Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 11

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 11

We have space but for two reports believed to be typical. Enebuske

reports on the effects of seven months' training on young women

averaging 22.3 years. The figures are based on the 50 percentile

column.

 

----------------+--------+----------------------------------+--------

| | Strength of |

|Lung | | | |right |left |Total

|capacity| legs |back |chest|forearm|forearm|Strength

----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+--------

Before training | 2.65 | 93 |65.5 | 27 | 26 | 23 | 230

After six months| 2.87 | 120 |81.5 | 32 | 28 | 25 | 293

----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+--------

 

By comparing records of what he deems standard normal growth with that

of 188 naval cadets from sixteen to twenty-one, who had special and

systematic training, just after the period of most rapid growth in

height, Beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this added a

little over an inch of stature, and that this gain as greatest at the

beginning. This increase was greatest for the youngest cadets. He

found also a marked increase in weight, nearly the same for each year

from seventeen to twenty one. This he thought more easily influenced

by exercise than height. A high vital index ratio of lung capacity to

weight is a very important attribute of good training. Beyer[1] found,

however, that the addition of lung area gained by exercise did not

keep up with the increase thus caused in muscular substance, and that

the vital index always became smaller in those who had gained weight

and strength by special physical training. How much gain in weight is

desirable beyond the point where the lung capacity increases at an

equal rate is unknown. If such measurements were applied to the

different gymnastic systems, we might be able to compare their

efficiency, which would be a great desideratum in view of the

unfortunate rivalry between them. Total strength, too, can be greatly

increased. Beyer thinks that from sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed

the average or normal increment fivefold, and he adds, "I firmly

believe that the now so wonderful performances of most of our strong

men are well within the reach of the majority of healthy men, if such

performances were a serious enough part of their ambition

to make them do the exercises necessary to develop them." Power of the

organs to respond to good training by increased strength probably

reaches well into middle life.

 

It is not encouraging to learn that, according to a recent writer,[2]

we now have seventy times as many physicians in proportion to the

general population as there are physical directors, even for the

school population alone considered. We have twice as many physicians

per population as Great Britain, four times a many as Germany, or 2

physicians, 1.8 ministers, 1.4 lawyers per thousand of the general

population; while even if all male teachers of physical training

taught only males of the military age, we should have but 0.05 of a

teacher per thousand, or if the school population alone be considered,

20 teachers per million pupils. Hence, it is inferred that the need of

wise and classified teachers in this field is at present greater than

in any other. But fortunately while spontaneous, unsystematic exercise

in a well-equipped modern gymnasium may in rare cases do harm, so far

from sharing the prejudice often felt for it by professional trainers,

we believe that free access to it without control or direction is

unquestionably a boon to youth. Even if its use be sporadic and

occasional, as it is likely to be with equal opportunity for

out-of-door exercises and especially sports, practise is sometimes

hygienic almost inversely to its amount, while even lameness from

initial excess has its lessons, and the sense of manifoldness of

inferiorities brought home by experiences gives a wholesome

self-knowledge and stimulus.

 

In this country more than elsewhere, especially in high school and

college, gymnasium work has been brought into healthful connection

with field sports and record competitions for both teams and

individuals who aspire to championship. This has given the former a

healthful stimulus although it is felt only by a picked few. Scores of

records have been established for running, walking, hurdling,

throwing, putting, swimming, rowing, skating, etc., each for various

shorter and longer distances and under manifold conditions, and for

both amateurs and professionals, who are easily accessible. These, in

general, show a slow but steady advance in this country since 1876,

when athletics were established here. In that year there was not a

single world's best record held by an American amateur, and

high-school boys of to-day could in most, though not in all lines,

have won the American championship twenty-five years ago. Of course,

in a strict sense, intercollegiate contests do not show the real

advance in athletics, because it is not necessary for a man in order

to win a championship to do his best; but they do show general

improvement.

 

We select for our purpose a few of those records longest kept. Not

dependent on external conditions like boat-racing, or on improved

apparatus like bicycling, we have interesting data of a very different

order for physical measurements. These down to present writing--July,

1906--are as follows: For the 100-yard dash, every annual record from

1876 to 1895 is 10 or 11 seconds, or between these, save in 1890,

where Owen's record of 9-4/5 seconds still stands. In the 220-yard run

there is slight improvement since 1877, but here the record of 1896

(Wefers, 21-1/5 seconds) has not been surpassed. In the quarter-mile

run, the beet record was in 1900 (Long, 47 seconds). The half-mile

record, which still stands, was made in 1895 (Kilpatrick, 1 minute

52-2/5 seconds); the mile run in 1895 (Conneff, 4 minutes 15-3/5

seconds). The running broad jump shows a very steady improvement, with

the best record in 1900 (Prinstein, 24 feet 7-1/4 inches). The running

high jump shows improvement, but less, with the record of 1895 still

standing (Sweeney, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches). The record for pole vaulting,

