Gymnastic problems

Foreword

At the time of his death, Professor Jakob Bolin had completed the manuscript the contents of which appear in the following pages. It had been his intention to add other chapters and to illustrate and publish the work, but he died before this could be accomplished. Dr. Jay W. Seaver, a former colleague and intimate friend of Mr. Bolin, took over the manuscript with a view to publishing it, but within a year, before the work was under way, he also died.

Feeling strongly that Professor Bolin's manuscript is one of the most important contributions to the subject of gymnastics which has been written in English, we, as a group of his associates at the University of Utah, thereupon undertook the task. With the courteous co-operation of the publishers, and of Professor Earl Barnes, who furnished the introduction, we are now able to present the book to the public. The illustrations and minor changes in the text are our own; for what they lack, we alone are responsible.

We cannot refrain from taking advantage of this vi FOREWORD

opportunity to express our love and profound admiration for Mr. Bolin, whose delightful personality and unusual professional attainments made him admired and esteemed across a continent.

Introduction

In his pursuit of civilization man is continually reaching conditions which threaten to destroy him. For protective covering, he substitutes fashionable costumes ; in place of a nourishing diet, he develops a sense-commanding and overstimulating course of entertainments in eating; for healthful exercise, he substitutes ease and sedentary habits ; fresh air gives way to over heated and over used interiors. With these abuses of his physical life come new diseases ; heart and kidney troubles and pneumonia sweep away the slaves of civilization.

And for this tendency to self-destruction there are but two correctives. One is through Rousseau's return to nature, and the other is through more civilization, more intelligently conceived and executed. When we have built our house so well that it not only shuts out the storms but also the fresh air, then we must either tear down the house or set up an engine in the basement and force fresh air through the rooms. It is clear that for men there is no going back in civilizational development. Nothing could be more artificial than for a civilized

vii viii INTRODUCTION

man to return to the woods. Once under way, we must go on to higher levels or perish.

The most far reaching of all the evil consequences of our civilization gather around our artificial activities, and lack of activity* Our bodies have not had the development that comes through out-ofdoor work and play in childhood; and in maturity we live in mines, factories and libraries. Not only the bony framework and the muscular system suffer, but all the more delicate machinery of digestion, circulation and respiration is disturbed and impaired. The nervous system, being badly nourished, fails to do its best and man faces destruction.

The corrective for this condition lies in gymnastics. Vacations, walks, golf, tennis, riding and the like will help maintain physical vigor but they are only lunches and refreshments taken between meals. Well-considered gymnastics must make the physical diet of modern man. The body must have regular exercises if it is to be kept in its best estate.

With children, this is especially true. Their bodies are to be shaped and developed on lines of efficient action. They are to be strained and toughened into their full power of resistance. Incipient weakness or malformation must be detected and corrected. Everyone knows this, but how slowly do we respond to our knowledge! This is partly

INTRODUCTION ix

because the training of a sound and beautiful body is no simple task. It requires profound knowledge of anatomy and physiology, with skill in devising exercises that will give the maximum of training with the minimum of waste and danger.

Just now, when all the world is facing war and the need of the physical efficiency that makes successful armies, this book should make an especial appeal to America. For military preparedness, we must have, in the first place, a country worth fighting for, and in the second place, strong men and women. Military drill and munitions can be provided if a nation has ideals and men. Gymnastics will give the best of military preparedness, with the minimum of disturbance to our peaceful ideals.

We have no one in America better prepared to write on this subject of gymnastics than was Mr. Jakob Bolin, the author of this volume. He brought to the task a most thorough training in anatomy and physiology, through his study in Sweden which he extended and perfected with each year of his life. In his work in America he trained thousands of teachers who revere his name, while in his Institute in New York, he dealt with every form of physical defect, requiring ever fresh consideration and special treatment.

His thinking was always scientific, in the best x INTRODUCTION

sense of the word. He spared no pains in determining facts, and no theory could stand in the way of a fact. With the facts in hand, he set to work to realize all that was possible. No labor was too great for him ; and his standard of achievement was always as far ahead as he could see. He was a scientific humanist ; and these pages from his pen will be eagerly prized by all who knew him, and will make those who did not know him regret that he wrote so little.

Earl Barnes.

Contents

CHAPTER

I Our Aim

II The Principle of Gymnastic Selection

Chapter I

It shall be my privilege to formulate more or less definitely certain problems in the work of the teacher of gymnastics and to point out the direction in which I see their solution.

To do so it is necessary first to take a rapid glance at the place which gymnastics is supposed to fill in our time, or, in other words, to establish what the aim or aims may be of its introduction in our lives.

