Future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was 11-years-old when he embarked on a mission to build his health. He’d been a sickly infant and youth wracked with severe intestinal problems and horrific asthma. He was almost an invalid throughout much of his youth, due to various coughs and colds and odd afflictions. When healthy, he was preternaturally active and energetic so the periods of sickness were even more pronounced.
His father challenged him. He told the bright, precocious young boy who loved to read, “… you have the mind but not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body,” he said.
The youngster responded. He flashed his trademark baring-of-teeth, a sort of partial beaming smile and partial determined snarl that clenched his teeth and personified his enthusiastic determination. He promised to make his body and build a perfect harmony between mind and muscle.
The young man embarked on a lifelong, ever-present training regimen. He took vigorous hikes across rough terrain, rowed tremendous distances on lakes and rivers, and used a huge variety of exercise equipment in his large, private gymnasium on the second floor of his home. The equipment ranged from chest pulleys and dipping bars and shoulder springs and gymnastics rings and heavy medicine balls and chinning bars to weighted Indian clubs and kettlebell-type iron weights. He trained every day, without fail, for years on end until his physique transformed from that of a pale, fragile balsa twig into a hardened, gnarled and knotted hickory branch. His ill health, for the most part, fell by the wayside under his assault.
Commit to make your body. Invest the time, the energy, and the blood/sweat equity necessary to develop your health to its maximum. You may not become a President or win a Nobel Prize like Roosevelt, but you will benefit, regardless.
From September 2010, http://raising-a-man.tumblr.com
His father challenged him. He told the bright, precocious young boy who loved to read, “… you have the mind but not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body,” he said.
The youngster responded. He flashed his trademark baring-of-teeth, a sort of partial beaming smile and partial determined snarl that clenched his teeth and personified his enthusiastic determination. He promised to make his body and build a perfect harmony between mind and muscle.
The young man embarked on a lifelong, ever-present training regimen. He took vigorous hikes across rough terrain, rowed tremendous distances on lakes and rivers, and used a huge variety of exercise equipment in his large, private gymnasium on the second floor of his home. The equipment ranged from chest pulleys and dipping bars and shoulder springs and gymnastics rings and heavy medicine balls and chinning bars to weighted Indian clubs and kettlebell-type iron weights. He trained every day, without fail, for years on end until his physique transformed from that of a pale, fragile balsa twig into a hardened, gnarled and knotted hickory branch. His ill health, for the most part, fell by the wayside under his assault.
Commit to make your body. Invest the time, the energy, and the blood/sweat equity necessary to develop your health to its maximum. You may not become a President or win a Nobel Prize like Roosevelt, but you will benefit, regardless.
From September 2010, http://raising-a-man.tumblr.com
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