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Show "Relaxed Play" Better Than Any Formal Exercise Exer-cise for the Health By DR. CHARLES M. WHARTON, University of Pennsylvania. Exercise as a panacea for all human ills is overrated. The search for the fountain of youth by exercise and diet has been commercialized to a point of hysteria. Reducing and starvation diets are assaults on health, and selecting the early hours for exercise is choosing the worst time of day for such efforts. Some one should cry a halt against the wild scramble for health by unnatural means. Furthermore, exercise is best when it is relaxed play, when it is pleas-are pleas-are and not work and when it comes, aa it were, of itself and is not merely mere-ly self-imposed as a stern duty. Instead of leaping out of bed and exercising violently for twenty minutes, try walking to work and entertaining yourself by noting new signs of changing weather from day to day. Or take the formal exercises if you really enjoy them and their immediate effect, but don't take them if you have to force yourself to them against all inclination and comfort. The person who abandons formal exercise, however, should be sure to-indulge to-indulge in "relaxed play" often enough to get from it the good he needs. That sort of play is something too few Americans know anything about. |