Bonnie Prudden's After Fifty Fitness Guide

""It's pain that ages usnot years,'' argues Prudden (Pain Erasure, etc.), fitness adviser to the Eisenhower administration, in this book that is brimming with almost 200 helpful exercises (illustrated with photographs and cross-referenced in charts for ailments and professions) to relieve pain and build everything from muscle to self-image. She debunks myths, such as ``you can't teach an old dog new tricks'' and thatsex ends at 50 or 60, but her tedious diet advises listing and weighing each morsel, and her theory of myotherapy (trigger-point therapy) for lower back pain is a combination of common sense and shiatsu. The text is disorganized, full of simplistic statements (``Birth is very hard on women but it's hard on babies too'') and irrelevancies about herself and the sad state of children's fitness in the U.S., and does not focus solely on readers over 50. This is the first book in the publisher's Good Life series, edited by Butler, chairman of geriatric medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. (October 31)