Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1888-11-08
CLIMB STEEP STEPS.
DR.. William A. Hammond Recommends
Novel Means of Exercise.

DR.. William A. Hammond Recommends
Novel Means of Exercise.
venture to say that not one reader
in ten can ascend flight of steep steps
as slowly as he pleases without hav-
ing the action of the heart nearly
doubled in frequency. A rapidly
beating heart is almost invariably
feeble heart Now there is but one
legitimate way of making the heart
strong. That is by taking regular,
systematic and sufficient exercises, in
to which climbing heights of stair
cases enters as a prominent feature.
Let a person who finds his pulse in
creased fifty or sixty beats in a minute
hundred stair-cases day after day for
a month or more and he will find that
the exertion does not add ten beats to
the normal number of his heart throbs.
But this is not all the good that will
be gained by climbing hundred stair
cases a day-say fifty in the morning
and fifty in the afternoon. Doubtless
the person with weak heart has suf-
fered more or less from what is called
nervous dyspepsia His food, instead
of being properly digested, has been
mainly fermented in his stomach and
has caused him various uncomfortable
feelings, which he has been in the
habit of attributing to every thing but
their proper cause. Not only have the
hundred minutes or so spent in climb
ing staircases put strength into his
legs, expanded his chest and saved his
heart from fatty degeneration, but they
have given tone to his abdominal mus
cles and to his digestive organs.
But even this is not all. He has
probably slept badly and INSULT ciently,
his brain having been kept in an undue
state of activity during the day, and
its vessels being distended with blood
which ought to be in other parts of his
body, refuse to be quiet when he seeks
the repose that he so greatly needs.
He is troubled with dreams (always
sign of imperfect sleepy and he rises
in the morning feverish, unrefreshed
and not thoroughly equipped for the
labors of the day before him. But his
staircase exercise changes all this.
The blood is now properly distributed
to the extremities of his body, he no
longer suffers from cold feet and hands,
the veins and arteries of his brain
cease to be filled to repletion, and
sleep ensues as a natural consequence.
Of course, in mounting his hundred
staircases day it would be imprudent
for him to begin with this number. AT
first one in the morning and one in the
afternoon are sufficient, and the task
may be doubled every day with entire
safety until the requisite quota is
reached. There is no danger of his
relapsing into his former sedentary
habits. The feeling of bien aise and
state of general beatitude will be so
marked that he will be anxious to con-
tinue the good work.
The treadmill has, so far as human
operatives are concerned, owing to the
uses to which it has been put. acquired
a somewhat unsavory reputation, but
1 intend to do something to give it a
better name than it has yet obtained.
It affords the best possible means of
giving tone to weak hearts l am
having one put into the sanitarium
that am erecting in Washington City
and those patients who come to me
with feeble hearts will have them
strengthened by having prescribed for
them a certain number of minutes ex-
ercise every day on the treadmill.-
William 4. Hammond, IN Philadelphia
Press.