“Study the lives of the men who have left their mark in the history of the world, and, though they may differ in many respects, you will find that they were mostly alike in possessing a certain firmness of muscular texture, and the ability to endure severe strain, physical and mental.” -Exercises for Gentlemen
Something I enjoy doing is browsing through old books about things like etiquette and exercise. I love to get that peek into another time period. The stuff that’s outdated is now humorous, but there is always a surprising amount of wisdom that’s just as true now as it was then.
So I thought the idea behind a new book, Exercises for Gentlemen: 50 Exercises to Do With Your Suit On, was great. Drawn from The School of Health, a forgotten classic of the early 1900s, Exercises for Gentlemen: 50 Exercises to Do With Your Suit On offers up excerpts and illustrations from the original physical fitness course book. Back before going to the gym became mainstream, men looked for ways to keep strong and limber in their everyday lives-things they could do on the go without even taking off their suit. Each chapter of the book focuses on exercises targeting specific parts of the body, like head and trunk, or arms and shoulders, with later chapters discussing personal hygiene and “tonic measures,” such as sponge baths and oil rubs. While still practical and beneficial for the modern man, many of the entries are unintentionally comical. It’s a fun little book that will fit in your pocket. Here are a couple of excerpts:



How to Win a Copy of Exercises for Gentlemen
I’ve got one copy of Exercises for Gentlemen: 50 Exercises to Do With Your Suit On to give away to an AoM reader. If you’d like a chance to win it, leave a comment describing an exercise you can do outside the gym as part of your daily life-when you’re at work, on the go, or traveling. We’ll randomly draw one of the comments to be the winner. The giveaway ends May 16, 2010 at 10:00 pm Central Standard Time.







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Briefcase/Laptop Raises.
Take a hefty briefcase or your laptop (or both for a greater challenge) and hold it with both hands horizontally. Get into a quarter squat position and bend your elbows about 90 degrees. While keeping your abs tight and your back straight, raise the weight from your hips to eye level and lower. Repeat about 40 times or until you feel a good burn. Do 3 or 4 sets.
This is a great exercise because it requires very little equipment, you don’t have to take off your suit, and you don’t get too sweaty. It works your abs, lower back, quads, biceps, and shoulders. Think its too easy? Give it a try and you might be surprised!
2 excercises i do when i am at work or away:
if i am staying at a hotel i find the fire exit start from the ground floor and run to 5 th floor one ste and one step down. 2nd run 2 steps up and then 1 step down . 3rd run 3 steps up and 1 step down.( then throw up, cry, call my mama) if you still have more strenght then go again :-)
second you can do while sitting on any chair, look down at your chest and then put your hands on the side of the chair on the arm restsqueeze yoru chest out , head straight feet the stretch in your chest squeeze your shoulders blades backhold it for 5 second, do it for 5 to 10 times..
2nd excercise in suit, while sitting on a chair bring your but tto the edge of the chair lift your left leg stright half way and lift your right hand pointing in front of you feel that core working hard now hold it for 5 second and then do again.
I call it the 2 year old leg lift. You will need a chair and a two year old child. Sit comfortably in any chair, as soon as you are nice and relaxed your two year old runs and jumps on your legs. With the child’s arms firmly wrapped around your legs , extend your legs until they are straight out in front of you. Your child should be giggling. Repeat until you feel the burn. Quickly stand up and hug child. Combined with the two year old toss up, and the piggy back ride you should be in shape in no time.
I always walk at a swift pace, and often take the stairs twice
Self Resistance Workouts. Every muscle in your body has an opposing muscle, and your body works best when the two muscles (or groups) are of comparable strength. You can perform any motion adding your own resistance, such as slowly curling your arm as you tighten both your bicep and tricep. It’s great because you get continual resistance throughout the range of motion, cannot use momentum to help you perform the exercise, and work more muscles in a shorter period of time.
The best exercise of all for anywhere is walking. You can do it anywhere, in any kind of weather and in what ever you happen to be wearing. Its great for keeping you fit and for losing weight. Most people don’t know that you can lose a pound a week by doing a brisk walk every day and without changing your diet. That’s 52 pounds a year with little effort. What could be better than that!
Outside of gym.
Every other day.
Jog one mile
5 sets of 20 pushups
5 sets of 50 curls (25lb dumbells)
5 sets of 50 crunches
5 sets of 20 Hindu or “jump squats”
Whole workout takes between 25 and 35 min.
