Thirdly, supposing that this great development of muscle (chiefly muscle in the arm) is successfully attained, does it serve any practical use whatever as regards either health or use? As far as health goes, it passes the bounds of imagination to conceive that the main organs of the body will be benefited by excessive biceps, whereas as regards strength, for all purposes except the lifting and holding of weights, it is extremely doubtful whether an increase of such strength does not imply a corresponding decrease in speed and agility. The fastest runners are not those with prodigious muscles, the hardest hitters have not a swollen biceps. The test, in fact, of fitness and power of the body lies not in measurements, but in the ability to perform certain movements with correctness and rapidity, to be able to make complex movements, to be capable of endurance, and to perform such movements with economy of effort.
Many reservations must be made, however, in what appears to be an all-round condemnation, and if we criticise the system of the most prominent of the dumb-bell advocates, Mr. Sandow, we shall certainly find a great deal to praise in what he says. His remarks about practising before a mirror, for instance, are excellent, since to observe the play of the muscles is, or ought to be to anyone with an eye for movement, of immense interest, and takes off (this he does not say) from the unspeakable tedium of the exercise itself. So, too, when he advises cold water, open windows, moderate diet, abstention from anything which disagrees, he has nought which is not advisable. Equally true, too, is his insistence on attention of the most fixed order to the work in hand, though perhaps he does not sufficiently allow for the period in which a set exercise indulged in so often as some of his, must, almost necessarily, become mechanical and automatic. For just as it would be impossible that a practised player at any game should consciously attend to what he is doing (he sees, for instance, a ball which is certainly a half-volley, but does not know he thinks about half-volleys at all, yet hits correctly), so after a time a dumb-bell exercise becomes (or should become) mechanical. That perhaps is its strength: that certainly is its weakness. For this reason: all exercises are, or should be, exercises towards an end. When that end is attained, there is no longer any need for them, unless the end be merely to alter the circulation of the blood; and something fresh, for the sake of stimulus and interest, should be begun. By these dumb-bell exercises, strength sufficient for the purposes of life can be no doubt attained; but after that, unless our mission is to lift weights, they are superfluous. That the muscles of the arm, that all muscles in fact should be in a state of efficiency is highly desirable, but in a sedentary life, in the life for which exercises are most obviously useful, it is the large muscle-areas, the muscles which the stillness of sitting tends to degenerate, that should be kept up to the scratch. The inability, in fact, to sit habitually in a chair in a position in which the lungs and heart will act naturally, is a greater defect than the inability to raise 56 lbs. above the head in the left hand. Practically perfect health is compatible with an abnormally weak forearm and wrist: abnormal weakness, on the other hand, of the muscles of the chest and abdomen always implies imperfect health.
Finally, the personal equation is not sufficiently considered in any system of exercise that has come across our notice. There is Chart I. for children, Chart II. for boys between 14 and 18, Chart III. for adults. Any system of weight-moving, such as dumb-bells, will never satisfactorily fill such a need as here exists, unless the teacher will see and examine personally (provided also he has the requisite knowledge) each one of his pupils. A thick-set boy of fifteen, though he weighs the same as a tall lanky boy of the same age, requires a perfectly different set of exercises to produce in him fit and robust manhood, while the tall lanky boy may be injured by exercises that are good for the average boy of his age and weight. But that there are exercises which are practically good for everybody we fully believe. Of this we treat later. Again, for people who wish to excel at games, to begin with dumb-bells seems a mistake, for it teaches first the slow movement, whereas speed of movement should come first. That they give bulk to the muscles is undeniable, and there is a great deal to be said for bulk, if only it has the power of speed. In any case these dumb-bell and developer exercises should be alternated with quick, full movements, so as to preserve the speed of the action of the muscles.
