LEARNING BY DEGREES.
Any out-door or vigorous exercise to which a girl is unaccustomed it is best she should be content to learn by degrees. This is the best rule for pleasure as well as for health. If you take so long a tramp to-day that you cannot walk again for a week because you became "tired to death," the walk was of no benefit to you, but a positive injury. You have overstrained your muscles, you feel exhausted, and you conclude that walking for pleasure is hard work. There is "no fun in getting played out," you say.
Surely not. But you have mistaken the cause of your failure to find "the fun." You began by trying to do too much at first. If you have heretofore been lazy, and have ridden everywhere, when you should have used the means of locomotion which nature has given you, you had better begin by doing only a short distance—perhaps only a mile a day—at first. Do not take any risk of tiring yourself. The distance can be gradually increased, and this course will so harden and develop the muscles used that no sense of fatigue need be felt at any time. Instead, you feel the pleasure that comes of being able to do what you undertake.
The same rule holds with regard to rowing, riding, or any form of sport or bodily training. "Begin with a moderate amount, and keep it up persistently until you become used to it;" this is what all common-sense authorities say on the subject. One's muscles are usually tired after an exercise, just because they are unused to it and don't understand their work. They are like lazy little servants, who need to be taught their duty and forced to do it.
