HEALTHY BODIES.

Shannon News, 6 November 1925, Page 2

HEALTHY BODIES.

The recent news of the death of Eugene Sandow brings to mind the wonderful popularity enjoyed his physical culture methods a few years ago. In the days before the war, pictures .of the Sandow biceps and displays of the Sandow developer, were in shop windows throughout the world. The Sandow system was a serious business. It had a touch of the country of Sandow’s origin, it was thorough in its organisation. It was inclined to be heavy, to cultivate muscle and strength at the expense of activity and speed. The German used to condemn cricket because it did not develop the body uniformly, but the Englishman rightly holds cricket to be a better exercise than indoor “physical jerks. The Englishman prefers, if ho can, to combine exercise with pleasure, and npt to go through merely mechanical nlovcments. Games are the best of exercise, but the trouble is that there is not room enough for everybody to play them, and even if a man has facilities he can seldom play every day. Sandow and other similar systems of physical culture come to the rescue of men and women who are not in the way of getting enough exercise. They are remedies made necessary by defects in our civilisation. The amount of attention given or recent years to what may be called artificial methods of physical culture is remarkable. It denotes an eagerness to be lit, and at the same time indicates serious -weaknesses in modern ways of living. It can be overdone. Sandow, however, and his fellow Avorkers in the same field have done a great deal ;< of good. Sandow himself was. like Roosevelt, an example of .what determination can do with a'i weak body. His exhortations and his exercises have given health and strength to thousands. He and his kind preached tho gcspel of health to a sedentary world that in the race for wealth or bare livelihood was inclined to ignore the claims of the body.