Now most people who feel the need of, and are better for, regular exercise are accustomed, when they have leisure and opportunity, to play some sort of game; and how enormously this tendency is increasing is shown, to take one instance alone, by the huge number of golf links which have sprung up all over the kingdom, and in particular round and close to London, accessible to the city man in summer for a short round perhaps when he returns home in the evening, and certainly used by him on Saturday afternoon and probably Sunday. He does not, as a matter of fact, hurry home in order to practise his beloved dumb-bells, he is not late for dinner because he cannot leave his dumb-bells, but because he will finish his round at golf. A game, in fact, is more enjoyed by most people than mere exercise for the sake of exercise. The dumb-bells are used when a game is not to be had. But these dumb-bell exercises, as we have pointed out, do not, except in so far as they may strengthen an inordinately weak muscle, improve or help a man’s game, unless we consider weight-lifting a game. Six months’ continuous exercise of the slow pushing and pulling order to overcome the inertia of the dumb-bell or the contraction of india-rubber will probably not lengthen his drive, since they do not teach speed of movement. That the long driver at golf may be very strong is beyond question, but it is equally beyond question that the professional strong man will incessantly be out-driven by a player whose muscles are half the size of the other’s, because the latter has cultivated swiftness of movement, the former has not. It is for this among other reasons that in the chapter on exercises we advocate, at any rate, until great speed has become easy, not the use of dumb-bells—anyhow not of dumb-bells of more than nominal weight—but a system of brisk, full movements, increasing not in regard to the resistance to be overcome, but in their own complexity. They require the same concentration of attention, but they are not fatiguing, although they give full exercise to the muscles. For it is a great error to suppose, as so many do, that fatigue is a criterion of exercise, that one has not had enough exercise, in fact, until one feels tired. Indeed, the converse, or something like the converse, is more nearly true, namely, that exercise which leaves one tired is either excessive or more probably is of the wrong sort. Fatigue is, perhaps, necessary if very severe exercise has been gone through, but it is a thing not to be sought after, and if possible to be avoided. As far as it is concerned with the muscles themselves, it shows that they have been overtaxed (an automatic signal put out by nature, saying, “Stop”), but probably in many cases feelings of fatigue arise from other causes, and a very little exercise will produce it, not because the muscles are overtaxed, but because there is something wrong with other organs of the body. Morning fatigue, the disinclination to get up after a good night’s rest, not from laziness pure and simple, but from genuine languor, is an extreme instance of this. But the dumb-bell user will not get over this by putting in a vast amount of work for the biceps and triceps, though a couple of minutes spent in using certain larger muscle-areas, with the accompaniment it may be of massage, which one can easily administer himself, will probably largely alleviate it. But instead he flexes the arm a hundred and twenty times, lifting to each shoulder, perhaps, in all a dead weight of 960 lbs.
Furthermore, these dumb-bell exercises, in which the weight of the dumb-bells is gradually increased, become after a year or two very severe indeed, and one would like to know the collective opinion of doctors on such a point as this. Can it be good for a man of forty-five or fifty to manipulate weights like these, performing say for half-an-hour a day a series of exercises with them, some of which at any rate entail considerable strain? And if these exercises are not good, what is he to do? If after some years of hard work at them he does drop them, does he not become liable, or tend to become liable, to a fatty degeneration of the muscles, or at any rate to an increase of fat over the muscles? In the meantime, if the course has been “successful,” if the man is enormously developed in the muscles, particularly of the arm and shoulder, it will quite assuredly be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to change those muscles whose birth and breeding is due to these slow pushing movements that are intended to overcome the inertia of dead weight, into muscles which have to deal swift, not heavy, blows at objects which for practical purposes (golf balls, tennis balls, even cricket balls) have hardly any inertia at all. In other words, he will find it difficult to become even passably proficient at games which require rapidity of striking—and it is hard to name the game which does not—and yet entail almost no strain on the heart and arteries, in order to supply the place of those heavy exercises which he feels himself unable, without risk, to continue. Besides this, it seems not unlikely that the perpetual straining may deaden the fineness of touch and judgment so necessary in most games. But the quick, brisk movements such as we recommend in the chapter on exercises seem to us to be singularly without the disadvantages of dumb-bell systems, as regards monotony, for their very speed is undoubtedly exhilarating; nor do they admit of any risk in the way of straining, while they exercise the muscles more than dumb-bells do, though they do not so much strengthen them. They are, therefore, quite as health-giving, since health, unless a man is positively suffering from muscular feebleness, has practically nothing to do with sheer muscular strength, while it has a great deal to do with muscular fitness. On the other hand, they have this great advantage over dumb-bell systems, namely, that they directly and rapidly tend to increase the speed with which the muscles can make their effort, and thus for that very large class of people who desire to play games, and do so whenever they can, these movements are of the greatest help even in learning the game, and also in keeping the muscles in actual and absolute practice for the game itself. They help, in fact, the right sort of muscle, they teach the light, rapid stroke which drives a ball. For the special exercises for each game, exercises which have been tested and found of service, we shall have to refer readers to the volumes on those games, which will subsequently appear, though even in the general list given in the chapter on exercise in this volume, no doubt they will pick out some that will be of service to them, whatever game they may wish to be in practice for.
