The Daily Doze of Exercise : Part 4

Keeping Fit all the Way
By Walter Camp

(Page 9 of 14)

A Call For Work That Will Count

Even at the risk of repetition, some facts should be driven home.

We are now working under conditions that should especially emphasize the fact of time-saving. We must take ourselves seriously, whether we are in the lines or behind the lines.

In the eight million men in this country between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four are the country's greatest executives and financiers. We can no longer give these executives and financiers two months in the South in the winter and a long summer vacation. We can no longer let a Plattsburg camp be a strenuous sifting out, a mere survival of the physically fittest. We need every man whom we can make available, and we need him with his vitality fully preserved and his endurance appreciably heightened. Some are stronger, naturally, than others. In football parlance we are no longer trying to pick a team out of a squad of two hundred men; we are trying to get a hundred and seventy-five out of the two hundred that can stand a fair pace and have enough left to fight with when they get there.

Any one who has been in touch with affairs in Washington, any one who has been engaged in our munition-plants and in our factories, any one who has worked upon Liberty Bond drives or Red Cross fund-raising, knows that if we are to support our boys on land and sea, these men who are trying to solve the problems of executive management, and who have the task of raising funds in thousand times increased volume, must be also carefully conserved. For, after all, even though we spell Patriotism with a capital P and Government with a capital G, even though army and navy orders take precedence, there is one great mistress of all, Dame Nature! And when she taps a man on the shoulder and says, "Quit!" that man stops; and when he offers the excuse that he has done it out of patriotism and loyalty she merely says: "I don't care why you did it, you have finished!" And there is no appeal to Washington from her verdict.

The Big Problem

We should soon hear the call for more men, men to fight and men to support the men who fight. The game is on. We are all in it now, either on the field or on the side-lines. We need to train for it fast and we have no time to waste. For, after all, it is condition that tells. It is the man who can stay, who can work at highest efficiency, and who can hold out the longest who is going to be most valuable. If we save even ten minutes a day in the setting-up exercises, we save, with a hundred thousand men, 16,666 hours daily toward perfecting their other knowledge. If we can make an able officer or a competent executive last a year longer or even six months under the increased strain, it gives us a year or six months more in which his understudy can gather the necessary experience to take up his task.

Millions of our youth are going out to fight, but disease and exhaustion will kill more of them than will the guns of the enemy. Thousands of men of the best brain-power in this country are going into committee-rooms and conferences every day from nine in the morning till twelve at night to devise better and more efficacious means of stopping the progress of the Hun. If these men's brains are of value, and we know they are, then the more clearly they act and the longer they last, the better for the country.

The Need for a Condensed System of Calisthenics

The demonstration, with a group of busy business executives and professional men, of the possibility of physical fitness at a small expenditure has been already mentioned. This idea has spread and many units of the Senior Service Corps have been organized. The writer's services were later on drafted into national work. At the call of the Secretary of the Navy, he was asked to take a position on the Naval Commission to develop athletic sports and games and physical fitness in our men at the various naval stations. In one week alone requests came from over four hundred communities to establish units of this work among business and professional men. Finding that it was impossible to answer all these calls, the writer devoted himself personally to a class in Washington, consisting of several Cabinet members, officials of the Federal Reserve Board, and others, and these men profited extremely from the work. But this should be done on a far larger scale.

The Hon. Daniel C. Roper, who was a member of the original class in Washington, requested the writer to come down and spend a month or six weeks in Washington, to organize drill groups in the various departments, several of them, like the Department of the Interior, having received requests to the number of three hundred or four hundred from men who wished to make themselves better fit physically for the work of these strenuous days. This, together with the demands from so many communities throughout the country, show that we are all now awake to the necessity of this cardinal feature of the nation's welfare, the physical fitness and stamina of its youth and men. This new gospel cannot be spread by one individual missionary, although there is little doubt that, wherever the story is told, thousands of our overworked and under-exercised men are glad to avail themselves of the opportunity.

This is the reason why the author has been led to devise a set of exercises that can be put in small compass, as regards both instruction and time required. Here follows a brief syllabus of the plan, in the hope of placing it within reach of men who can afford but little time for anything outside of their pressing office duties. We can no longer take delightful vacations of indefinite length to restore our waning vitality. The country needs every man and needs him at the best of his power.

A Reasonable Program

No matter how driven a man may be, it seems only reasonable to think that he should be able to spend ten minutes twice a day on a condensed system, or setting-up exercise, adding to it an outdoor walk of half an hour. By this means he can keep himself physically fit to bear the burdens which are falling more and more heavily upon the shoulders of us all. The men who are going to the front first should have every chance of conserving their vitality and increasing their resistive forces. Those of us who must do work behind the lines should be kept equally fit for that larger work without which the machine must inevitably break down. The method is scientific and it has been tested on men of all ages from eighteen to seventy. It embodies the elimination of all wasted effort and concentration upon points of approved and essential worth. It is as much a man's duty to make himself fit and to keep himself in that condition as it is to carry on any other part of his work. This method should be adopted not only in every department at Washington, but throughout the country; it should be taught in our schools and colleges, and so thoroughly that never again in a world-wide crisis should we find ourselves physically unprepared.

About the Author

Walter Chauncey Camp (1859 - 1925) was a sports writer and football coach known as the "Father of American Football". Along with John Heisman, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Glenn Scobey Warner, and George Halas, Camp was one of the most significant people in the history of American football.