Also at work, when standing, I try and stay on my toes, something my grandpa said he always did.
When standing in the bus I like to hold my backpack, shopping bag, or whatever I may be holding next to me or a little in front of me and keep it in a ‘curl’ position. In other words, I do a curl with it and stop half way up. I hold that until I get tired and switch to the other arm. It doesn’t have to be a curl either, any sort of exercise on the shoulders and arms will do!
When I find myself spacing out on the subway, I try to keep awake by doing some calf raises. It can be quite a challenge in a moving car. I also like to “subway surf” which involves keeping your balance without holding onto anything. Not very advisable with a crowded car.
*the flyer reads*
ASTOUNDINGLY AND UTTERLY SIMPLE
EXERCISES TO CHISEL YOUR DIMPLE.
THEY WILL MAKE YOU BURN IN PAIN
AND MAKE OTHERS QUITE VAIN
FROM THE MUSCLE YOU HAVE GAINED.
LEARN HOW YOU SHOULD HAVE TRAINED!
*end flyer*
*in the big top*
DR. ALEXANDER KUCY BRINGS HIS STUPENDOUS, MICRACOULS, MUSCLE-BUILDING, WOMMEN ATTRACTING, OTHERMEN SHAMING, BODYWIEGHT EXERICISES GATHERED FROM HIS TRAVLES THROUGH LANDS NEAR AND FAR!
SO COME ONE AND COME ALL!!! LEND ME YOUR CURRENTLY FAT, FLABBY, AND UN-MUSCUALR EAR!
You do not want to sweat in a suit. You sweat by boiling your blood. As with shaving, were it takes an hour to boil your pot of water, it takes nearly an hour to boil your blood, so you have nearly an hour to exercise before you sweat and ruin the fine Southern cotton your sweet, morning dew tulip ironed for you. Again, as with shaving, you do not want to do it cold, so you need to warm up. After sitting in a wooden chair all day, working on your tax reports while asking your old, miserly boss Scrooge for a few more coals, your hamstring tighten up tighter than Hamburg Harpsichord put through a sea salt, dry oven curing process. So how do you crack open that spine and break the sore leather of your legs? By touching the tips of your shiny, polished leather shoes! Bend down, allow your muscles to loosen, push down some more, let them loosen some more, push down again, and when you feel like you can move down no further and your hamstrings begin to burn, stay steady and hold that position for thirty ticks of the fastest hand on my watch. [My watchmaker, Geppetto, has advised me to insert a notice here, that these thirty ticks are equivalent to thirty seconds.] Now bend up, inhale a belly fully of air through the nostrils, exhale through the mouth, bend back down, and repeat twice more! Do not forget to do this again once done with your exercises, so as to stretch out your tendons, swine, and fine muscle textures, but breath in the reverse order to cool down your blood so that it does not boil and so that it does not sweat into your ascot or necktie.
To continue bringing your blood up from ninety-eight point seven degrees Fahrenheit to two-hundred-eleven degrees Fahrenheit, you need to stretch out your swine, textured muscles, glutimus-maximus, and calves much, much more. You will do this with calf stretches. Stick the tip of your foot up and against a wall, being careful not to scratch the carefully cultivated patina of your finely fitted wooden Dutch clogs, rest you heel on the ground, place your hands on your hips, and bend forward from the region which your lovely sunshine had found necessary to split open to allow your splendid son to come through, that region being the pelvis. Stretch until your calves burn with the sensation of mild oxygen deprivation, then alternate the legs. Do this twice and you’ll fell as young, loose and limp as a strangled and wrung spruce goose.
Now a gentleman has a gentlemanly house and in that gentlemanly house he has gentlemanly floors and by gentlemanly floors I mean clean ones, so lay down on it. The exercise that we will now be commencing is called a plank. A plank, through the means of planking, which, as this scientific diagram, A1, shows, means that your central core abdominal muscles align into the shapes of two by fours, will strength out your core abdominals, your thighs, a little bit of your gluts and triceps, will give perfectly straight posture and will set you straight and true and make you walk down a thin narrow perfect straight line. So when you are lying on the floor, belly smushed, place your elbows beneath your shoulders and your hands towards your head, palms down, and push up. You should be on your toes and on your arm from your elbow to your hand. Keep your body straight as a plank and maintain this posture for sixty ticks of the fastest hand on my watch. If you feel that you have become an expert at the plank and more gifted at walking the straight path than Gandhi and more gifted in a straight back and two by four core abdominal region than Mohammad Ali than you can advance to a secondary technique in the plank were clench your butt cheeks together so tightly that not even curry induced diarrhea could slip through. Plank some more/ your abs will be 2×4’s.
