Outdoor Exercise.
The person who takes vigorous exercise in the open air such as playing games like tennis or golf, or who walks vigorously, will have no need for formal breathing exercises. For those, however, who cannot readily obtain outdoor exercises the natural way, the following chest movements and breathing exercises are recommended. They should be taken with the body free from tight clothing, and either in the open air or a well-ventilated room. First, raise the hands above the head as far as they can reach, and then bring them forward and upward several times, and then upward and downward on the side of the head, inhaling on the uplifting of the arms, exhaling on the sinking of the arms. When the arms are lifted above the head, opportunity is given for the air inhaled to reach the upper part of the lungs, parts which in the sedentary person are very rarely used, and where usually the germs of tuberculosis begin their evil work. Arm extension forward, breathing deeply with arms carried sideward and backward, at shoulder height. If those who exercise in their rooms will be careful to breathe only through the nose and will keep the head erect, they will find that the performance of almost any set of exercises will serve also as breathing exercises, since they will increase lung activity.
XIII
BATHING AND CLEANLINESS
The soldiers of the body which carry on for us the battle against disease, old age, and death, have as great and as constant a need of water as do the human soldiers, part of whose equipment is always the indispensable canteen. Water is needed by the body in many ways, but it is especially required by the blood. Water is the solvent in which float the white and red corpuscles of the blood, and the many nutritive elements which the blood carries through the body, and the particles of waste material which it bears to the lungs to be burnt up, or to the other excretory organs to be ejected. By the aid of water, the minute particles of food which are broken up and transformed by the chemical processes of the body are conveyed to the most distant fibre of the intricate human mechanism, wherever repair or new growth is required. No other element of nature could so well carry on this function as water. It is so limpid and mobile that it can move through the most delicate and intricate network of veins, and can find its way by osmosis or percolation into such parts as are inaccessible by openings.
The human body is constantly throwing off water. A large portion is lost by evaporation from the skin, upon which it is poured out by millions of what might be termed little sewer pipes or sweat ducts, for the purpose of washing away impurities from the system. The kidneys remove a considerable quantity, bearing with it poisonous elements in solution, the product of various vital activities. In other ways water is removed from the body, to the amount of about five pints in twenty-four hours. This loss must be made good in order that the requisite fluidity of the blood shall be maintained; and the need of the body is expressed by thirst. Beverages which contain other substances, as flavor, or as part of some mixed drink, are useful as thirst quenchers just in proportion to the amount of water which they contain.
Physiologists point to the evaporation of water from the surface of the human body as being one of the most perfect adaptations of means to ends exhibited in the whole circle of life. The vital activities of the body occasion the constant production of heat. At times the heat is greater than is needed, and would destroy the vitality of certain tissues if it were not speedily conducted away, just as too much heat in a stove would melt the iron of the stove. The evaporation of water from the skin accomplishes this heat dispersal. When external heat is great, perspiration in the normal, healthy person is more active than when external heat is less than that in the body, and, by this provision of Nature, the temperature of the body is maintained at about 100° Fahrenheit under all circumstances, and thus man is enabled to exist under such great extremes of heat and cold as are found in nature.
There are numerous other ways in which water is essential to the process of life within us. The free drinking of water greatly favors the elimination from the system of the products of waste. It hastens tissue change, and encourages the assimilation of food. And apart from its use internally, it has also a very great value as a means of applying heat to or abstracting it from the body for remedial purposes, to say nothing of the functions it performs as a cleansing agent. Of late years the value of water in therapeutics has become generally recognized by the medical profession, and all over the world its use as an active agent has increased. Indeed, in the view of some physiologists, ordinary pure cold water is by far the most powerful and useful of all known healing agencies. It heals not by any strange or occult power, but by co-operating with the natural forces of the body, by aiding to the utmost those physiological processes by means of which the body sustains itself in health, and resists the encroachments of disease by the means of its bodyguard of blood cells, and by maintaining at its high pitch its innate vital resistance. When the Austrian Priessnitz first began the use of water in his mountain village a century ago, the world believed that the wonderful cures he wrought were accomplished by mystical charms or incantations by which he was supposed to communicate to the water its healing power. Modern science, however, has revealed the secret of water’s potency as a curative agent, and hydrotherapy, or curing by water, is now as well recognized as almost any other branch of medical science.