TUMBLING INTO BATTLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 199, 16 April 1943, Page 9

TUMBLING INTO BATTLE

TYPE of physical training that A will be new to New Zealand soldiers, has reached the stage where a group of 18 recruits has been able to demonstrate the procedure to Army and Air Force officers, Government officials. and others. The Listener saw the demonstration, and received the impression that the few wide variety of interesting exercises will be welcomed by the men who have to do them. Inserted as a stage between the basic exercises and the rigorous hardening exercises, the new "purposeful" tables proceed from loosening exercises to games of "horses and jockeys" (a queer variation on leap-frog), press -ups, medicine-ball games, methods of carrying the wounded, stick games, and so on, In most of these exercises, whichgenerally speaking, are the same as those at present used by the Education Department, there is an insistence on co-operation between pairs or groups of men, especially in an exercise whereware

in a group of six men take a 120Ib log and throw it from their shoulders about 2ft. above their heads, and catch it on the opposite shoulders, An exercise that followed a display of tumbling showed the direct application of such practice to a useful purposethe men had to mount a table 6ft. 3in. high and step nonchalantly off it-not jump-and land in comfort, perhaps with a roll to disperse the shock, a practice useful to paratroops. Men who have been through a sevenweeks’ course of this will then engage in obstacle races of a kind which depend on all the men arriving at the same time, not trying to beat each other. The Listener saw them go over and under fences, up rope ladders, up and along single ropes, leaping trenches, surmounting a 10ft.-high bare wall by ‘co-opera-tive methods, crossing a "stream" by wires, and so on, finally falling into a firing position within a few Seconds of each other; and all this in full battle order.