Note, then, that our profession is born at a comparatively late period of social evolution. It is a product of a comparatively high civilization, of a rather complex life. The lower the civilization, the simpler the life we lead, the more easily do we fit into the environment, reacting properly to its stimuli, and the less need there is of any particular preparation or education in any direction. The preparation which the individual needs he gets incidentally from his mode of life. It is a natural training, which tends to make of him more or less of an automaton, reacting unerringly, and more or less unconsciously, to the influence of the environment, very much as a bear cub or a young chicken does. This natural training gives, however, small power of adaptation to changes in the environment. The automaton acts well within certain well defined limits, but it fails when new modes of reaction are required daily and hourly, because of the complex nature and everchanging character of the environment. Then there seems the necessity of introducing artificial means by which the individual learns to adjust himself to the great variety of the conditions surrounding him, and to choose consciously or unconsciously, among many possible reactions the one which is best adapted to meet both present and remote conditions. Education is the artificial means invented by man, as a reasoning being, to supply the needs which natural training cannot supply. Gymnastics is the most artificial and formal part of physical education, and is the last part to make its appearance. When life's duties become chiefly intellectual; when the physical activity is taken out of it; when the individual becomes confined to canons of brick and mortar instead of being able to roam over hill and vale ; when he becomes tied to a machine or an office desk, instead of making his living by stalking the deer; when he hugs the stove and uses artificial light to dispel the gloom created by himself, instead of basking in the sun with the winds playing freely around him; when he finds that his gains in many directions are bought by a loss of something in other directions ; and when he comes to the conclusion that the loss is due to the decrease in physical activity; then he does not turn to gymnastics as a help. He instinctively tries to return to his natural ancestral life. He goes tramping through the woods, as his forefathers before him, in search of game. He goes fishing, hardly expecting but always hoping to catch something. He is not a fisherman, but a sportsman. It is not the fish he wants. He can buy them cheaper. He wants the j oy and the pleasure, the relaxation and the excitement, the change of activity from intellectual sensory to intellectual motor. He takes his vacations in the mountains or at the seashore. He roughs it. He doffs the garb of civilization to commune with Nature.

But measures like these are sporadic and unsatisfactory. They are costly in time and money. The virgin forests fall by the woodsman's ax. The fields are taken up by the farmers. The beaches are filled with summer resorts, vying with the cities in their artificiality. He is everywhere met with signs warning him of "No trespassing here," "Keep off the grass." He finds it more and more impossible to be natural in his activities, and seeks a substitute in plays and games of olden times, perhaps modified to be within his easy reach. He invents new ones to suit the contingencies of his life. He plays football, golf, tennis, goes rowing or canoeing. But civilization means evergrowing urbanization. The necessary facilities for indulging in these sports become more and more inaccessible to an evergrowing percentage of our population. The games are played less frequently, and at greater expenditure of time and money. Then the citizen begins to feel that the physical activity which he craves must be brought directly into his home or office, or at least next door to him. He also demands that it shall be concentrated and regulated so as to affect him most favorably in the briefest possible time. He cannot afford to rely upon chance. He wants the matter studied, systematized, formulated, so that he may gain with reasonable certainty just the effects most desirable to him. Gymnastics, the most formal and artificial, the most systematized of all branches of physical training, enters to fill the needs of the citizen in a highly organized community.

So I picture to myself the racial development of gymnastics. And as everywhere else we find a recapitulation of its essential features when we consider the individual. The infant's play is essentially the instinctive reaction to the environment. The form of the movements, their intensity, their speed, their sequence, are determined by extraneous circumstances, not by the reasoning powers. Any change in the conditions brings immediate corresponding varieties in the activity. That is the natural training period. But the child grows and enters into communion with his kind, becomes a part of the community, and begins to reason. When his unregulated activity comes in contact with that of others, the activity of all becomes subjected to direction of reason. The immediate interests of one become subordinated to those of all, division of labor appears, rules are formulated, to which each submits, and, because of which, each inhibits his activity in one direction in order to supply it more particularly in another. There is a gradual transition to the highly organized games, many of which resemble primitive man's vocations, hunting and warfare. The organization grows more and more complicated, the division of labor is carried farther and farther. The general training disappears, a onesided one takes its place. And the individual finds the necessity of supplementing his onesided training in one direction by onesided training in another direction. Sooner or later the young man or the young woman lands in the gymnasium to find in its artificial methods a substitute for nature's training.

