The Physiology of Muscular Exercise

Author: F.A. Bainbridge, Ernest H. Starling

Muscular exercise is of such constant occurrence in daily life, and its more obvious effects are so familiar to every one, that the complexity of the processes underlying it is apt to be overlooked. Yet a knowledge of the changes taking place in the body during exercise, and of the adjustments involved in carrying it out efficiently, is of more than mere academic interest. It is essential,for example, that the clinician, who is called upon almost daily to decide whether, and to what extent, his patients should take exercise, should be acquainted with the effects which muscular activity produces upon the various organs of the body, and particularly with the significance of the circulatory and respiratory changes associated with it. Further, the elaborate investigations of industrial fatigue which have been carried out during the last few years leave no doubt that not only the efficiency of the worker as a member of the community, but also his health, and even his entire outlook upon life, are closely bound up with the conditions under which his manual labour is carried out. A fuller realisation and a more direct practical application, by employers and administrators, of the physiological principles, which underlie the capacity of the body to perform muscular work, would undoubtedly greatly increase the output and improve the health of industrial workers. Muscular exercise is the highest expression of the activities of the body considered merely as a machine, and almost all the resources of the body are mobilised in order to bring about the greatest efficiency of the neuro-muscular system.

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