Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at Sixty — John Shaqi
Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at SixtyFletcher, Horace
Science
Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at Sixty
Fletcher, Horace
Mastication; Nutrition
The reports include a test in what is termed "deep-knee bending," or
squatting on the heels and then lifting the body to full height as many
times as possible. John H. Granger, of the Battle Creek Sanatorium
staff, did this feat 5,002 times consecutively in two hours and
nineteen minutes and could have continued. He then ran down a flight of
steps to the swimming-pool, plunged in and had a swim, slept sweetly
and soundly for the usual time, and showed no signs of soreness or
other disability afterwards.
Doctor Wagner gave his strenuous contribution to our knowledge of
possibilities of endurance by holding his arms out horizontally for
200 minutes without rest--three hours and twenty minutes. At the end
of that time he showed no signs of fatigue, and stopped only because
of the weariness shown by those who were watching and counting the
minutes. These statements seem like exaggerations, but they are not.
Both of these tests can be tried by any one in the privacy of his or
her own bedroom.
Doctor Anderson, Director of the Yale Gymnasium, taking advantage of
the cue offered by the Yale experiments, which he superintended,
practised Fletcherizing in all its branches. At the end of six years
he put the muscles thus purified to the test, with the result that
he added fifteen pounds of pure muscle to a frame that never carried
more than 135 pounds before in the half century of its existence, and
demonstrated that the same progressive recuperation that I have enjoyed
is open and available to others who have passed middle life.
Mr. Stapleton, one of Professor Chittenden's volunteers, grasped
the same valuable cue while serving as one of the heavy-weight
test-subjects in the Yale experiments. He reduced his waist measurement
to thirty inches and a half, increased his chest measurement to
forty-four inches; and has refined his physique until his ribs show
clearly through his flesh, while his muscles mount tall and strong
where muscle is needed in the economy of efficiency. In the meantime,
without training other than that connected with his teaching, he
increased the total of his strength and endurance more than one hundred
per cent.; and reduced his amount of food by nearly, if not quite,
half--as have also Doctor Anderson and myself.
MY ENDURANCE TEST AT YALE
These are merely typical cases of distinguished and measured
improvement.
How the movement went on from step to step others have told, and I need
not follow it further here.
Two years after I began my experiments my strength and endurance had
increased beyond my wildest expectation. On my fiftieth birthday I rode
nearly two hundred miles on my bicycle over French roads, and came home
feeling fine. Was I stiff the next day? Not at all, and I rode fifty
miles the next morning before breakfast in order to test the effect of
my severe stunt.[F]
[F] Detailed account of this test is given in _The New Glutton or
Epicure_, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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