workplace. One of its tools is a calculator that uses rough assumptions to suggest what costs might be involved.

Businesses plug in the number of employees, the tally is multiplied by 8.2 percent (a slightly dated national prevalence rate for diabetes), then that figure is multiplied by $13,243, an estimate for yearly medical costs of a diabetic. Voilà: the price tag of diabetes. It is a burden more than five times that of workers without diabetes.

Ron Z. Goetzel, a vice president for Thomson Medstat, which analyzes health care costs for businesses, said that if absenteeism and productivity losses are added, diabetes ranks third among major conditions as an economic cost to employers, after heart disease and hypertension.

Companies have only started to reckon with this, and with the disease's ancillary concerns. Even if advocates say safety is rarely a factor, companies argue they cannot take chances with some types of workers, like school bus drivers or even pizza deliverers.

Concessions may seem small -- for example, granting a bank teller more frequent breaks -- but many employers contend that if rules bend for one person, then that breeds resentment among other employees. Co-workers cannot see the diabetes, and if an employer gives preferential treatment to a diabetic worker, it cannot legally tell other workers it is because of the diabetes. Companies feel that indulging all diabetics trivializes the meaning of disability and of fairness.

''It comes down to how many extra points do I give you,'' said William J. Kilberg, a Washington employment lawyer. ''Why is everybody a victim?''

He said too many people who are not disabled demand special favors. ''I mean, I wear eyeglasses,'' he said.

In addition to the threat of a suit under federal or state disability law, businesses must grapple with the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires them to grant unpaid leave to ill workers. That can create scheduling difficulties.

''This whole area gets complicated, because the medical leave act can mean employees absent from the workplace for extended periods,'' said Stephen A. Bokat, general counsel for the United States Chamber of Commerce. ''That bothers employers even more than an employee needing a half-hour during the day to administer some insulin.''

Health care consultants urge companies to become proactive, try to use tools like wellness programs to forestall diabetes' claim on their workers and install disease management programs to improve existing cases. And many do. Companies dangle $100 incentives (though more often a mug or a T-shirt) if an employee submits to a health assessment or accepts a phone call from a health coach.

But getting participation is hard. And the economic worth of these undertakings to a business is difficult to gauge with a progressive disease like diabetes. Sometimes the evident benefits of in-house health programs are years down the road, when an employee a business invested in may well be working elsewhere.

When Safety Comes First

John Steigauf's fellow mechanics called him ''Flunky.'' The name caught on after Mr. Steigauf gave advice to a prickly supervisor, who thundered, ''I'm not going to let some flunky mechanic tell me how to do my job.'' Mr. Steigauf, 47, wanted it embroidered onto his uniform. Supervisors said forget it.

He joined United Parcel in Minneapolis in 1991, turning wrenches from the start. Five years ago, he learned that he had Type 2 diabetes. Though it often goes with being overweight, he had a wide receiver's build: 6-foot-2, 193 pounds. But his mother had diabetes.

He was put on pills and watched his diet, abandoning his cherished hot chocolate. Yet his blood sugar remained high. If it didn't drop, he would need insulin. That sent fear pumping through him.

U.P.S. requires mechanics, like its interstate drivers, to hold a commercial driver's license and to be cleared to drive out of state so they can road-test trucks. In reality, mechanics could go weeks without leaving the yard, but those were the rules. And at the time, federal officials did not grant interstate licenses to insulin-using diabetics.

They did dispense a few exemptions. But Mr. Steigauf, who started using insulin only in 2004, stood no chance. The requirement was to have driven safely while on insulin for three years.

So Mr. Steigauf tried starving himself, slicing off 30 pounds. It made him crabby, fatigued and so thin ''that if I stuck my tongue out, I looked like a zipper.''

His blood sugars did not budge. But after he took insulin, his diabetes settled down almost at once.

Later in 2004, he had to have a physical to renew his commercial license, a test he could no longer pass. Minnesota did not have the three-year rule, and since he had never had a hypoglycemic episode or other problems, Mr. Steigauf got an exemption to drive within the state. Given that he didn't even leave the county while road-testing trucks, he hoped that would be good enough.

