How to get strong and how to stay so / by William Blaikie.

  • William Blaikie
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: How to get strong and how to stay so / by William Blaikie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    pliances will not be nearly as much as a moderate doctor^s bill, and quite as little as the patent gymnastic articles which are so often praised— mostly by people who know little or nothing of other forms of exercise than those fitted to their own apparatus. A large beam, for instance, has been devised, with handles fastened by a con- trivance above it, which is meant to restore the spine (when out of place) to its proper position. But there is scarcely anything it can accomplish which cannot readily be done on some one of these simple, old-fashioned, and far less cum- brous pieces of apparatus. Again, in the large cities there are establish- ments where the chief and almost the sole exercise is with the lifting-machine. A person, standing- near ly erect, is made to lift heavy weights—often of several hundred, and even a thousand or more pounds. The writer, when a lad of seventeen, worked a few minutes nearly every day for six months on a machine of this kind; and while it seemed a fine thing to lift six hundred pounds at first, and over a thousand towards the end, there came an unquestioned stiffening of the back, as though the vertebree were packed so closely to- gether as to prevent their free action. There came also a very noticeable and abnormal development of three sets of muscles : those of the inner side G 2
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