Health: How to get it and keep it. The hygiene of dress, food, exercise, rest, bathing, breathing, and ventilation. — Inside the Classic

The Five Hindrances and the Individualized Approach

Woods enumerates five obstacles to adopting physical training: ignorance of its benefits, distrust of methods, mistaken notions about cost, fear of time commitment, and the fatalistic preference for waiting until illness strikes. He counters each by insisting that health can be achieved with minimal expense and time—provided the regimen is suited to the person. “Any marked change from our accustomed manner of life should begin gradually,” he writes, using the example of a winter bather who must transition slowly from warm to cold water. The same principle applies to exercise: a program must target the individual’s specific weaknesses, whether “impaired digestion, imperfect respiration, or sluggish circulation.” Only after addressing these points does the routine become “all-round.”

The Roosevelt Example: Strenuousness as a Model

Woods invokes President Theodore Roosevelt as a paragon of vigorous exercise. He notes that Roosevelt, frail as a child, now enjoys “strenuous” activity that would be “hard work” to most men. The anecdote of Roosevelt riding two days with broken ribs—not mentioning it to avoid offending “cowboy etiquette”—illustrates the extreme standard Woods admires. Yet he also acknowledges that few carry “the burden of a weightier responsibility” than the President, implying that even the busiest person can find time for exercise. Roosevelt’s “present rugged health” is offered as testimony to “persistent vigorous exercise.” The contrast between the President’s childhood frailty and adult vigor reinforces Woods’ argument that health can be built through consistent effort.

Mind, Intensity, and the Danger of Overexertion

Woods distinguishes between automatic exercise and that which engages the mind. The most beneficial results, he claims, come when “the mind is kept on the alert” and the exercise contributes to enjoyment—as in fencing or sparring. A congenial friend adds value, and variety sustains interest. Without this, exercises are “apt to be abandoned.” Yet he also warns against “over exertion,” citing “broken-down health” from track races and similar indiscretions. The balance is delicate: exercise must be intense enough to be effective but not so violent as to cause harm. Woods recommends combining walking and running with simple indoor work like dumb-bells, giving “nearly all the advantages of a fully-equipped gymnasium.”

Woods’ manual is less a rigid prescription than a flexible framework, repeatedly urging readers to assess their own condition and adjust accordingly. The excerpts show a writer who values practicality—low cost, minimal time—yet also champions strenuous effort. Readers will find a text that mixes classical allusion, contemporary celebrity (Roosevelt), and plain advice on breathing, bathing, and ventilation. The book’s structure, moving from general principles to specific exercises, rewards selective reading based on one’s own weaknesses.

I think often of old Dr. Woods, urging Roosevelt’s plain vigor upon us. Yet his counsel, for all its talk of lungs and limbs, always felt like a care of the soul too. When I shelve his manual, my eye catches my later companion, The art of preserving health: A poem — Story, Setting & Ideas, whose quiet verse murmurs the same gentle, costless secret: we keep ourselves by tending to our days.