Physical Exercise for Women.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 7074, 21 February 1893, Page 1

Physical Exercise for Women.

Dr Richardson, in the Young Woman, sayo that no changes which have come over our social life in the last twenty years are more remarkable than the physical training and education of women. We have learnt,' says Dr Richardson, that women can with every advantage practice physical exercises as - well as men. Croquet began the beneficent evolution, cycling followed, then lawn tennis, then cricket, afterwards swimming became popular, and now there is hardly an athletic sport or exercise of any kind in which the young woman does not take her share as well as the young men. Of these amusements, Dr Richardson says, swimming is the best. There is no exercise whatever that brings into more regular and systematic play the muscles of the body in a regular order. It also gives the skin the taste and habit of cleanliness. Lawn tennis id also admirably adapted to women, as it allows periods of repose. Cycling is also good, and would be better if women only wore decent clothes. Dr Richardson recommends young women to choose the bicycle rather than the tricycle. They seat a bicycle more gracefully, they work it with less labour, and rub less risk. He does not know a woman who has tried it in moderation who has not been benefited by the exercise. He thinks that fifty miles a* day is the maximum that even a practised woman oyolist should attempt. Dancing under hygienic condition is also useful. The nett result has been beneficial beyond expectations : —“ The health of women generally is improving under the change : there is amongst women generally less bloodlessnass, less of what the old fiction, writers called swooning; less of lassitude, less of nervousness, less of hysteria, and much less of that general debility to which, for want of a better term, the words * malaise ’ and ‘ langour ' have been applied. Woman, in a word, is stronger than she was in tbs olden time. With this increase of strength woman has gained in development of body and of limb. She has become less distortioned. The onrved back, the pigeon-shaped chest, the disproportioned limb, the narrow feeble trunk, the small and often distorted eyeball, the myopic eye, and puny ill-shaped, external ear—all these parts are becoming of better and more natural contour. The muscles are also becoming more equally and more fully developed, and with these improvements there are growing up amongst women models who may, in due time, vie with the best models that old Greek culture has left for us to study in its undying art."