Training, in theory and practice / by Archibald Maclaren.

  • Maclaren, Archibald, 1819-1884.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Training, in theory and practice / by Archibald Maclaren. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/304 (page 23)
    ^3 It is with the second requirement of exercise, respiratory power, or ‘wind,’ that we have now to deal; and first, let us hear what rowing-men them- selves think of it. ‘ Men must run to be put into thoroughly good wind. No other motion removes the internal fat, the great enemy of good wind. There is no known exercise adequate to this result but this one h’ Now the respiratory organs are almost the only parts of the body where fat is never deposited; on the lungs it is never found ; and when found on the heart, except in meagre quantities along the interspaces of its fibres, and upon some blood-vessels where it has important offices to fulfil, it is in actual disease, or in that ‘ fatty degeneration ’ which not unfrequently occurs in many of the tissues at an advanced period of life; and that either of these is the normal condition of the youths of our public schools and colleges is surely difficult of belief. But fat is found on the viscera and organs of the lower cavity of all healthy men at this period of life; and at this time of great and often ill-regulated exertion, its protective presence here is as valuable as it was on the surface of the body at an earlier stage of life, when the liability to injury was from falls and similar causes. The only way, as I con- ceive, in which its presence here could affect re- spiration unfavourably would be when accumulated