Swimming Imposes Little Muscular Strain, But Is More Thorough Exercise Than Any Other.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18938, 7 December 1929, Page 19 (Supplement)

Swimming Imposes Little Muscular Strain, But Is More Thorough Exercise Than Any Other.

(Written for the “ Star ” by

OWEN BAXTER.)

SWIMMING, as a summer pastime, appears to become every year more popular, and each successive season sees the beaches more crowded than they were formerly. In the weekly round of summer pleasures of the young people of to-day, the visit to the beach plays a very important part, and the surf appears to be tending more and more to call people from other forms of amusement. One of the reasons for the great growth in the popularity of surf bathing in recent years is probably that the improvements in methods of transport have made the beaches so much more accessible than they were to the parents of the young generation of today. Particularly has the motor-car given a filip to surf swimming. The beaches are no longer distant places of pleasure to be reached only as the result of much toilsome travelling, the joys they give curtailed by the knowledge of an equally arduous journey home. Nowadays the youth of the city, escaping from the offices while the sun is still well up in the slcy, is able within a few minutes to be on the beach. The elimination of the old-time travel disabilities has enabled the lure of the open beach to assert itself more effectively, and this is reflected in the growing numbers that daily throng the beaches when the weather is favourable.

Then, too, a much greater proporthe . youn S people of to-day are able to swim than was the case a decade or two ago. For the most part, they were taught at school, and many of them were highly proficient before they left. Thus, there is a much greater proportion to whom the water presents only the pleasures of bathing and none of the terrors that acted so strongly as a deterrent to the less proficient people of the older generation.

The water and the breeze and the sun are the modern panaceas for the little and the big ills that sedentary habits breed. Men and women who are chained to office desks during the working hours are able to find a world of relief in the bracing effects of surf bathing. It is both an exercise and a tonic. It tunes up both the muscles and the nerves. It stimulates the senses, brings a sparkle to the eye and a flush to the cheek. It brings virility to jaded frames, and repose to tangled nerves. Of all the curative

treatments for bodily ills that can be had for nothing, it is probably supreme.

So powerful an influence is swimming on the open sea beach that it has been able first to flout the autocratic dictates of Dame Fashion, and then to change them. When our grandmothers were girls a lily white skin was the sine qua non of gentility. To the modern miss it is fast becoming anathema. Not for her the faded beauty of her prototype of bygone years. She wants her body burned to a healthy tan by the sun—as much of it as possible, and as tanned as possible. The nearer she can get the summer hue of her limbs to that of the Maori the better pleased she is. So common nowadays is the brown skin of the sunburned girl, that should a solitary bather appear on the beaches without this hall mark of the new summer cult she becomes conspicuous among the multitude by reason of the whiteness of her skin. The unfortunate who is taking her first splash of the season a little late is apt to hide in the sandhills till the sun has removed the traces of her neglect and given her some of the brownish tinge of her sisters.

Swimming is one of the greatest ol all exercises. Not the least of its many merits is that it is as suitable for a young child as it is for an old man. You are never too young or too old to swim. Physical strength too, is a negligible factor. Ability to swim has nothing to do with physical strength. Any healthy person can enjoy it and reap nothing but good from the process. Swimming imposes no muscular strain. Even if you go at it with great vigour, you will find it is a case of “bellows to mend” before it is a case of protesting muscles. And yet while it imposes so little muscular strain, swimming exercises the muscles more thoroughly, perhaps, than any other form of exercise. Even the highly specialised exercises that have been evolved under the general ised term of “ Swedish drill ” will give no more exercise to the muscles of the body than will swimming. There is this very important point about the exercise which swimming gives you. While it administers this curative activity in a very pleasant way, it does it in the most stringent possible way. In most forms of land exercises you can just perform the movements m a relaxed kind of way and really get no exercise at all. But if vou try

