Dt. Bill Orban - creator of the 5BX plan

The following is an extract from a more extensive article published in the 'Ottawa Citizen' Monday, July 15, 2002. Text and photos © The Ottawa Citizen. Reproduced with permission.

He may also have been the first boy from Regina to play football for the arch-rival Winnipeg Blue Bombers, a decision he says he never regretted, even though he blew out his knee the year he played for them, in 1945, ending a promising athletic career.

"That was the end of professional sports for me, when the knee went," Mr. Orban says when we reach the cafeteria. "Things might have gone very differently for me, although today, of course, I think it's not a bad thing.

"I have devoted my life to academics, to research, and I have quite enjoyed it. Looking back, I wouldn't have had it any other way.".....

.....Mr. Orban says he is now on the verge of another first. It is the culmination of a lifetime's work, a scientific discovery that could fundamentally change the field of human kinetics, and no doubt be as controversial as the pioneering research he did in the 1950s.....

.....Bill Orban was born in Regina in 1922, the youngest son of Hungarian immigrant parents. His father was a construction worker, and from a young age, Bill excelled at sports.

"In high school I signed up for every sport going, I couldn't get enough," he says. "Hockey and football were my favourites, but I did anything, track, swimming, you couldn't stop me from trying something."

He also did well academically at the Jesuit high school he attended, and in 1941 he was offered a hockey scholarship to the University of California, in Berkeley. He enrolled there in the engineering program, because of his strength in mathematics, but discovered on his first day at the Berkeley campus that the university had something called a physical education department.

He switched his program and quickly became engrossed with the new subject material.

"Dad has always been intrigued by how things work," says his son, Bill Orban Jr. "How does the human body work? What makes it perform? What do elite athletes possess, that other people don't. Those questions have driven him his whole life."......

......When he arrived at the University of Illinois in 1953 to begin work on a PhD, he was a young man already consumed by those questions his son says have driven him his whole life. The university was at the forefront of the study of energetics -- how energy is used by the body to make it perform -- and Mr. Orban virtually lived in the energetics lab.

He puttered around among the treadmills and the wall clocks; filling oxygen bags to figure out a person's maximum oxygen intake; using his son, Bill Jr. as the test subject for many experiments.

"I was his guinea pig," remembers Bill Jr. "I had to run on this treadmill, to the point of exhaustion, so dad could measure my oxygen intake. We did it in the evenings and weekends, when everyone else in the lab had gone."

After receiving his PhD, Mr. Orban could have stayed in the United States. There were job offers, many of them good ones, at large universities that were about to establish their own physical education departments.

Instead, he returned to Canada, where he was hired in 1956 by the Department of National Defence. There, he was asked to devise a fitness training program for RCAF pilots, many of whom were posted to far-flung northern communities with little or no recreational facilities. The government of the day estimated as many as a third of its pilots were unfit to fly.

What Mr. Orban came up with, two years later, was the 5BX fitness plan. It was a revolutionary fitness program that put forth the claim, for the first time, that you did not need sustained, rigorous exercise to become fit. Rather, it could be accomplished using five simple exercises, in as little time as 15 minutes a day, three days a week.

The premise for 5BX came to Mr. Orban in Illinois, when he noticed his son's maximum oxygen intake did not improve significantly, even as he became more skilled on the treadmill. He also noticed that certain elite athletes -- Jesse Owens was tested in the energetics lab at the University of Illinois -- did not show improvements in their fitness levels after lengthy bouts of exercise.

Perhaps length of time wasn't as important as previously thought. Perhaps the intensity of the exercise was more important.

"Everybody in the field assailed Bill when 5BX came out," says Dr. Jean Kozak, a senior researcher at SCO Health Service, who has known Mr. Orban for years. "It took tremendous strength of conviction to withstand that onslaught, but in the end, he was proven right. Bill saw what no one else had seen before."

The federal government went on to sell 23 million copies of the 5BX booklet. It was translated into 13 languages. The program was sold to the American air force for $2 million alone.

Bill Orban, a federal public servant with six children and a seventh on the way, did not even receive a bonus. He was acknowledged on the credit page of the book, and 20 years later, after reading a magazine story about Mr. Orban, a professor in British Columbia sent him $1 because, says Mr. Orban: "He wanted me to be able to say I got something out of it."

It may not have made him any money, but the 5BX program made Bill Orban's reputation. The University of Saskatchewan came calling when it wanted to set up a physical education program, and Mr. Orban quit the government to return to his native province.

