Note 16 — Chapter IX · TRAINING FOR SPECIAL EVENTS.

“After a certain period of study difficult exercises have been learned, and may then become automatic. Their effects will then be very different. Is it not quite a different thing to amuse oneself with dancing from occupying oneself with learning dancing? Dancing, riding, rowing, even running, when they have long been practised, need no more [conscious] brain work than walking, which is above all an automatic exercise.... It actually needs an effort of will to oppose an action which has become unconscious and to change an acquired pace.... We see at the first glance the great hygienic superiority [as increasing the oxygen in the system, removing waste products, relieving the brain fatigued by intellectual work, &c.] of exercises which can be performed automatically, with economy of nervous energy, complete [?] repose of the brain, absolute [?] inaction of the psychical faculties. The work of the human system is then performed by the coarser parts of the machine, and fatigue is first felt by the subordinate agents of movement.

“But for certain bodily exercises the period of apprenticeship is indefinitely prolonged, and the movements need an increasing guidance on the part of the nerve-centres and the conscious faculties, because these movements cannot be constantly identical, and unforeseen emergencies occur. Fencing can never become an automatic exercise, notwithstanding the tendency exhibited by certain parries and thrusts to become habitual actions and to be performed instinctively; the movement cannot always be performed in the same manner and follow always the same order, for they are subordinated to those of the opponent.” Dr. Fernand Lagrange, in “The Physiology of Bodily Exercise.”