Dumbbell

 

My physio in rehab said 1 kg dumbbells can be bought at K-Mart. These are required for Exercise 3 at home each day, bicep curls, three sets of 12. A pair were duly purchased and placed near the back door, where I collect them each morning. The exercises gently improve all parts of the body, without strain, but must be done daily. Last night while browsing the shelves, I flipped open Joseph Strutt’s ‘The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England’ (New edition, T. Tegg, 1841) completely by chance at page 77: Dumb Bells. “John Northbroke, in a treatise against Dicing, Dancing, &c. written in the time of queen Elizabeth, advises young men, by way of amusement, to ‘labour with poises of lead or other metal’; this notable pastime, I apprehend, bore some resemblance to the Skiomachia, or fighting with a man’s own shadow, mentioned in one of the Spectators: ‘It consisted,’ says the author, ‘in brandishing of two sticks, grasped in each hand and loaden with plugs of lead at either end; - this pastime opens the chest, exercises the limbs, and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing without the blows.’ It is sometimes practised in the present day, and called ‘ringing of the dumb bells.’” Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for bypass patients doing their physiotherapy. Giving the lungs as much air as possible is one of the essential tasks after such an operation. Muscles have lost their tone and need restoration. Flesh that was dull becomes pink, again. I even toy with the idea of physiotherapy being some kind of Skiomachia, or sciomachy, as I exercise alone to overcome the changes made to my own body. Strutt is an attractive figure, a social historian before there were such people, an artist who wrote ground breaking works on the history of costume, as well as of sports. Strutt is familiar with village handbells; he cannot cite the Spectator contributor because the article would be anonymous. He died in 1802. Northbroke, or Northbrook, is not so attractive, a clergyman of plainly Puritan bent, his interest in sports and pastimes seems based on the desire to stop most of them forthwith. Dumbbells scrape through, while they know their place. He is also against theatre, on the grounds that all of the sins enacted on stage will give the audience ideas that they will re-enact for real soon after the play has ended. We don’t know when he died but must have been a peer of William Shakespeare, a person who wrote plays in which no two people are the same, and even the really smart ones do dumb things. My copy of Strutt’s book was rescued from a cull of unclassified material in the Jesuit library in Parkville in 1985. It weighs less than 2 kg, which means a rehab patient is permitted to hold it for long periods in both hands without ill effect.