that sort of slacking when swimming, a mouthful of water promptly recalls 3'ou to serious business. That is why swimming is such an admirable exercise for school children. Exercises in the school yard are apt to get irksome and monotonous and highly unpopular, with the result that they are performed in a way that brings only a tithe of the benefit they are supposed to confer. But who ever heard of a schoolboy wanting to slack when he was given an opportunity of getting into the water? Thus, the exercise that swimming gives you is very thorough, despite the fact that, so far as any given muscle is concerned, it is very gentl*. Von want to build big biceps, and to have the large knotted manifestations of strength poking up under your skin as is the case with, say a champion weight-lifter, or some such other oamson-like gentleman, it is no good trying to achieve your end through swimming. Swimming tones down those protruding muscles instead of emphasising them. It for symmetry. The muscles of the swimmers are smooth, and lithe and tough the sort of muscles that can stand a fatiguing strain for a very long time. And the important point about this

feature is that it is not a few specialised muscles that are so treated. All the muscles of the body aie similarly benefited. Swimming doesn’t strengthen any particular muscles—it strengthens them all, even a large number of the internal muscles that the average man doesn't know he possesses. Because it imposes so small a muscular strain, because it makes for perfect symmetry of form, and because it builds up and strengthens the entire system, swimming is the best exercise that a girl can indulge in. Nobody ever saw a girl who swam regularly, who possessed a figure like an animated clothes horse. The sort of girl whose clothes obviously hide a multitude of phj'sical imperfections is the sort of girl who doesn’t swim. And she is the sort of girl who, above all others, ought to swim. On her the beach and the sea and the sun can confer what probably nothing else can j —a “figure.” Girls, more than boys, | should swim for health and beauty. Boys can gain benefit (though perhaps not to the same extent as from swimming) from a number of the rougher sports that are too violent for girls. Swimming gives that gentler treatment to which the feminine form appears to be able to respond in a truly wonderful way. No wonder the modern bathing miss had discarded the obscuring, blousy swimming raiment of her mother. She has a lively sense of her own personal charm, and a pretty exact knowledge of how it can best be illustrated. However, the mod ern costume, with all its daring brevity, has more than the vanity of its wearers to justify it. The briefer and the flimsier the costume, the more chance those two great physicians of preventive medicine, the sun and the wind, have. Health is fairly blown and burned into these scantily-clad figures. An important factor in the increased popularity of the surf beaches is the greater degree of safety which is offered there now. In the old days, when surf clubs were unknown and life-

saving reels had not appeared, venturesome bathers who were not strong swimmers had every chance of becoming the subject of a paragraph among the week-end fatalities. In recent years large numbers of sunburned young men have made themselves perfect in a whole series of mysterious evolutions with line, belt and reel that spell safety for the bather w’ho is wise enough to stick to the area that these young men patrol. It is not easy to drown yourself at Brighton nowadays. An experiment is not advocated, because it is likely to be very unpleasant, but it would prove the truth of the statement. Before you had time nearly to be drowned, the sunburned young men previously mentioned would have pounced on you and dragged you ashore. And, if you had managed obligingly to carry your experiment to the point where you had lost consciousness, you would merely provide them with an opportunity of showing how thoroughly they have mastered the modern methods of resuscitation. It would probably please them—they don’t get many chances for real resuscitation wrork —but it would be very unpleasant for you. Still, it would demonstrate whc.t is undoubtedly correct—that the activities of the surf clubs have mad bathing on our more popular beaches remarkably safe W eak swimmers of a venturesome nature are promptly warned if they are observed to be putting themselves in any danger. The bather who is wise doesn’t regard the life-saving man as an interfering nuisance when he checks him from going to any particular part of the beach. He goes where he is told. Of course, there are the exceptions. Just a few years ago a man who didn’t know the beach and who proved to be quite a poor swimmer (though he evidently didn’t think so himself) received the xvarning of the surf club man (a shy and modest youth) with a burst of indignation that sent the timid boy hot foot back to the pavilion. Meantime this emixjdi ment of self-assurance went just where he pleased. There was a hard surf and a bad undertow. Six boys battled for a long, long time before they got him, unconscious, ashore, and they woiked on him for a long time before they brought him back to consciousness He neither thanked the men who had saved his life nor apologised to the boy that he had told to go—well, not to Brighton. But that’s all in the surf club game. The boys had made a tremendously good save, and that was all they were really concerned about. However, for wise folk, the incident has its own moral. lIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIHIIM