PHYSICAL AND MENTAL WELFARE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 41, 18 February 1939, Page 8

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL WELFARE

PHYSICAL FITNESS -4

Dear People, Before we can have physical fitness by exercise, we must have physical fitness by nutrition. When popular treatises on physical training first began to appear in our own civilisation—about the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries —their authors, although not psysiologists in the modern sense, endeavoured to provide some scientific justification for their theories. In the second half of the nineteenth century, research was made and effective results obtained in connection with the mechanism of muscular effort and the phenomena of contraction and fatigue. Physique and Science Towards the end of last century, biology and physiology began actually to be taken as a basis of physical recreation. The physical training which is in vogue in our schools (copied a quarter of a century ago from Britain) is a good example of moderate, non-competitive physical exercise. It has been recognised by the majority of health and fitness specialists who have studied the subject from the angles of biology, physiology, medicine and psychology, that the essential requisite is not to discover the best method of physical training alone; but to practice physical culture, giving it its due place in daily life—may one repeat this?—giving it its due place in daily life, and adapting it to the physiological. economic and mental capacities of the ir. vidual. Scientific Common-sense The all-round health and fitness specialists in question (and whose names are given, week by week, at the foot of this column) hold that psysical training should correspond to the requirements of age, sex and constitutional aptitude, and should be based upon a correctly nourished body, as well as upon the preferences of the individual, and the living conditions and the climate of each country. Once the actual method of achieving allround physical and mental fitness shall have been chosen, the reliable scientific advisers in question counsel its use in measured doses, just as in thef case of a medicine or a diet, but always with daily regularity. New Zealand Knows Better! The president of the Board of Education in Britain, when introducing the second reading of the Physical Training and Recreation Bill in the House of Commons in April, 1937, stated in plain termo that physical fitness is based upon correct nutrition. “Measures for physical training,’’ he said, “must run parallel with measures for correct nutrition. The one includes the other.” On the contrary, in New Zealand, promoters of physical training and recreation quite otten explain to the public that “when once" the fitness campaign shall have been launched, no doubt diet will be attended to.—By whom? In the meantime, action will probably be taken in the near future to ascertain the people's requirements for playing grounds and sports grounds, with full details of ages, localities, etc., while scandalous neglect to institute largescale enquiries into the people’s minimum requirements for nutrition, with details of ages, state of health, etc., continues as before. Loopholes Galore The traditional sports and games of the Anglo-Saxon race have spread throughout the world to the extent of demanding newspaper space and radio time out of all proportion to other and more important needs. “Sport” is already the most widely advertised and best catered for aspect of national life, in any country of the world; while true health and fitness (i.e., the prevention of physical and mental disability and the promotion of positive physical health and intellectual balance, sanity and power) remain in the background. Public demonstrations, mass drill and competitive athletics will continue to exclude the very people who are most urgently in need of wise counsel in regard to health and fitness; whilst those individuals who already have the bent to indulge in sports at the expense ot cultivating intellectual activity will be

encouraged in their present tendencies by the provision of almost unlimited facilities. 1 Methods of Assessing Health ! The education authorities of New I Zealand are for the most convinced that height and weight in school children, taken in conjunction with their ages, do measure a certain healtii-and-nutrition standard. In justice to these authorities, however, it is only fair to state that they realise the present time-limit of “ten minutes per examination”—and that, only in connection with one-quarter of the total number of school children in the Do- : minion—does not enable them to give •of their best in the way of assessing the children’s health-nutrition-fitness. • Increase in height alone was long conJsidered a fairly reliable indication of I degree of grow th of the whole bonestructure. The fact, however, that I height can increase without a corresI ponding lateral development led scienI tific investigators into physical fitness ■ to compare changes in height with changes in the mass of the body itIself. I Comparative Measurements Best Aboslute linear measurements of the various parts of the body are nowadays considered to be of no real value alone; and the practice is being | adopted by fitness specialists abroad 'of expressing such linear measurements as percentages of the length of I the body. The seven fundamental fac- ! tors for the assessment of real growth are: Width of hips, depth and width of thorax, weight, height, circumferI once of biceps and measurement of | the deltoid muscle. In necessarily rapid measurements of large numbers of children, or in mass-examination of )adults, the fuller measurements may [be reduced to the three details indisi pcnsable to any reliable comparative • assessment of health, fitness and nutrition: i.e., width of hips, circumference of arm (flexed in action, and at rest), .and sagittal diameter of thorax, freeily expanded and contracted. True Basis of Fitness Children and adults are now classified in relation both to development of bone-structure and of muscles : either as “normal’’ or as “suspected j cases.” It may be that the Fitness I Campaign promoters will insist upon comparative measurements of all chil- | ciren in future. This measure alone :will show up all the more clearly the ' present state of malnutrition in New Zealand. On the basis of tens of of separate measurements 'overseas, it has been proved beyond question that health and fitness and I normal growth are proportionate to [the increase in those factors which -.depend upon correct nutrition, i.e., i various bone-measurements, muscles. I etc., as well as general height and weight. Thus one comes back inevit'ably to the inescapable fact: Before we can have physical fitness by exercise, we must have physical fitness by nutrition . Yours as ever, Authorities synthesised; As previously enumerated. Additionally: British Parliamentary Debate on Fitness; Dr. G. Demeny, Paris; Professor Labbe, Paris; Dr. R. Franzen, New York.