CHAPTER XXI.
Training.
If you intend a fifty-mile or a week’s trip awheel, it will be very necessary to accustom yourself to the work before attempting a distance you have not yet covered. Suppose, though your muscles are unaccustomed to long-continued exercise, that you know how to wheel a bicycle and are anxious to go with your friends. They perhaps wheel for an hour or two hours daily, or for several hours twice a week. They are afraid to take you with them; and you feel sure that you can go as far as they do, and at the same rate of speed.
You must make your opportunity and prove your ability. Suppose you can wheel for half an hour without fatigue. Wheel that half-hour every day the weather permits; know your distance and your road; and then practise increasing speed, that is, do your distance in less than the half-hour without hurry. Start slowly, and keep the pace until you get your breathing apparatus steady; then ride faster, and maintain that pace; and so on, in increasing ratio. If you have been in the habit of covering your distance in five minutes under the half-hour, next time add that distance to your spin, and do it in your limit time. When you easily do five miles in half an hour on the road, add a mile or more for the next two or three spins; then do not wheel for one day; the next day wheel twice the distance, wheel eight miles, and rest a day. Then double your distance again. If you cannot do this without feeling the effects seriously, go back to where you made your greatest distance with ease, and start from that point again.
Keep a careful record of your outings, dates, wind, sun, time of day, and humidity. The latter is very important, for on a hot, dry day, greater distance can be done with safety than when evaporation is slow. Consider all the conditions when you find that you are fatigued, and decide if the trouble is with yourself or with the weather. Do not start for at least an hour after eating, and always rest after exercise before taking a meal. Observing these directions, you will soon find that you are making very fair progress, that your confidence is assured, and that you have acquired a certain amount of endurance, and can attempt any reasonable distance.
Exercise transforms, making the inactive capable of performing work and of enjoying opportunities for using their newly discovered powers. The weak are strengthened; the strong retain and renew their stores of strength; the young are symmetrically developed, and the older remain supple and active. Exercise preserves and develops all parts of the organism that are capable of performing work. Exercise is work, muscular work; and in working the muscles, all the tissues become readjusted, and all materials and accumulations tending to hinder movement are diminished in quantity and equalized in distribution.
Ease of movement and a state of muscular inactivity are incompatible. To be active, one must work; and the whole organism will respond, and adjust itself to the conditions imposed by occupation and manner of living. The complicated mechanisms and intricate processes of the human body adapt themselves to required conditions; it is only necessary to determine what those conditions shall be to produce certain results.
It is difficult for some to overcome the tendency to a state of inactivity; and there are others to whom even the contemplation of repose is distasteful. The physiological effects produced by exercise differ in different individuals, active persons and those not in the habit of doing muscular work being very differently affected. For exercise, of whatever kind, is muscular work, and “muscular work tends to modify the nutrition of all motor organs and to give them a structure favorable for the performance of work.”
All muscular work is done through the contractile power of the muscles. By use the fibres become freed from fat and other accumulations, the muscles increase in size, the contractile power becomes greater, and the impedimenta of fat, etc., are removed by the processes that are accelerated by movement. “Repose causes atrophy of muscular tissue,” and the necessary discernment and powers of discrimination must be cultivated to avoid a tendency either in the direction of over-doing or of insufficient exercise.
“The effect of muscular exercise is to render vital combustion more active; it causes more active processes of assimilation.” “Muscular education leads to an economy of forces. Practice leads to a diminution of muscular expenditure”—more work done for power expended. For the power to perform work depends on knowing how to do it properly. Real strength lies, not so much in the mass of muscular tissue as in the ability to use it.