Exercise for Health

Southland Times, Issue 20523, 27 June 1928, Page 3

Exercise for Health

(From Our Correspondent.) London. The following recipe for joie-de-vivre is given by Mrs Bagot Stack, the health culture expert: “Cultivate the slim-through figure, poise the head as if it were attached to a star, swing loosely from the hips, walk down the road looking straight at everybody mentally and physically, and experience that exhilarated feeling.” She holds that the slim figure can be cultivated and kept by proper exercise. The present craze for slimness was not mere vanity, but an unconscious appreciation of the laws of nature, which had made health attractive. Our grandmothers held themselves rigid, and in so doing shortened the spine. That was wrong. The modern girl was flabby. That was also wrong. The first type was like a Dutch doll and the other like a rag doll, when what we were trying to get was a Venus de Milo.

“Civilized conditions make girls bend over a typewriter all day, when they ought to be exercising in the open air,” she says. “So the modern business girl goes in for ‘doormat exercises’; concentrates, that is to say, on the weak spots. Civilized feet are dreadful, and two other very weak spots are

the digestive system and breathing capacity. Here is one of a series of exercises I give to a group of girl clerks, telegraphists, cooks, nurses, and hairdressers:

“Go down on the floor on your hands and knees—drop the back; then drop the waist forward; then lift. Repeat several times. “This and other exercises the girls practise for twenty minutes every morning on getting up. It keeps them slim and it gives them an inner beauty. We are not satisfied when we have got the hefty health of the physically fit. That is not enough. These girls acquire the grace, lightness, and subtlety of the Greek figure. “The back should be the half-way house of the body. The reason why Lord Derby could not touch his toes was because he had not a properly trained spine. The light, natural poise of children is the correct poise. A great many girls go in for stunt dieting, and half starve themselves in order to acquire the slim-through look. It pulls their heads out and flattens their chests, but it does not get rid of that flabbiness. What they want to do is to train the back—the back of the knees, the back of the waist, the back of the neck, and the heels.” (To be Continued.)