It wasn't. For consistency, U.P.S. wanted all its mechanics to be certified to drive from state to state, whether they needed to or not. So Mr. Steigauf was sent home on disability, even though he felt fine.

Norman Black, a U.P.S. spokesman, said the company had always intended to find Mr. Steigauf another position. He said the company did not discriminate but was passionate about safety.

Studies tracking accident rates of diabetics are inconclusive; some indicate worse outcomes, others don't. But either way, Mr. Steigauf's direct supervisor at the time, Dan Welke, said he thought the company had gone too far, that somebody else could road-test the trucks repaired by Mr. Steigauf.

''It just seemed ridiculous,'' Mr. Welke said.

Mr. Steigauf also had trouble making sense of this. When his diabetes raged out of control, it had been all right to fix trucks. Now, with the illness under control, it wasn't.

When he spoke to someone in human resources, Mr. Steigauf said he was told that he would never come back. The notion that he was a human tinderbox punctuated his interactions. ''I'd be told that I could pull a tractor up to a fuel pump and pass out and the thing would explode,'' he said. ''I was like a grenade and was going to kill people.''

At home in Bloomington, Minn., where Mr. Steigauf's tidy ranch is bordered by a soupçon of lawn, he, his wife, Dawn, their twin daughters and their severely autistic son struggled on a weekly disability check of $431, about half his old pay.

To keep going, he did odd jobs. Friends at U.P.S. dug into their pockets. The family cut one another's hair and skipped sending Christmas cards.

Finally, Mr. Steigauf asked U.P.S. to excuse him from interstate driving as a ''reasonable accommodation'' under disability law. After all, he had left the state for U.P.S. only once in 13 years. Some of his colleagues, he found out, did not even have commercial driver's licenses.

But U.P.S. refused, saying he was not disabled under discrimination law, and thus not entitled to an accommodation.

So, in early 2005, he filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and waited, interned in his house, as if he had evaporated -- all the while collecting disability from a company that said he was not disabled.

After seven months, U.P.S. offered him a lower-paying job, fixing trailers. He could not touch an engine or drive. But he took it while he battled for his former position.

Then he had some luck. Federal officials changed their rules on interstate licenses and Mr. Steigauf qualified for a waiver, allowing him to return to his old job. He is expected to start within a month or so.

This fall, the E.E.O.C. concluded that he had been discriminated against and that U.P.S. owed him relief. U.P.S. said it would contest the decision.

Mr. Steigauf is still bitter, not toward U.P.S. itself, but toward the way he believes it treats diabetics. Even now, he feels singled out.

''I've had unloaders at work say to me, 'Are you that diabetic guy?' '' he said. ''I don't know what they mean. Nothing? Or, 'You shouldn't be working here'?''

To keep his exemption, he must obey a complicated protocol to show the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that he remains fit. Every three months, he has to report how much he drives and his sugar levels. If he has an accident, even if someone rams his car while he's in a movie, he has two days to alert the government. He has seven days to let the government know if he has a new car or a new phone number.

''The exemption adds to the discrimination,'' he said one afternoon at home. ''It constantly reminds me that I'm different.''

His children skittered through the room.

''You become a show dog,'' he said. ''I fix engines. I don't want to be a show dog.''

Mental exercises

NYTimes

December 27, 2006
As Minds Age, What's Next? Brain Calisthenics
By PAM BELLUCK

Is there hope for your hippocampus, a new lease for your temporal lobe?

Science is not sure yet, but across the country, brain health programs are springing up, offering the possibility of a cognitive fountain of youth.

From ''brain gyms'' on the Internet to ''brain-healthy'' foods and activities at assisted living centers, the programs are aimed at baby boomers anxious about entering their golden years and at their parents trying to stave off memory loss or dementia.

''This is going to be one of the hottest topics in the next five years -- it's going to be huge,'' said Nancy Ceridwyn, co-director of special projects for the American Society on Aging. ''The challenge we have is it's going to be a lot like the anti-aging industry: how much science is there behind this?''

Dozens of studies are under way. Organizations like AARP are offering tips on brain health. And the Alzheimer's Association conducts hundreds of Maintain Your Brain workshops, many at corporations like Apple Computer and Lockheed Martin.

