NO MORE "CHESTS OUT."

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8794, 23 April 1907, Page 4

NO MORE "CHESTS OUT."

The ceutury-old order of discomfort, detested by the schoolboy and volunteer recruit, "Chests on'; and stomachs in," has been heard, says-the Christchurch Press, for the last time in the British army. The soldier of the future will stand upon parade in natural attitude, not as if his breast were always espanding to some imaginary ball. Instead, he will be told henceforward notl"; to puff out his chest on any account. The Army Council, after consultation with a large number of medical men and experts, who were all of the same opinion, have decided that the top-heavy, stiff-backed, rigidnccked variety of soldier, who has long been the ideal, is not, generally speaking, a tower of strength. Often his massive chest contains a heart that has been overstrained in its development. At the inquest on an army sergeant, whose figure was most probably the admiration of his regiment, but who died of heart failure, af doctor told the coroner's jury that his death was due to the "pernicious practice in tho British army of puffing out the chest." Along with the protruded chest, the dumbbell system of exercises has been discarded as "an antiquated, unscientific, stupid perversion of tho ways of Nature," inferior in all j respects to the Swedish system of "free gymnastics," which has already been adopted iu most continental armies, and will now take the place of dumbbells in Great Britain. "The tiling we now impress on men gymnastic work," an officer explained to a writer iu tho Daily Mail, is, "Do not hold your breath; you must breathe easily all the time. Any exercise which prevents your breathing freely is bad.'' The knotted muscles, according to this adviser, are altogether wrong. They simply bind the chest and tie the heart down. They do not expand the lungs, and give the heart plenty of room, which is what the athlete needs. Old-fashioned English officers will probably bo as much perturbed by the now regulations as were their Crimean predecessors by tho discarding of the traditional throatstrangling stock, but it is doubtful if the innovation will mean much in this colony. Our Wow Zealand volunteers, however much they may admire the British carriage, as counselled and exemplified by imported instructors, hardly ever achieve it for themselves. Now their freedom from rigidity will be a virtue.