How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions

by S. S. Curry

Another reason for the beginning of the day's exercise with joy is the fact that the positive emotions affect a man in the centre of his body. They are all expressed by sympathy and right expansion of the torso. This is not only central in expression, it is also central in training.

The muscles affecting the more central organs should in every exercise in some sense cause co-ordinate actions in various parts. The expansive action of the chest is one of the chief exercises because it not only frees the vital organs but co-ordinates the normal actions of a man in standing and walking.

Observe that harmony demands that all parts be equally exercised, but unity demands that we begin our exercises at the center. The organic centrality of the whole body is of first importance.

We should not only feel expansion of the chest in all exercises, but we should begin with exercises for the torso rather than with exercises for the limbs. We want to reach the deepest vital organs as a part of all exercises.

Sometimes a man goes into a gymnasium and works for the muscles of the arm, for example, while the muscles of his chest and around his stomach and diaphragm are weak. In this case the central muscles may grow weaker. Exercises, not properly centred, will decrease harmony.

I have found many people with lack of support of the voice and weakness of the diaphragm and the muscles relating to the retention of breath, but I have found very strong muscles in the arms, while the muscles in the center of the body were surprisingly weak.

In following "external measurements" too much attention is often given to the muscles of the limbs that can be measured. It is easy to discover the fact that the lower limbs have more muscular development than the arms, but this is of little consequence compared with the weakness of internal and hidden muscles like the diaphragm.

It cannot be too often emphasized that an organism necessarily is one. The parts sympathize with each other, and the higher the organism the more is this true. The voice expresses the whole being and body, and it not only calls for great activity of the central muscles, such as the diaphragm, but every part of the body seems to share in voice conditions.

A human being with his legs cut off can never sing or speak as well as he could before he lost them.

9. As far as possible, always feel in all the muscles a sympathetic action with certain opposite parts that support or naturally co-operate with these.