How to Get Strong and How to Stay SoBlaikie, William
Science
How to Get Strong and How to Stay So
Blaikie, William
Physical education and training
If walking and horseback parties, instead of being, as now, well-nigh
unheard of among our girls, were every-day affairs, and there was not a
point of interest within ten miles which every girl, and woman too, did
not know well, it would prove a benefit both to them and to the next
generation which would be almost incalculable.
Girls should also learn to run. Few of them are either easy or graceful
runners; but it is an accomplishment quickly learned; and begun at a
short distance and slow jog, and continued until the girl thinks nothing
of running a mile in seven minutes, and that without once touching a
heel to the ground, it will do more than almost any other known exercise
to make her graceful and easy on her feet, and also to enlarge and
strengthen her lungs. A roomy school-yard, a bit of lawn, or a
gymnasium-track, either of these is all the place needed in which
to learn this now almost obsolete accomplishment. The gymnasium is
perhaps the best place, as there they can wear costumes which do
not impede freedom of movement.
If besides these things the girl or woman will determine that, as much
as possible of the time each day in which she is sitting down, she will
sit with head and neck up, trunk erect, and with shoulders low, and that
whenever she stands or walks she will at all times be upright, she will
shortly find that she is getting to be far straighter than she was, and,
if she has a larger and finer chest than formerly, it will be nothing
strange, for she has simply been using one of the means to get it. If a
still greater variety of daily work is desired, she can select it from
Chapter XII.; the exercises on the pulley-weights and on the apparatus
sketched in Fig. 8 being especially desirable.
_Daily Exercise for Business Men._
And what daily work shall the business man take? His aim is not to
lay on muscle, not to become equal to this or that athletic feat,
but simply to so exercise as to keep his entire physical and mental
machinery in good working order, and himself equal to all demands
likely to be made on him.
First he, like the young man or the woman, should make sure of the ten
or fifteen minutes' work before breakfast. Not through the long day
again will he be likely to have another good opportunity for physical
exercise, at least until evening, and then he will plead that he is too
tired. But in the early morning, fresh and rested, and with a few
minutes at his disposal, he can, as Bryant did, without serious or
violent effort, work himself great benefit, the good effect of which
will stay by him all the day. If he has in his room the few bits of
apparatus suggested in the chapter on "Home Gymnasiums," he will be
better off than Bryant was, in that he can have a far wider range of
exercise, and that all ready at hand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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