At least two health insurers are pushing brain health. MetLife is giving prospective clients a 61-page book it commissioned called ''Love Your Brain.'' Humana will provide, free or deeply discounted, $495 worth of brain fitness software to some four million older customers, and offers ''brain fitness camps'' with the software at computer stores and community colleges.

There are Web sites like HappyNeuron.com, which offers subscribers cranial calisthenics, and MyBrainTrainer.com, marketed to anyone who ''ever wished you could be a little quicker, a little sharper mentally.''

And Nintendo's Brain Age, a video game intended for baby boomers and their elders, features simple math, syllable-counting, word memory activities and the quick reading aloud of passages from the likes of Poe and Dickens, which ''gives your prefrontal cortex a workout,'' the instructions say.

''I just felt that, Hey, this is something I ought to do,'' said Roy Gustafson, 85, who tried it at a Nintendo promotion at his Redmond, Wash., retirement community. He quickly got top scores (his ''brain age'' was low 20's), and decided to quit while ahead. But almost daily, he plays the Sudoku games in the handheld device, saying, ''It keeps me alert.''

Whether the hopes for brain health programs are realistic is still largely unknown, scientists say.

Certainly most brain-healthy recommendations are not considered bad for people. They do not have the potential risks of drugs or herbal supplements. And things like physical exercise and Omega-3 fatty acids help the body, even if they do not end up bettering the mind.

''All of the things are good for you to do in general,'' Dr. Elizabeth Edgerly, a clinical psychologist with the Alzheimer's Association, said. ''Do I have concerns? Yes. We're very cautious. Is it going to mean you can remember where you left your car keys? We can't say that.''

Still, the appeal of the programs is strong.

Epoch Senior Living in Providence is among the many assisted living facilities with ''brain fitness centers.'' Surrounded by posters of Einstein, Rodin's ''Thinker,'' and ''Brain Facts'' (''one billion glial cells in the human brain''), residents spend an hour a day for eight weeks doing computer exercises involving recalling story details and distinguishing similar-sounding syllables.

David Horvitz, 92, an Epoch resident, said, ''It did improve my concentration, particularly when I read. Before, my mind would wander and I'd have to reread passages several times. It also seems to me that I'm remembering names a little bit better.''

Emeritus Assisted Living, a chain, started a brain health program for residents, their families, staff members and people in the community. So far, centers in Florida, Massachusetts and South Carolina offer ''brain-healthy'' foods like salmon and walnuts, activities like spelling bees and reminiscing games, prizes to staff members for recalling brain health trivia, and a ''brain health self-assessment'' questionnaire asking, among other things, if people play challenging board games, walk 10,000 steps a day, or eat flax seed three times a week.

The brain program at the Isle at Emerald Court in Tewksbury, Mass., an Emeritus facility, includes a five-day-a-week regimen of leg lifts and stretches on the burgundy jacquard lobby chairs, influenced Ray Decker to choose the center for his mother, Joan, 75, who is in the early stage of Alzheimer's.

''Those types of things may stimulate her brain and, despite her debilitating disease, she actually may come back a little,'' said Mr. Decker, 57, who plans to adopt brain-healthy activities. ''I think that this will keep my mother healthy for some time to come, actually extend her life in a mental and physical manner.''

While there is encouraging animal research, experts say human studies have generally relied on observations of people with healthier brains, but have not tested whether a particular behavior improves brain health. Perhaps people with healthier brains are more likely to do brain-stimulating activities, not the reverse.

''Right now,'' said Dr. Marilyn Albert, director of cognitive neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, ''we can't say to somebody, 'We know that if you walk a mile every day for the next six months, your memory's going to be better.' We don't know that if you do certain kinds of puzzles it's going to have a benefit.''

In addition, few scientists believe brain health activities prevent dementia, only that they might delay it.

The strongest evidence suggests that cardiovascular exercise also probably helps the brain, by improving blood circulation, experts say.

''What's good for your heart's probably good for your head,'' said Dr. Lynda Anderson, chief of health care and aging studies at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which last year received the first Congressional appropriation to study brain health.

Similarly, Dr. Albert said that heart-healthy foods were probably brain-healthy foods.

