characteristics. With my air-inflated shoes, it won't happen, because air maintains its characteristics always."

Football helmets, on the other hand, are too good. "The helmet really protects the head great, so great that people use it as a spring to butt into other people. All the force is transmitted to the neck, and you get neck injuries. If you took helmets out of the game completely, you would have fewer injuries, because nobody would dare to hit so hard with the head. You have more neck injuries in football than you do in rugby, because they think the head's protected."

The possibilities seem endless, and are not confined to sports. Ariel's biomechanics can tell an insurance company if a claimant is faking injury. The circuitry he developed to link his computer elements together may have applications in long-distance medical

Gideons Bible What,

in thefuturefor individual sports? Computer consultant Gideon Ariel gives his opinion:

SWIMMING. "We will see a lot of changes in the future, especially in style. Swimming, basically you're talking about drag in the water and water resistance. You want to maintain a minimum amount of drag in the water and develop your muscles to the level where you can maintain motion in isokinetic fashion, that is, at a constant velocity. Records will be broken."

BICYCLING. "We will see development in two areas. First, they will improve the bicycles. I believe sprockets should be variable sprockets, as your muscles vary, not symmetrically. Second, there will be more learned about using arms and legs to contribute to motion."

RACQUETBALL. "There's a lot of injuries in racquetball because the shoes are not designed for the floor. You get abrupt stops due to friction on the floor, causing rupture of the Achilles tendon, the most common injury. Characteristics that are important are reaction time, quickness and anticipation."

BASKETBALL. "In racquetball, you don't have time to change your decision. In basketball you do. You can catch the ball and hold it and make a decision later on. It's a different kind of reaction time."

TENNIS. "A beginner always focuses on the balllooks at the ball, runs to the place. The champion focuses someplace on the shoulders, and he makes decisions before the guy even hits the ball, so he has so many more milliseconds to make a decision. Sometimes you'll see Connors or Borg running to the left, and the ball comes to the right, and he looks like an idiot. But if he didn't have such early cues, he wouldn't be such a great player."

BASEBALL. "There are probably too many cleats on the shoes, and they contribute to injury of the knees, because if the foot doesn't give, something else has to give. Also, the cleats are probably in the wrong position."

SKIING. "When they made ski bindings so good they wouldn't break, everybody started breaking their shin bones. Because there is energy there, and it has to go somewhere, it will give where it is weakest. They might be a good idea, but I'd like to see the research that would show one way or another."

monitoring equipment of the type NASA attaches to astronauts. His current pet project is specialized work shoes.

Any one of these would be enough to keep most businesses thriving, and Ariel has reason for optimism. "People say it will become a multimillion-dollar company," he says with a big-hearted smile. "And I say, so what? When you die, does God remember you richer? There's no reason to go crazy. We don't like to wear fancy clothes, and we don't like to go to big parties, and we don't like to have $5-million homes. We have everythink we need. No matter what we learn here, we can't add days to life. All we can do is add life to days." 0

Paul Bernstein is a California.freelance writer with the joints of a 20-year-old.

DANCE. "Gymnastics, dance and figure skating will all require more flexibility in the future, more strength, more explosive type of activity with the body as compared with the past when it was very graceful."

JOGGING. "There are now in this country thousands and thousands of podiatrists, and they cannot keep up with their schedules, because so many people come and complain of problems, in their knees, problems in their ankles, problems in their hips, problems in their shoulders. The body does not need to have the ability to run ten miles a day. A marathon is a great sport, but it's very damaging."

WALKING. "Walking is a very good sport that probably will catch on in the future, because jogging has a lot of stress on the body. The reason that walking's better, from an anatomical point of view, is thatyou don't have the shock every time you hit the ground. Walking is like rolling eggs-you build energy, and you let the body fall; you build energy, and you let the body fall. Running is like a bouncing ball. We found from our research that if you walk five miles, it maybe takes you longer but the calories you burn are the same as jogging five miles. But the damage that jogging does is more. Olympic walking is a technical event where you use the hip a lot, and you use the straight leg, and it's not as healthy as straight walking and is not more healthy than jogging. Walking fast is the best activity for endurance, especially for people over 40."

CHILDREN. "Any sport is good for kids as long as they are not doing only this sport. They should have a variety and work on their total fitness. If you want to play tennis, there's no reason why you shouldn't jog also, do exercises, some gymnastics, some weight-lifting."

OLDER ADULTS. "The older you get, the more you have to shift your program from a stress-producing exercise to more endurance-producing exercises with less stress, less shock and more flexibility. Because aging is involved also with chemical change in the ligaments and tendons, you lose flexibility, and when you lose flexibility, it's easier to break joints, dislocate joints, tear muscles. From sprinting at 20, you go to maybe five-mile jogs in the 40s. If you overstress the physiology, like people today running marathons all the time, the anatomy cannot take it. You could become a great cardiovascular specimen-and be in a wheelchair." 0

PASSAGES 1982