Personal hygiene and physical training for women

by Anna M. Galbraith

During a contraction each muscle-cell shortens and thickens, giving off some of its substance into the lymph-space which surrounds it, and absorbing food, consisting of carbohydrates and oxygen, from the surrounding plasma. Exercise improves nutrition by the rhythmic, automatic massage caused by the contraction and relaxation of the muscles on the vessels which they contain, while warmth favors the elimination of waste matter.

It has been proved by Hawk, of the University of Pennsylvania, in his experiments on the blood-count of an athlete in training, that various forms of active muscular exercise produce an average increase of 16.8 per cent. in the number of red corpuscles. When exercise is long-continued, the rate of increase lessens, and, further, the number may be decreased in greatly prolonged violent exercise. The explanation of this is that a large number of cells lie inactive in various tissues of the body until they are brought into the circulation by muscular exercise.

PLATE III
Senegalese woman. (From Stratz, after Dr. Rykens, in Shufeldt’s “Studies of the Human Form.”)

Athletic training has been called “mainly heart training.” Exercises of endurance do not require supreme efforts, but they do accelerate the action of the heart and lungs, and the aggregate of work done is very much greater than in exercises of strength, but the exercise must be sufficiently active to provide for the free circulation of lymph, which is carried on mainly through the massage of muscular contraction.

If a walk be so listless that there is not sufficient movement of the muscles to overcome the pernicious influence of gravity acting on the column of blood contained in the veins of the abdomen, thighs, and legs, the vessel-walls may become permanently overstretched and varicose. The exercise must be sufficiently active for the muscular contractions to empty the lymph-spaces and hasten the circulation. It usually raises the general bodily, as well as the local, temperature of the parts, and so facilitates the removal of the waste-products.

The acquirement of skill lies in the training of the nerve rather than the muscle. A simple movement requires only a nerve impulse to the acting muscle, while a complicated movement requires a wave of impulses to the accessory and antagonistic groups of muscles which control and steady the movement. It is easy to see how, in the first efforts to perform complicated movements, the contractions of the muscles will be jerky and inaccurate, many useless muscles will be employed, and the expenditure of nervous energy will be out of all proportion to the result, and these first attempts at new feats of skill rapidly exhaust the attention. This is well illustrated in the first efforts of a child learning to walk.

Exercises of strength and skill train that alertness of mind so essential in ordinary life. They shorten the period between thought and action, producing what is known as “presence of mind.”

The Relative Proportions of a Perfect Female Form.—The relative proportions of a perfect female form, as deduced by modern sculptors from the Greek statues, are as follows: With a height of five feet five inches, the weight should be one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. The woman should, with the arms extended, measure from tip to tip of the middle finger, five feet five inches; that is, exactly her own height. The length of the hand should be one-tenth, the foot one-seventh, and the diameter of the chest one-fifth that of the height. The distance from the perineum to the ground should measure the same as from the perineum to the top of the head. The knee should be exactly midway between the perineum and the heel. The distance from the elbow to the little finger should be the same as the distance from the elbow to the middle of the chest. The measurement from the top of the head to the chin should be the same as the length of the foot, and there should be the same distance between the chin and the armpits. A woman of this height should measure twenty-nine inches around the waist, thirty-four inches around the bust, if taken under the arms, and forty-three inches if measured over them. The upper arm should measure thirteen inches and the wrist six inches. The calf of the leg should measure fourteen and one-half inches, the thigh twenty-five inches, and the ankle eight inches.

The table on page [297], compiled by Dr. Weisse, the Medical Statistician of the New York Life Insurance Company, “A Table of Standard Weights for Women,” is based on the average weights of over 58,000 insured women, and is given to show the normal relation between the height and weight. A point of extreme interest in the table, and one that is not generally recognized, is the variation in weight, independent of the height, at different ages.