But it is to the ordinary unathletic man, the man who does not really care about being in practice for a game, that we quite as sincerely recommend them, for it is our hope that he will find them, as we ourselves have done, pleasant and exhilarating (where we have found dumb-bells tedious and wearisome), economical in point of time, though they give, so we believe, more exercise than dumb-bells do, without strain and without fatigue. But they do not, and not for a moment do we claim it for them, increase the actual bulk of the muscles with anything approaching the rapidity possible in dumb-bell exercises, and if a man happens to want a sixteen-inch biceps without delay (or reason) it will be mere waste of time for him to use them.
There are many other points in which systems of training, in common with these dumb-bell exercises, seem to be defective, which need not be mentioned here. It is perfectly true that, as a whole, men in training—say a week after they have been training—are in excellent health. But this health we soberly believe to be realisable by men living in towns, with sedentary occupations, and, as they say, no opportunity for exercise. The man who must be in London six days out of the seven, practically abandons the attempt to keep in good health, without knowing what easy aids lie ready to his hand. He has no idea how much simple treatments, in the way of heat, baths, exposure of the body to the air, can do for him in the way of enabling that wonderful mechanism, the skin, which never sleeps, but works night and day at its business of cleansing, to have a fair chance. Such a man has a cold, and acquiesces in this state of things, saying he always has a cold in February, as if he were rather doing his duty than otherwise. It never occurs to him that to have a cold is to be unhealthy, that in such a case there is inflammation, and the mucous membrane is working double tides to throw it off. Such inflammation, of course, must have a cause, and is usually put down, often correctly, to sitting in a draught, or not changing when wet. But when one is really well, living, let us say, in the country, and getting wet perhaps two or three times a day, one does not catch cold. In London under such circumstances many people do. Why? Not because it is London, but because they are below par, liable to attack. And it is a gross mistake on their part to acquiesce in such a state of things. It is in most cases easily remediable, and that with little expense of time, and none at all in money for doctors’ bills and abhorrent drugs.
Finally with regard to training and practice for certain games, there are two fallacies, commonly considered truisms, which are worth commenting on. The first is that mere practice is conducive to excellence, than which astounding statement there was never anything less proven. It is dreadful to think of the amount of time which real enthusiasts give to lone and solitary practice without ever dreaming that what they are doing is probably merely emphasizing and making more radical an already existing fault. Such an enthusiast (and the professors of his game encourage him in it) will take half a dozen golf balls on to a lonely upland, or half a dozen racquet balls into a lonely court, and there continue with unabated zest to do things wrong. Such practice is merely pernicious.
A second fallacy, connected with this point, is that style is unattainable. For what is style? Apparent ease to the man who knows little about it: real ease to the man who does know. And this ease is—with certain exceptions, as in a tour de force necessary to get out of difficulties—certainly acquirable. Awkwardness and effort are, as a rule, the effect of bad teaching or no teaching. For it must be remembered that while a ball an inch above the net at tennis, a back bracket at skating, a slog over the pavilion at Lord’s, to repeat instances already used, are natural, in the sense that they are compassable without misuse of the human frame, yet they imply accurate and complex movements, which no one person would guess for himself. We say “guess” advisedly, for all games are empirical.
And thus having to a certain extent cleared the ground we will pass to construction.