The ideal toward which every community is working
is the establishment, as an integral part of it, of
a local fitness plant. This includes first, playgrounds
laid out for all recreational sports, in their season.
The ideal playground system will have enough room in
walks and landscape-gardening for park development—sufficient
to meet the community’s maximum needs.
Community physical-fitness centers are growing up
in which an adjacent lake or river provides facilities
for rowing, canoeing, and recreational enjoyment through
breathing the fresh air, while taking regular physical,
conditioning exercises.
Such an ideal community plant has proven by no means
a vision incapable of realization. To-day men
and women realize painfully the need for one in their
home community and are prevented from the fulfilment
of their dream by only two obstacles—lack
of funds and adequate organization of the plan.
This work and these centers offer the greatest possibilities
in the Americanization scheme, perfection of which
is a paramount duty for this country.
[Illustration: Setting-up work
of A company of one hundred]
[Illustration: Doctor Anderson leading
A group in the Yale gymnasium]
Not only do such plants transpose the astonishingly
large percentage of the physically unfit of our foreign
and domestic population and reclaim those whose physical
imperfections have either become evident through the
draft, or which are not known, but it affords the surest
possible means of interesting this large element of
our population in American institutions, of attracting
them to the soundest and most beautiful features of
American life, and of convincing them of their comradeship
in the strength and sinew of American manhood; in short,
of building the foundations of democracy on a base
as stable as the eternal granite hills.
The Senior Service program starts with setting-up
exercises which open the chest, gently stimulate the
heart, and start the blood coursing through the system,
and follows with progressive walking, a little hill-climbing,
and, later in the development, with some weight-carrying
exercises. The system renews the resistive force
of the body, tones up the muscles, opens the chest
cavity so that the heart and lungs have more room
and the breath is deeper and better, gives general
exercise to the various muscles which have become
more or less atrophied from disuse, and brings about
a marked improvement in the mental outlook and in
the animal spirits.
The system is a combination of setting-up exercises
with outdoor work, all carefully and precisely laid
out after twenty years of experience in conditioning
men. It should be followed absolutely, not partially
or occasionally. It is far from severe.
Its strength lies in the cumulative effect rather
than in any special effort at any one time.