I thus emphasize the artificiality of gymnastics. This does not signify its inferiority to the so-called natural methods. Far from it. Difference is not inferiority. There are certain benefits coming from physical activity which are secured very much better and more easily by other methods of training than by gymnastics. But the much vaunted superiority of the so-called "Nature's own way" is much exaggerated. Those who make the distinction between the artificial and the natural, that the former is always bad, the latter always good, are making a grievous mistake. To be logical they should condemn civilization itself, because civilization is artificial. It is natural to tell the time by the position of the sun. It is artificial to use a watch. But the latter is more precise. The trouble seems to lie in a confusion of the terms artificial and unnatural. In many features our civilization is unnatural. But these are unessentials. All the essentials are natural, in accord with the results of Nature's own laws. The raw material springs from Nature unaided, the finished product is the result of reason applied to Nature's product. The

Fig 1.

A simple movement of the upper arms in the plane of the

shoulders. (See page 35.)

Fig 2.

Common bad form in the " wing " position. (See page 36.)

same relation holds good in physical training. Tracking, felling and bringing home a deer is a kind of raw material of physical activity. Gymnastics is the selection of the raw material, its combination in various ways, its polishing until the natural product is made more suitable for the needs of civilized man.

What are these needs? Why do people generally take to some form of exercise? Why do they go walking, bicycling, or horseback riding, when they do not need it for getting from one place to another? Why do they play tennis or golf?

Why do they frequent the gymnasia? And, by all means, why do so many profound thinkers urge the necessity of supplying our school children with physical activity of this and other kinds? This last question is important because its answer may not coincide with the answers to the former questions. The individual who turns to physical activity, not because of any knowledge on the subject but simply because of an indistinct feeling or desire for it, may be able to give us hints, but it is those who have given deep thought and careful consideration to the subject to whom we must turn for definite information.

The former will probably tell us that he looks for recreation, for relief from strenuous mental activity, for pleasure, for joy, and because it is a matter of general experience that at least a certain amount of physical activity is necessary for the maintenance of physical health and vigor, and that his sedentary life does not give him enough of it.

The student will speak of these two points as desirable in the highest degree. He will tell us that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." He will point out that civilization has tended and is tending to supplant muscular labor at such a rate that not only the professional man has been deprived of the vigor which comes from physical activity, but the introduction of machinery has dispensed with the severer muscular labor also of a large number of workmen who are now becoming parts of the machines they tend, limited mainly to pressing the button or some other similar small acts, and that their general health deteriorates as well as that of the professional classes because of the small amount of physical activity. But he also tells us that the reintroduction of physical activity into the life of civilized man is necessary not simply because of the general lack of such activity in our daily vocation but still more for the purpose of counterbalancing such activity as still remains. He will call our attention not only to the insufficient amount of physical labor performed by our physicians, lawyers, clergymen, teachers, business men, and factory workers, to sustain health, but will emphasize the narrow limits within which the labor of the blacksmith, the farmer, the general laborer, is confined, even though this labor be prodigious in quantity. He will maintain that the highest degree of vigor cannot be built merely on a certain quantity of physical activity, but asserts that to assure the greatest amount of physical well-being the activity must be harmonious, distributed over the whole physical man. He will point out that the school curricula not only supply an insufficient amount and too few forms of physical activity, upon which to sustain that degree of health necessary to serve as a solid foundation for education, but that they are deficient also in as much as they ignore the direct influence of physical activity upon mental and moral development. He will recite to us the loss in these respects which has come when many of the educative duties of the home in a primitive community have necessarily been dropped with the oncoming of more highly civilized stages, without being taken up by the school which should naturally inherit them. The participation of the child in the many duties of the home, doing of chores, helping in supplying the family with the means of subsistence, all that is practically gone from the civilized home, and with it a wide gate to knowledge has been closed, an educative means of the highest value has been swept away, and nothing has come to take its place. Physical training in its various aspects is supposed to fill the vacuum, at least to some extent.

The purpose then of physical training is recreative, hygienic, in both a general and a special sense, and educative.

It is self-evident that though the general purpose of physical training has many aspects, all of which should be duly considered by those who are in charge of the work, one or the other view-point may become of paramount importance in certain classes. It is also self-evident that the great variety of physical activity at our disposal makes it possible to vary the means employed, so that different procedures which more readily yield recreative results may be used when recreation is the main object in view, while others more effective in a hygienic sense should attract our attention under different conditions.

Thus if I seek the means best adapted for furnishing recreation, all will agree that for both child and adolescent, and even for adults, play, unorganized or organized, takes the first place. Gymnastics can and shall furnish recreation, because that is part of the purpose of physical training as a whole; but it would be bad policy to give gymnastics particularly for that purpose when other and more effective means are at hand. The recreative aim of physical training should be sought mainly on the playground, if such exists or can be obtained, not in the gymnasium except when conditions absolutely prohibit us from applying means by which the most recreation can be gained with the least waste of energy.

