EXERCISE FOR REPAIR
In mature life exercise only for repair
After the body has reached maturity, or attained its full growth, the only exercise needed is for repair. This it must have or Nature will inflict her inexorable sentence in some form of congestion.
Why the "trunk" requires exercise
In various industrial and professional pursuits the legs, neck, and arms are used enough to keep them in a fair state of repair. That part of the body, therefore, that suffers most for want of motion, or exercise, is the trunk. In this part of the anatomy are located the vital organs controlling not only the circulation and the oxidation of blood, but also those organs upon whose normal action depend solely the questions of digestion, assimilation of food, and elimination of waste.
If properly nourished the body will demand a certain amount of exercise
If the food is selected, combined, and proportioned so as to produce chemical harmony in the stomach, and to meet the requirements of age, temperature of environment, and work, the body will be kept sufficiently charged with energy to demand a certain amount of exercise. If the command is obeyed the body can be trained to work automatically, as it were, but where the vocation is sedative, or prevents obedience to these demands, the trunk should be exercised in the open air from thirty to forty minutes daily by flexing, tensing, twisting and bending in every possible way, long enough and rapidly enough to double the normal heart action and inhalations of air.