WORK AND SPORT

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 September 1929, Page 9

WORK AND SPORT

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING.

“The idea prevails almost everywhere that mental and physical work are entirely different,” writes the Medical Correspondent of the “Times Trade and Engineering Supplement.” “Consequently it is assumed that a man may exhaust himself with impunity in physical exercise and yet remain as active mentally as he was before he began. “The opposite, unfortunately, is true. Physical exercise tires the brain as well as the muscles and uses up, consequently, that store of nervous energy on and by which we all live.

“This is obvious when it is remembered that muscles are much more difficult to tire than nerves. Even at the end of a heavy day of exertion a man’s muscles are capable of a great deal more; it is his nerves which are weary. They are so weary that they no longer carry the necessary impulses to his muscles with the necessary vigour.

“These weary nerves cannot profitably be yoked to mental work or to any work. Before he can begin again their owner must rest.

"This truth needs emphasis just now when all of us are anxious to get exercise after the long winter. Let us take our exercise by all means, but, if we have mental work to perform, let us take it reasonably, in small doses.

“It is, for example, - a mistake to spend the day preceding a day of strenuous mental work in strenuous physical labour. Two rounds of golf on Sunday are a bad, not a good, preparation for important decisions on Monday morning. “Play the golf on Saturday, rest on Sunday, and do yourself justice. “Golf has saved many a life, but it lias imposed on some of its players a burden of the nature of which they' seem to be wholly unaware.: These people are so anxious to be fit that they remain permanently in a of exhaustion. They grow dull-witted, that is, weary-witted, and find their ’ work a burden. J “A spell of weather in which they do not play, comes to them as a relief and restores their energy. “Again, if heavy mental work is in prospect or in process, heavy physical work ought to be avoided. It is not necessary to cease taking exercise, but it is necessary to take the minimum and not the maximum amount. A little gardening is an admirable help to mental vigour; so is a day’s fishing. But mental vigour and hard games of tennis do not make easy partners —on I the same day. You cannot eat your I cake and have it.”