The amount of physical activity necessary for a person engaged in exclusively intellectual or small mechanical fields may be supplied in many ways. If you, like Gladstone, have opportunity to fell trees, you may well do so, sure that thereby increased vigor will be your reward. If you can buy a suburban home where you can dig, and hoe, and serve as general utility man, you will benefit from it. If you can get a horse for a morning ride; if you can join a golf or tennis club; if you can indulge in any of the many forms of sports open to persons of means and some degree of leisure, then by all means make the investment. It will pay good dividends. But for the great majority of people whose opportunities for these forms of activity are limited ; for the mass of school children, who cannot pitch a ball on the street for fear of hitting a staid old citizen on the head, who cannot run the bases without bumping into a baby, who have no space to move in large ways, — for these, for the common people, for the growing generation especially, the gymnasium is, perhaps not the best, but the most convenient place in which they may have their needs fulfilled. Gymnastics is not a form of activity absolutely necessary for maintaining general health and vigor. It will probably be less prominent for that purpose, as parks and playgrounds come to be universally recognized as necessaries of city life, when we become civilized enough to acknowledge that no man's life should consist merely of slaving, sleeping and eating. The general hygienic purpose may, at least partly, be gained by less formal exercise, but as a matter of fact, it is not usually secured by these means by the majority of the people, and the gymnastic teacher will be failing in his duty if he does not see to it that a large amount of work is accomplished in his classes, whatever the forms may be that he uses.

But, however important for hygienic purposes it may be that the individual has a certain quantity of physical activity, quantity alone does not suffice to secure the greatest possible vigor. The vital organs, even though healthy, must work under the most economical conditions. We do not need to enter into detailed explanations, for instance, of the great waste in energy expenditure which results from that common faulty attitude which is characterized by exaggerated spinal curves, abducted shoulder-blades, and relaxed abdominal walls. It may perhaps be permitted simply to record here the conviction that this attitude, so prevalent among all classes and at all ages is, perhaps, sapping more energy than any other one factor. It means lessened space for the heart and the large vessels ; it means a mighty decrease in the respiration; it means the withdrawal of a large part of the influence of the respiration upon venous and lymphatic circulation ; it means a diminution of that natural massage by the diaphragm and the abdominal walls from which the abdominal viscera should derive benefit; it means the lack of support normally given these organs; it means, in brief, unfavorable conditions for practically all the organs upon which our nutrition, circulation and elimination depend.

To prevent the development of these unfavorable conditions becomes one of the most important duties of society, and physical training is the proper means for it. This is our specific hygenic duty. But the games and the sports are, as a rule, undetermined and general. The forms of the movements are not selected directly with a view to their effects upon the organism but in order to accomplish a definite external task. The activity in them is of the same general kind as that in the professions or trades. It is mainly flexor activities. And games and play and sports and athletics cannot therefore supply the necessary corrective influence except in quantity. They themselves need to be supplemented by corrective agencies. I believe nobody will gainsay the assertion that our athletes are not, as a rule, particularly good models as to carriage. An exception should be made for our oarsmen, which have in their activity excellent correctives to other athletic and professional work. With the severest forms of competition eliminated, I believe rowing would be as near an ideal exercise as any one form well could be. But it is available only to the few, and practically the only road open to us, if we wish to secure to the growing generation the benefits of an erect carriage, a harmonious development with all that it implies of vigor, efficiency and beauty, is to select particular formal exercises — gymnastics.

The purely educational benefits, which gymnastic training is expected to furnish, are so manifold, and it is in their contemplation that we first become

Fig. 3.

A corrective exercise with the upper arms in the plane of the shoulders. {See page 35.)

Fig. 4.

Unless care is exercised, the elbows and head are likely to be carried forward. (See page 36.)

really aware of the necessity of placing physical training upon a broad foundation.

