Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/265

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WHAT EXERCISE TO TAKE DAILY

Next, starting with the bells at your shoulders, push both at once steadily up over your head as high as you can reach; and continue till twenty-five are accomplished. The back-arms, tops of the shoulders, and the waist have now had their turn.

Facing the excerciser (page 48), and standing about two feet from it, catch a handle in each hand. Keeping the elbows stiff, draw first one hand and then the other in a horizontal line until your hand is about eighteen inches behind you; the body and legs being at all times held rigidly erect, and the chest well out. Continue this until you have done fifty strokes with each hand. This is excellent for the back of the shoulders—indeed for nearly the entire back above the waist.

Again, with back to the exerciser, hold the handles high over the head, and leaning forward about a foot, keeping the elbows unbent, bear the handles directly downward in front of you; and so do twenty-five.

Besides these few things, or most of them, hang by the hands on a bar or rings if you can, catching it with both hands, just swing back and forth, at first for half a minute, afterwards longer, always holding the head well back. This is capital at stretching the ribs apart and expanding the chest. If the above exercises seem too hard at first, begin with half as much, or even less, and work gradually up until the number named can be easily done.

If, once in mid-morning and again in mid-afternoon, the man, right in his store or office, will turn for two or three minutes to his dumb-bells, and repeat what he did with his home pair in the morning, he will find the rest and change most refreshing. But in any case, whether he does so or not, every man in this country whose life is in-door ought to so divide his time that, come what may,

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