As for brain-training exercises, studies show improvement from them, though not necessarily in real-life activities, said Dr. David A. Loewenstein, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami medical school.

In a National Institute on Aging study, people given at least 10 hours of training in memory, reasoning or processing speed showed improvement, which held five years later. People reported slightly less difficulty in everyday skills, like handling medication and making telephone calls, but most of those results were not significant, researchers reported.

Dr. Loewenstein, meanwhile, found that people with early Alzheimer's who were trained in real-life tasks like face-name recognition and balancing checkbooks improved significantly in those skills. People given computer memory and concentration games and crossword puzzles did not do as well on real-life tasks, although many thought they were improving, he said.

''Just because you're able to recall a story better after six weeks may not mean that it's had any demonstrable effect on everyday life,'' Dr. Loewenstein said.

Posit Science, a San Francisco company that makes the brain fitness software used by Epoch and Humana, said its own studies, some published, showed that its software improved memory and mental focus.

''We've seen more than 10 years of improvement,'' said Jeff Zimman, the company's chief executive. ''In processing speed, people who were on average 80 years old were performing like 30-year-olds in speed at those tasks.''

Posit, one of several making such software, hopes to adapt it for people with early Alzheimer's, AIDS-related dementia and schizophrenia. Mr. Zimman envisions other uses: corporations hoping to improve brains of older employees; sports enthusiasts and hobbyists honing, say, bird-watching skills.

Emeritus Assisted Living has partnered with Dr. Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist advocating social, mental, spiritual, nutritional and physical ways to promote brain health, to make its 180 homes ''brain health centers for the community,'' said Chris Guay, a divisional director of operations. The Isle at Emerald Court hands out brain-shaped stress balls and plans to fly a brain flag out front. One administrator tried stimulating her brain by writing with her opposite hand (with barely legible results). The maintenance director wears a pedometer and gives them to visitors. An Emeritus center in Florida is lobbying grocery stores for brain-healthy food displays.

Mr. Guay said he hoped the program would attract ''more people to fill our buildings'' and ''help us retain employees.''

Some experts say even if there is little cognitive benefit, there may be psychic benefit to mental exercises.

''I feel my brain is better,'' said Dorothy Pereshluha, 84, a resident at Isle at Emerald Court, who had trouble finding her room and remembering names when she moved in.

Alice Babulicz, 75, a resident at Wartburg Assisted Living in Mount Vernon, N.Y., which uses brain fitness software, said she paid more attention in church and was so energized that ''now I can walk four or five blocks.''

And Marcia Mittleman, 88, who took Epoch's course twice, with graduation and a medal, said that psychologically, it ''filled a void.''

Asked if her cognitive function improved, she replied, ''Did it make me smarter? No.''

Suddenly, she scanned the room. ''Did anyone see my walker?''

Body weight exercises

The Best Exercise You're Not Doing
By Alwyn Cosgrove, Men's Health
Men's Health

As a trainer, I've witnessed some amazing things in the gym, most of which involved 300-pound powerlifters moving weight equal to that of a small SUV. (There was also the adult-film star I trained who had an orgasm every time she did hanging leg raises, but that's another story.)

The most impressive feat I've ever seen, though, came courtesy of a 160-pound guy named Steve Cotter. Steve's a martial artist, and one day he did a dozen single-leg squats while holding an 88-pound kettlebell in each hand. If that doesn't sound particularly jaw-dropping, try doing one—without any weights.

And there lies an important point: Despite the plethora of gym equipment available, some of the greatest exercises remain the ones you can do with just your body weight—for instance, the single-arm pullup and the handstand pushup. Or the lower-body version, the best movement to build leg strength and improve athletic performance: the full-range, rock-bottom, single-leg squat.

So, while you may not be the strongest guy in the gym, you can still turn heads by banging out a set of single-leg squats. And the attention is just a side benefit. Master this one exercise and you'll see gains in strength, speed and balance. You'll squat more weight, jump higher and discover athletic ability you never had before. The best part: You can do it all without setting foot in a gym.

Test Your Best

To determine your training plan, do as many single-leg squats as you can. If you aren't able to perform at least two repetitions flawlessly, note the spot during your descent at which you can't control your speed of movement. This is your "breaking point"—and you'll need to know it to complete the routine. Once you've finished the test, proceed to the workout here that most closely matches your maximum effort.

Single-Leg Squat



Stand on a bench or box that's about knee height. Hold your arms in front of you and flex your right ankle so your toes are higher than your heel. Keeping your torso as upright as possible, bend your left knee and slowly lower your body until your right heel lightly touches the floor. Pause for 1 second, then push yourself up. That's one repetition.

YOUR BEST EFFORT: 0 TO 1 REPS

THE PROBLEM: Individually, your legs aren't strong enough to support your body weight through the entire range of motion.

THE FIX: A two-pronged attack using "negatives" and "partials," both of which help you challenge your weak spots and lower your breaking point. Do this workout once every 4 days until you can perform at least two single-leg squats with perfect form.

Step 1: Negative Squat

Stand on your left leg, facing away from a bench. Holding your arms and your right leg in the air in front of you, slowly lower your body until your butt is slightly higher than your breaking point. (Ideally, this should take 5 to 7 seconds.) Sit, then stand up using both legs. That's one repetition. Do six reps with your left leg, then six more with your right. Complete a set. Rest for 2 to 3 minutes and move on to step 2.

Step 2: Partial Squat



Stand on a bench holding a pair of 5-pound dumbbells. As you perform a single-leg squat, simultaneously lift the dumbbells in front of you to shoulder height. (This helps counterbalance your body, making the movement easier.) Again, lower your body until you're just above your breaking point, then pause for 2 seconds before pushing yourself back up. Do 10 repetitions with each leg, pausing for 10 seconds instead of 2 on the last rep with each.

YOUR BEST EFFORT: 2 TO 5 REPS

THE PROBLEM: Because you can't adjust the weight you're using, as you can with free weights, your muscles give out quickly — and that limits the total number of repetitions you can perform, a key factor in increasing strength.

THE FIX: A technique called escalating density training, or EDT. Popularized by Charles Staley, author of Muscle Logic, this method helps you slow the onset of fatigue, so you can complete more total repetitions than usual. Instead of doing as many reps as you can in each set, you'll do more sets of fewer repetitions. In addition, you'll further increase the challenge to your legs by adding two other single-leg exercises: the Bulgarian split squat and the high stepup.

Step 1: Determine your starting point

Take the number of single-leg squats you can complete with perfect form and divide it by two. That's how many repetitions you'll do each set. (If your best effort is three, round down to one.) Perform the four-week EDT routine below once every four days, doing the number of sets indicated and resting after each for the prescribed amount of time.

Step 2: Bulgarian Split Squat

Stand with a bench about 2 feet behind you and place the instep of your right foot on the bench. Keeping your torso upright, lower your body until your left thigh is parallel to the floor. Your left lower leg should remain perpendicular to the floor. Pause, then push yourself back to the starting position as quickly as you can. Do 12 to 15 repetitions, then repeat, this time with your left foot resting on the bench and your right foot in front. After you've worked both legs, immediately (without resting) complete step 3.

Step 3: High Stepup

Stand facing a bench or step that's about knee height. Lift your left foot and place it firmly on the bench, push down with your left heel, and push your body upward until your left leg is straight and your right foot hangs off the bench. Lower yourself back down. That's one rep. Do 12 to 15, then do the same number of reps with your right leg.

YOUR BEST EFFORT: 6 TO 9 REPS

THE PROBLEM: You have poor endurance.

THE FIX: Training your muscles to resist fatigue. Perform the following routine once every 4 days for 5 weeks.

Step 1

Do as many single-leg squats as you can, then rest for 60 seconds

Step 2

Repeat until you've completed twice the number of reps you achieved in your first set.

So, if you do seven reps in your first set, you'll do as many sets as needed to complete 14 reps. For each subsequent workout, this will be your repetition goal.

Step 3

Each workout, try to reach your repetition goal in fewer sets. For instance, if you need five sets in your first workout, aim for your goal in four sets in your next session. After five weeks, repeat the entire process. But in order to keep improving, do the exercise while holding dumbbells at your sides.