But let us, who deal with gymnastics, be frank enough to acknowledge that the formal training, however valuable it may be in this regard, can furnish very little indeed of those benefits compared with the less formal and more spontaneous exercises. The gymnastic teacher should of course not forget his duty to help in developing power of attention, in educating sense-perception, in stimulating will, in making each pupil fit to assume his place as an active member of society cooperating with others. If he forgets this, he fails in one of the most essential features. But is it not a fact that what our educators mainly ask from physical training is that it shall give the pupil a better knowledge of and belief in himself, a desire to overcome obstacles and defeat difficulties? That physical training shall steel the courage, make the individual feel a longing to be in the midst of the fray, develop men with initiative and aggressiveness, men fit to lead in any enterprise, men on whom we can rely to carry the civilization a step further, men who do not leave the school or college behind them on the day of graduation but who take it with them into life, carrying it and the benefits of education into whatever place they may have to fill, men of whom it shall not sneeringly be said that their education has made them unfit for practical life, but who must be recognized as eminently practical, not in spite of, but because of their deeper learning, men who not only have been passively filled with the wisdom of books, but who have been trained well in both thinking and in doing. And men of that type are not created by formal activity, such as is the chief characteristic of gymnastics, even though they may be rounded off thereby. They are made on the football field, in the shell, wherever competition enters fiercely, where presence of mind, control of the body and dogged persistence are demanded, not where activity is regulated by a commanding leader, or thumping on the piano, or where each goes forth to do his stunt and then retires, but where each watches his opportunity to sail in with all his might when needed, where each relies upon his judgment.

The particular aim of gymnastics, then, the aim which can be gained by no other branch of physical training, is what we have spoken of as hygienic in a special sense, to counteract the evils of onesided activity. Those who, with me, so see the main object of gymnastics are frequently criticized for their narrowness. They would be narrow if they refused to see anything but this circumscribed field.

But the mere fact that they distinguish between this particular field and the broader one of physical training does not make them narrow. It rather guarantees that within that particular field they will do their work far better than if they endeavored to gain results by their work which can be better gained by other means ; far better than if they confound play with work: far better than if they encouraged the one already efficient at the expense of the one who is backward. May the teacher of gymnastics ever have a clear and vivid conception of the limitations of his own work so that he does not enter into fields which are not his, dissipating his energy and that of his pupils in futile endeavors to gain that which gymnastics cannot gain. But may he at the same time remember that the gymnastics is not the end. It is only one means among many for a given end, the development of citizens of the highest order; citizens with a straight back and well poised head, to be sure, but who need far more than that, who need all that physical training can give, all that education can give.

It is poor gymnastics when the teacher is unable to furnish that which should be brought forth by the gymnastic exercises better than by any other means. It is poor gymnastics when fun becomes the chief end instead of the condiment giving the necessary zest. It is poor gymnastics when the main object is to expend a certain number of footpounds of energy to secure increase in cardiac and pulmonary activity, without care being taken that these organs are put under the most favorable conditions to meet the increased demand upon them. It is poor gymnastics if we strive to astound the world by nicely finished and smoothly gliding combinations of complex movements fit to be put into the repertoire of a juggler, or by exhibitions of strength vying with those of a Sandow, if we do not take into consideration the effects on the vital functions. But poor as all this is, poorer still is the gymnastics if we forget that we deal with human beings, not with machines ; if we kill the souls of our pupils by formalism believing that we care properly for their bodies, if we act as if we were burdened down by an overload of method instead of being guided, directed, carried by common sense.

It is because of the necessity to emphasize this broadness of view that I consider it better to speak of developmental gymnastics, rather than to use the narrower terms, recreative, hygienic or educational.

Physical activity of a formal kind is used also for therapeutic purposes, to influence directly the organism in regaining its harmonious functions when lost. And hygienic measures are curative in a certain sense, and the common forms of gymnastics may therefore well be considered in relation to actual disease. But the gymnastic teacher should not consider himself as a mechanical physician. Even if he possesses the adequate knowledge, which he but rarely does, there comes the practical impossibility to apply the most effective therapeutic measures to classes. Diseases cannot be treated in wholesale. Each individual must be considered. Treatment must be individualized. That typical defects prevalent in a large percentage of our classes should receive due attention is true, but this does not vitiate the general statement. When a class of school children present a general picture of Kyphosis, we shall of course especially adapt our means to conquer it, as it is our duty to prevent the tendency to this deformity common in all classes. If we have to deal with a class of nurses or saleswomen, we may expect a large percentage to have weak or flat feet. Naturally we will then lay added emphasis on suitable means to prevent or conquer that deformity. But it is not our duty to go around with an anxious eye to discover defects in each individual for the purpose of curing them. If our work shall be directed to the benefit of the great majority we meet, we must adapt our means to the average normal individual, not to the perfect one, but just to the average one with tendencies to defects in many directions, but with no developed diseases or deformities. Those who have such developed diseases should be weeded out from the general class by suitable medical examination, and subjected to the treatment best adapted to them. One of the means may be gymnastics, individual or in classes. But that is then a specialized form that is distinguished from the usual classwork, the consideration of which is a matter distinct from the purpose of this work.