corrected to November, 1905, is 12 feet 132/100 inches (Dole); for

throwing the 16-pound hammer head, 100 feet 5 inches (Queckberner);

for putting the 16-pound shot, 49 feet 6 inches (Coe, 1905); the

standing high jump, 5 feet 5-1/2 inches (Ewry); for the running high

jump, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches (Sweeney). We also find that if we extend

our purview to include all kinds of records for physical achievement,

that not a few of the amateur records for activities involving

strength combined with rapid rhythm movement are held by young men of

twenty or even less.

 

In putting the 16-pound shot under uniform conditions the record has

improved since the early years nearly 10 feet (Coe, 49 feet 6 inches,

best at present writing, 1906). Pole vaulting shows a very marked

advance culminating in 1904 (Dole, 12 feet 132/100 inches). Most

marked of all perhaps is the great advance in throwing the 16-pound

hammer. Beginning between 70 and 80 feet in the early years, the

record is now 172 feet 11 inches (Flanagan, 1904). The two-mile

bicycle race also shows marked gain, partly, of course, due to

improvement in the wheel, the early records being nearly 7 minutes,

and the best being 2 minutes 19 seconds (McLean, 1903). Some of these

are world records, and more exceed professional records.[3] These, of

course, no more indicate general improvement than the steady reduction

of time in horse-racing suggests betterment in horses generally.

 

In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its

manifold forms was one of the most characteristic __EXPRESSION__s of

adolescent nature and needs. Not a single time or distance record of

antiquity has been preserved, although Grasberger[4] and other writers

would have us believe that in those that are comparable, ancient

youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in leaping and

running. While we are far from cultivating mere strength, our training

is very one-sided from the Greek norm of unity or of the ideals that

develop the body only for the salve of the soul. While gymnastics in

our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and measurements independently

of games was unknown, the ideal and motive were as different from ours

as was its method. Nothing, so far as is known, was done for

correcting the ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary defects;

and until athletics degenerated there were Do exercises for the sole

purpose of developing muscle.

 

On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk,

shoulders, and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and

ego-centric, deficient on the side of psychic impulsion, and but

little subordinated to ethical or intellectual development. Yet it

does a great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a

safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is radical revision and

coordination of various cults and theories in the light of the latest

psycho-physiological science.

 

Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The present academic zeal

for physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with

anthropometry. This important and growing department will be

represented in the ideal gymnasium of the future--First, by courses,

if not by a chair, devoted to the apparatus of measurements of human

proportions and symmetry, with a kinesological cabinet where young men

are instructed in the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers,

the sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer to plot

graphic curves, compute average errors, and tables of percentile

grades and in statistical methods, etc. Second, anatomy, especially of

muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their

physiology, with stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the

flow of blood and lymph, not excluding the development of the upright

position, and all that it involves and implies. Third, hygiene will be

prominent and comprehensive enough to cover all that pertains to

body-keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and

public hygiene--all on the basis of modern as distinct from the

archaic physiology of Ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in

1839, before this science was recreated, and the persistence of whose

concepts are an anomalous survival to-day. Mechanico-therapeutics, the

purpose and service of each chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the

value of work on stall bars with chest weights, of chinning, use of

the quarter-staff, somersaults, rings, clubs, dumb-bells, work with

straight and flexed knees on machinery, etc., will be taught. Fourth,

the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest development in

Greece to the present is full of interest and has a very high and not

yet developed culture value for youth. This department, both in its

practical and theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes

and scholarships to stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per cent of

students who are now unaffected by the influence of athletics. By

these methods the motivation of gymnastics, which now in large measure

goes to waste in enthusiasm, could be utilised to aid the greatly

needed intellectualization of those exercises which in their nature

are more akin to work than play. Indeed, Gutsmuths's first definition

of athletics was "work under the garb of youthful pleasure." So to

develop these courses that they could chiefly, if not entirely,

satisfy the requirements for the A.B. degree, would coordinate the

work of the now isolated curriculum of the training-schools with that

of the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter; but besides

its culture value, which I hold very high, such a step would prepare

for the new, important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned

profession of physical trainers. This has, moreover, great but yet

latent and even unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic

youth. Grote states that among the ancient Greeks one-half of all

education as devoted to the body, and Galton urges that they as much

excelled us as we do the African negro. They held that if physical

perfection was cultivated, moral and mental excellence would follow;

and that, without this, national culture rests on an insecure basis.

In our day there are many new reasons to believe that the best nations

of the future will be those which give most intelligent care to the body.