Exercise, a choice

Girolamo Mercuriale, an Italian physician, says: Just because one can exercise, it doesn’t mean one should. Millions have taken this seriously.

Art of exercising: The first comprehensive book on exercise wasDe Art Gymnasticaby Girolamo Mercuriale. (a representative image | Photo Credit: R. V. Moorthy

For a reason too complicated to get into, I have been thinking about exercise lately. Not of the jogging or pumping iron type, but of the theoretical variety. The first comprehensive book on exercise was De Art Gymnasticaby Girolamo Mercuriale, who said in the 16th century, “I have taken as my province to restore the light art of exercise, once so highly esteemed but now dead and forgotten.” Perhaps the period was full of the exercise-averse like so many of us.

Apparently the American composer Virgil Thomson said on turning 90 that finally he no longer needed to exercise. Do we have to wait that long?

Here’s Franz Kafka writing in his diary, “Every night for the past week my neighbour has come to wrestle with me. Apparently he is a student, studies all day, and wants some hasty exercise in the evening before he goes to bed. I am the stronger and more skilful of the two. He, however, has more endurance.” Tolstoy shared with Goethe a “taste for bodily exercise…”

‘Exercise’ came into the language in the 14th century; to exercise is to “remove restraint.” I know all this thanks to the joy of reading about exercise rather than actually doing it.

Sweat: A History of Exercise by Bill Hayes, writer, photographer, and partner of the late Oliver Sacks, has been the spur. It is a delightfully quirky and erudite book, which piqued my interest when I turned to a random page and read, “Libraries, like gyms, have always been a refuge for me, just as gyms, like libraries, have always been places of learning.”

Hayes’s quest for the history of exercise is an eccentric exercise in chasing the past, running, swimming, boxing to being a “gym rat” (which, Hayes tells us, the ancient Greeks, too, had an expression for and translates into “palestra addict,” a palestra being a “large athletic facility for exercising, viewing, and bathing.”

Mercuriale, an Italian physician, told us four and a half centuries ago what fitness gurus are emphasising today: “Strength is very different from good health. Those over-concerned with beefing up their bodies produce minds and senses that are dull, torpid and slow.” Love that. At another place he says, “One doesn’t exercise to enhance one’s beauty. That’s pure vanity. One exercises to prevent illness and preserve health.”

I have nothing against exercise; in fact, some of my best friends exercise. Yet, it thrills me to read, “Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilised type…” There is no chance that I will ever lay excessive emphasis on exercise. In fact, even the adequate amount is unlikely. Hayes tells us that the sweat of athletes was considered a prize commodity in the ancient world, and I have no intention of wasting mine.

Mercuriale says sensibly: just because one  can exercise, it doesn’t mean one  should. Millions have taken this seriously. But as we grow older, we might no longer have the choice. How many of us live to be 90, after all?