It is poor gymnastics when the main object is to expend
a certain number of foot-pounds of energy to secure
increase in cardiac and pulmonary activity, without
care being taken that these organs are in a favorable
condition to meet the increased demand put upon them.
It is poor gymnastics if we desire to astound the
world by nicely finished and smoothly gliding combinations
of complex movements fit to be put into the repertoire
of a juggler, or by exhibitions of strength vying with
those of a Sandow, if we do not take into consideration
the effects upon the vital functions.
“Look at these fellows,” said the physician,
“built like giants and rotten inside!”
True, he was speaking of a lot of big negroes, but
he found the same condition in others—men
with stiff muscles and slow movements, men with shoulders
pulled forward and no chest expansion, breathing wholly
with their abdomens. As he put it, “Those
men will to-morrow be the recruits for another army,
the one which fills the tuberculosis hospitals.”
What we want is suppleness, chest expansion, resistive
force, and endurance; and these do not come from great
bulging knots of muscle nor from extraordinary feats
of strength. Rapid shifts from severe training
to a life of ease and indulgence is not Nature’s
process. It is not the way in which she carries
on her work. Every step she makes is a little
one. She seems never to reckon time as an essential
in her economy. We should heed the lesson.
The man who eats, drinks, and neglects all care of
himself for a year, and then rushes madly into a period
of severe physical exercise and reduction, may at
the end of the month, if he possesses sufficient vitality,
come out feeling fine. But if he repeats the
process of letting himself go, Nature puts on the fat
more and more and a second severe reduction becomes
necessary. And it is only a question of time
as to the exhaustion of any man’s vitality through
these extremes.
Any one who has had the opportunity of talking with
the men in authority who are bearing the burden of
fitting a nation for the present emergency cannot
fail to be impressed with the fact that time is the
great element. We must really prepare our men,
we must make them fit in the shortest space of time
that will accomplish the result. And we must
conserve our man-power. It is no longer a question
of putting on such severe work as shall weed out all
but the physical giants; we are not trying (as seemed
to be the idea in the first Plattsburg camps, before
the war) to make the going so stiff as to leave us
only 50 per cent. of hardened men. We want every
man who can be brought along rapidly into condition,
and not the strongest only. Hence the problem
takes on a new phase.
