CHAPTER XII.
EXERCISE.
Several men were riding home together in a tramcar on their way from business, and were discussing their health, as so many people do nowadays. They were all looking tired and depressed, and on comparing notes found that they were all suffering from the same complaint, “nervous exhaustion due to overwork.” At least, that is what they called it. They were tired when they went to bed, and just as tired when they got up in the morning, and had no energy for their day’s work. Why the latter should have proved too much for them was a mystery, as their hours were not long by any means, and they were all in the prime of life.
As a matter of fact, they were not suffering from nervous exhaustion at all, but from poisoning, the result of a sedentary occupation and want of exercise. These men had an excess of waste products in their system, retarding their digestions and clogging their energies.
Exercise at middle age.
It is particularly at or just before middle age that the want of exercise so frequently manifests itself. Most people keep up their games or their walking until the age of thirty or forty. It is after that stage that they tend to settle down and take things easily. If they would only reduce their diet at the same time little harm might accrue, but unfortunately in many instances, as we have already pointed out, they begin to eat more instead of less. The result is that we are confronted with the problem of increased intake and diminished output. We often see men of strong physique who have given up games and reduced their walking to a minimum, and have become moody and irritable, sleepless and depressed.
This is because their systems have become loaded with a superfluity of waste matter. And the latter not only makes them headachy and tired, but if the accumulation is allowed to go on unchecked, it deranges the vital organs, the kidneys particularly, and before long may actually set up organic disease. After that the strain on the whole bodily functions becomes greater and greater, until the breaking-point is reached. For as people grow older their organs have less power of throwing off waste material, and become less able to support one another when any weakness appears.
These breakdowns are the most liable to occur in the case of athletes who have been accustomed to severe and active exercise all their lives. In them the system seems to have learned to depend, even more than in the case of other people, upon hard exercise to keep it in good condition. And when men of this type drop it too suddenly, the results are disastrous. Yet that is what so many of them tend to do. They are unable any longer to indulge in the violent games and training to which they have been accustomed, and they will not “lower themselves,” as I have heard it expressed, to take part in milder forms of recreation. Sometimes they even become too lazy to walk.
Of course, no man can be expected to keep up his running, or take part in boat races, or practise putting the weight after he has passed a certain age. Nor would it be good for him to do so. Once he has passed thirty he must begin to take things a bit more slowly, and avoid taking part in athletic contests. For racing in any form involves a mental as well as a physical strain, and few men beyond that age can stand the stress of the two combined.