Recreations and sports have the inestimable advantage of being taken in the open air and being interesting to those who take them—two factors whose absence in any form of therapeutic exercise is with difficulty atoned for. Athletics, though sharing in these advantages, are not well adapted to most therapeutic purposes, on account of their excesses, indefinite dosage, and lack of variety, each contestant being a specialist in one or a few forms of exercise. There remain for consideration the formal exercises of drill of various kinds, gymnastics, Swedish exercises, including passive and mechanical movements, and massage, which is elsewhere treated of in this work.
As the primary purpose of military, fire, and other drills is not therapeutic, they are not well suited to the treatment of disease, though they share in the beneficial effects of systematic exercise. The manual of arms is not adapted to young children, being too formal and too strenuous; the writer has seen cases of lateral curvature, knock-knees, nervousness, and debility in young boys which had apparently been aggravated if not produced by military drill.
Modern gymnastics has been largely shaped with reference to military purposes, and, while gymnastic exercises, if well selected and proportioned, do promote muscular development and physical grace and vigor, they are easily carried to an extreme, and instances are not rare where they have broken down the constitution, instead of building it up. Feats of skill train the nerve centers more than the muscles, and once the trick is acquired, their value as exercise is slight. Feats of strength often put an injurious strain upon the organism, with no corresponding benefit. The arm appears to be the object of all the exercises of modern gymnastics (Legrange); breasting and other movements which throw the suspension or support of the body upon the arms and shoulders give them unsuitable work, and result in disproportionate development of the muscles of the shoulder girdle, often associated 'with a rounded back, and little or no increased power of ventilation, since all such feats are performed with a chest fixed and constricted by muscular effort. The gymnastics of the modern gymnasium are in marked contrast with the athletic exercises of the Greeks, with whom the striving for physical perfection amounted to a passion. Their exercises were running, wrestling, boxing, fencing, and throwing the discus, taken in the open air, without apparatus, and exercising the body throughout, and especially in the fundamental associated movements of the trunk and limbs. The defects of ordinary gymnastics have been felt by those interested in physical culture, and have been partly obviated by the introduction of free movements, like running, jumping, and wrestling, and partly by the use of resistance machines, usually
