For good in-door exercise there is nothing like a gymnasium. This is fortunate, for every house has a gymnasium in it, if its owners only knew it. It may sound like a strange statement, but it is true. Every bedroom is a gymnasium.
It is convenient to call this piece of furniture a chair; but if you call the room a gymnasium, you may call this chair a pair of parallel bars and a trapeze. If it is a light chair, and the ceiling is high, you may call it an Indian club and a pair of dumb-bells also if you like. That bed is a horizontal bar; so is the ledge over the door. The wall is an upright bar, and the pillow a sand-bag. When you are sleepy at night, you go to your bedroom; when you awake in the morning and spring out of bed, you find yourself in your gymnasium.
When you are only a little way dressed, try this exercise on your parallel bars: Turn your chair over so that it may rest upon its front legs and the front edge of the seat. Grasp the hind-legs, one in each hand, and with your legs stretched out, and your weight resting on the toes, lower your body until your chest is on a level with the legs of the chair; then push yourself up again by straightening your arms. Do this, without letting go the legs of the chair, two or three times. This will be as many as you will want to try at first, and you must never tire yourself. After several days' practice you will find you can do it a dozen times without any special fatigue, and you will also find that your arms are getting larger and harder.
When you can do this first exercise easily, get another chair, and place the two back to back, and about eighteen inches apart. Stand between them, and grasp the chairs, one with each hand; hold your arms straight, and lift your feet off the floor. Now lower yourself by bending your arms; dip down between the chairs as far as you can, and raise yourself up again without putting your feet to the floor. This exercise is rather harder than the other, and at first you will not be able to make more than perhaps two or three dips, but you will be astonished to find with how few days' practice you will be able to make twelve dips, and soon twenty or more. This is a capital exercise for the chest and arms; and because you are not going to be a lumberman or a wrestler you need not think you are wasting time by developing your muscles.
One of the greatest poets this country has produced, and one of the most able editors of any country, the late William Cullen Bryant, practiced this exercise every morning, and kept it up until his eighty-fourth year. What a wonderful old man! But we shall hear more of him soon.
Now for a bed exercise. Grasp the foot-board with the hands close together, and the fingers on the side nearest the body. Bring your elbows together, and leaning forward upon them so that they support your body, balance yourself upon your hands, and go forward until your face almost touches the bedclothes, and your legs are parallel with the floor. This is not easy; but after you have practiced the chair exercises well, you will soon be able to do this several times, and even bring your feet almost down to the floor and return to your balancing position without touching the floor.
One of the fittings of a gymnasium is a "horizontal bar." This you will find in your gymnasium in the ledge over the door. Open the door, and take hold of the ledge, and see how many times you can draw your chin up to the ledge. Not many times at first, you will find. But it is a capital exercise to bring up the biceps, as the muscle in the front of the arm above the elbow is called. Mr. Bryant used to do this exercise on the ledge over the door, and pulled himself up so many times without resting that he could not keep count of them. And he was not a light boy or girl, but an old gentleman of eighty years.
Now try a trapeze exercise, or something very like what is done on a trapeze. Sit on the chair, and place your right hand on the back of it, and with the left hand grasp the seat between your legs. Raise yourself a little by your arms, and pass your right leg through your arms to where the left is, and the left leg through to where the right was. You will then find yourself with your face to the back of the chair. Rest in that position for a few seconds, but without releasing your grasp of the chair, and then pass your legs back to their original position. This is an excellent exercise for the back and legs and arms, and though gymnastics are out of place in the sitting-room, it is a good trick to do when, as sometimes happens, some one is talking about and showing feats of strength.
In many gymnasiums there are striking-bags, filled with sawdust or sand, and hung from above by a cord. The cord is not necessary. One of the pillows of your bed will do just as well as a hanging bag. Throw it up to the ceiling, and as it comes down strike it up again, first with one hand and then with the other, and see how long you can keep it in the air. This pillow fighting is a good and not at all dangerous exercise. Pillow never hits back.
Although nothing has been said about girls doing these exercises, they are all suitable for girls, especially if done before they have finished dressing. Girls must have tumbled hair some time, and what better time than before they have combed it in the morning? Girls do not care much about foot-ball and base-ball, but they do like to have nice figures, and to be strong and healthy, and they will find no better way of becoming so than by practicing these and similar exercises.