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
But fortunately that same exercise also helps make better blood, gets
the entire lungs into action, quickens the activity of the other vital
organs, and so tones up the whole man, that, if the exercise is taken
daily and is kept up, disorder, unless very deep-seated, disappears.
It is well known that when the system, from any cause, gets run down,
disease is more likely to enter, and slower at being shaken off. Thousands
and hundreds of thousands of men and women have hard work, mental strain,
fret and anxiety, daily, and for years together--indeed, scarcely do
anything to lighten the tension in this direction. They tell you they are
subject to headache or dyspepsia, or other disorder, as if it was out of
the question to think of preventing it. But had the work been so arranged,
as it nearly always could be--far oftener than most persons think--to
secure daily an hour for vigorous muscular exercise for all the parts, this
running down would, in most instances, never come. The sharp, hot work,
till the muscles are healthily tired, insures the good digestion, the
cleared brain, the sound sleep, the buoyant spirits.
The president of one of the largest banks in this country told the
writer that, disappointed one summer in not getting a run to Europe,
reflection told him that one marked benefit such jaunts had brought him
was from the increased sleep he was enabled to get, that thereupon he
determined on longer sleeps at home. He got them, and found, as he well
put it, that he could "fight better." Beset all day long with men
wanting heavy loans, that fighting tone, that ability to say "no" at the
right time and in a way which showed he meant it, must have not only
added to his own well-being, but to the bank's protection as well.
Again, many men are liable to occasionally have sudden and very
protracted spells of head-work, where sleep and almost everything else
must give way, so that the business in hand may be gotten through with.
"Tom Brown" told the writer that, when in Parliament, he could work
through a whole week together on but four hours of sleep a night, and be
none the worse for it, provided he could have all he wanted the next
week, and that since he was twenty-five he had hardly known a sick day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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