There, among his many administrative duties as dean of the new department, he set up the Saskatchewan Growth Study, a study that is internationally recognized as one of the most important studies of physical development (it tracked the growth of 200 boys from the age of seven to 17) ever devised.

"Bill is one of Canada's great, pioneering researchers," says Dr. Kozak. "He's one of those rare researchers who loves to share, who loves the camaraderie of academic research. He's not in it for personal gain, and I doubt if he has ever been disenchanted with what he's doing."

His zeal and passion were infectious. His students went on to become professors, or deans, themselves. One, Russ Kisby, created the Participaction program for the Trudeau government, using elements of his old professor's 5BX program.

He became an evangelical proponent of physical fitness, interviewed for books and magazine articles, always willing to show the proper way to do a situp or a pushup. He practised what he preached too, working out every day, running 14 kilometres a day until he was 73. He now makes do with a daily, three-kilometre walk, augmented occasionally by a 12-kilometre bike ride.

He returned to Ottawa in 1966 to become a professor, and then dean, in the University of Ottawa's department of human kinetics. His children grew and prospered. Bill Jr. played nine seasons in the Chicago Blackhawks organization. Gerald became a business consultant. Jim, another son, is a vice-president of the Citizen.

And along the way he kept wondering, kept mulling over, some of the lingering mysteries of human kinetics and physical fitness. Why, for example, was maximum oxygen intake considered the benchmark of physical fitness, when many people could show marked improvement in fitness, without any significant change in their oxygen intake?

Why was there no way, mathematically, to show how fit a person was, or exactly how fit they could become? The components of a mathematical equation -- distance, time, energy -- would seem to be there. Why was there so much guesswork?

Bill Orban continued, into his ninth decade, to mull over those questions of energy and performance, of speed and distance, of how the human body works, in a mechanical sense, and why physical amelioration was not a readily attainable goal.

And then one day, he says, it just came to him. Like a scream. The mathematical formula that would unlock everything. The answer to his mystery.

The answer Bill Orban says he has found, after a lifetime's worth of research, flows naturally from the 5BX program. In that book, written 34 years ago, Mr. Orban was looking for a better way to achieve physical fitness.

Today, he believes he has found the "perfect" way.

"With this new program," says Mr. Orban, "a person can calculate, mathematically, how fit they can potentially be. There is no guesswork. It isn't a range. You can figure out exactly how fit you can be."

What's more, you can also calculate, almost to the stride, what has to be done to reach that level of "optimum physical fitness." You don't have to run five kilometres, if four will do. You won't have to spend 30 minutes on a stationary bike, if the last five minutes accomplish nothing.

The potential uses of such a discovery are too many to list, although the benefits to the elderly are of special significance. It was while doing research at the Bruyère centre, after retiring as a professor, that Mr. Orban came up with the final mathematical equations for achieving "perfect physical fitness."

"I believe what Bill has come up with is revolutionary, and will change some basic assumptions in the field of human kinetics," says Dr. Kozak. "A lot of it stems from the research he did for us, on how you come up with an exercise program for the frail and elderly.

"Before Bill came along, there wasn't even a way you could test a bedridden patient. This work is just as pioneering as the 5BX program was."

Dr. Kozak says it will also be just as controversial. If what Mr. Orban has invented is as billed (and he won't reveal the mathematical formulas until a scientific paper is published, likely next year), then it will cause a groundshift change in human kinetics.

A person's maximum oxygen intake, long considered the "gold standard" in physical fitness, will be replaced by a mathematical formula for "performance-energetics capacity." That change alone will invalidate hundreds of doctoral theses and dozens of scientific assumptions.

In Mr. Orban's words, there will be a "hell of a squawk" when his research is published. But if the 5BX controversy left him chastened, or cautious, there is little sign of it.

This is his answer to a question on what the new discovery will mean for the elderly: "Well," he says, and then pauses as if the question confuses him. "It will mean everything. Just everything. We won't have to put up with frailty. There is no scientific reason for it."

And then he laughs at what he has just said, and how it must sound. As if it were some sort of boast, instead of the simple truth he has been searching for his whole life, the scientific proof for what he has long accepted as tenets of faith -- that we can all become physically fit; that it is maddeningly simple; that the human body can be ameliorated, in less time than it takes to cook a microwave dinner; that the key to a better life is right here, buried somewhere in the trial times of elite athletes and the maximum oxygen intake of young boys.

"I finally have it," he says, after telling me frailty is about to become old-fashioned. "I believe I finally have it."