Читать книгу Sandow on physical training: a study in the perfect type of the human form - Eugene Sandow - Страница 8

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they are only recreative exercises and, for the most part, fitfully indulged in. Moreover, they are confined, as a rule, to the school-age, and are too often dropped when the youth passes into the first stage of manhood. It is well known, also, that they develop only the lower limbs, or the lower limbs and the right arm, leaving without its meed of exercise the left arm and upper portions of the trunk. This incomplete and imperfect unfolding of the human body it should be the design of intelligent methods of physical training to correct and to supply with the needed exercises, so as to bring about a uniform and harmonious development. Lacking this, there is seen faulty growth and weak or distorted conformation in an otherwise healthy and well-constructed frame.

In the following pages, the narrative of the career of an enthusiast in athletic pursuits, it is the design of Mr. Sandow, as well as the modest purpose of the writer, to show how effective can be even simple methods of muscular training, when scientifically imparted, in raising the human body to a high plane of physical perfection, and in making it better fitted for the all-round, every-day work of both the manual and the intellectual toiler. In physical education, as in every other laudable ambition, there are few royal roads to the signal and satisfactory attainment of one's ends. Here the sciolist, or the ill-equipped instructor, can of course make a show of juggling, and hump the muscles in indiscriminate ridges, without much reference to their practical uses, and with little benefit to the health, vigour or permanent well-being of the deluded pupil whom he affects to train. This, of course, is folly. In all our aims after physical education the great thing to bear in mind is to avoid ambitious and elaborate efforts at bodily training. The ancient Greeks and Romans would have laughed at our extensive array of apparatus,—the appurtenances of our modern gymnasia—on which we foolishly lavish large sums of money, often only to be looked at, or used for harm rather than for good. Another point is this: see that your training be not only simple but effective. In its scope let it be thorough. Physical education, as we have already hinted, is too often and incompletely directed to the accomplishment of one or two feats—notably those wrought by the exterior muscles by the use of the apparatus ordinarily in vogue in our gymnasia—without reference to the vast net-work of interior muscles, which have so much to do with bearing the strain of arduous gymnastic exercise, and have their important, set functions in the vital seat of the system. As these interior muscles are brought into harmonious play with the connected exterior folds of tissue, the athlete may pursue his exercises safely; if they are not so brought into play, as too often happens, then a break-down may be expected, and dire, often, is the result. To obviate this, Mr. Sandow's stringent caution cannot be too strongly impressed, on the young gymnast particularly, viz., that