I will demonstrate to you another exercise to extended your reach and improve your ability at throwing a “windmill punch” in a battle of fisticuffs to defend your precious little flower of a wife, your children and home, or your heavily invested gold, coal and oil mine from a underpaid workers’ strike. Stand erect. Begin by pinching your shoulder up towards your ears. Very good. Now, while shrugging your shoulders up and down flap your arms out from your hips at yours ears up till they are parallel with your shoulders. Repeat to your liking. Then flap your arms all the way up while still bouncing your shoulders. Add a small hop to this motion with your feet, calves, knees, thighs, glutimus-maximus, and legs. After several hops begin spinning your arms in circles, while still jumping, using all mentioned muscles and sinew, and still shrugging your shoulders. After ten repetitions reverse the direction of your arms and spin ten times more than repeat again with both arms rotating in opposite clockwises. After ten more repetitions commence skipping and frolicking about while continuously employing previously aforementioned sinew and muscles. You now must feel like a ninny and a sissy, like a daisy such as your dandy. I, Dr. Alexander Kucy, MD., Ph D., JD., USMC., will beat that out of you.
On to the push up you girly, confused man dressed in a suit. Allow me to deconfuse you. Lie down flat on your belly. Place your hands beneath your shoulders then move your hands 2 hand spaces out, sideways from your body. Move them in the direction of which your kidneys are pointing. Push your body up with your arms while keeping your neck, back, and legs straight as if you were still lying on the ground. Ah, but why am I reminding you? You are as straight as a plank from the plank. Pause for a moment at the top, the top being right before your arms are fully extended and locked. Inhale on your way down, exhale on your way up, do not have a seizure. Repeat this cycle again and again until you push all the weakling, coward, and puny out of you, and your arms give out, and you collapse in exhaustion.
Let us continue the strenuousness, without sweating since it has not yet even been half an hour, with an exercise called the pull up. As a dapper young man takes a stroll through the park with his adoring lady he might wonder how he can keep his chiseled shape so chiseled so as to retain the adoring affection of his petit femmé. To his problem, I Dr. Alexander Kucy, MD., Ph D., JD., USMC., have the answer. The pull up; while strolling in a park find a sturdy tree branch that is roughly a foot above your head with the diameter of a balled up fist. Grab the branch with both hands and pull yourself up to the point that your chin comes up above the branch. Do this again and again till you chin no longer comes near the branch or your sweetheart asks you, “What in the Good Lord’s Name are you doing?” Repeat 3 times for tighten your muscles to their tightest sinew possible.
Stand on a stair with one foot so that one foot’s ball is on the stair while the heel is suspended in the air. Extended your foot upwards and push your body weight upwards then pause at the top of the movement then extended all the way downwards. Use a two beat cadence, bum-bum…bum-bum, for each extension, work the calf till failure, then switch legs. Do three sets on each legs. As it was when your music teaches hummed to you when you were an incompetent-at-the-piano-playing-child, it should look like this; up one, two, pause, down, one, two, pause, up one, two, pause, down, (repeat) up, one, two, pause, down, one, two, failure, switch legs, up one, two… etc., etc., etc., Additionally, an ancient seer rummy trick, I Dr. Alexander Kucy, MD., Ph D., JD., USMC., learned in Beirut, is to mix one part ostrich egg, two part fatty cow milk, one part gin, one part tonic, and one part bee’s wax, which then should be drunk and also spread on the legs using kangaroo leather with sand in it to exfoliorate the pours, increase the fineness of the muscle texture and its chiseledness, and strengthen the glutimus-maximus.
Another exercise to make your legs look less of an ostriches’ and more of a kangaroo’s, is a lunge. Simply stand erect, hands on hips, take a long, full step forward, bend your back knee down to the ground, stand all the way back and do this thirty times so each leg has had fifteen tests of its dexterity, than pause as you’re the love of your life does when she turns a sheet of piano music, then do it again and do it again so you’ve done it three times totally. One little caveat is that you must not let your front knee pass in front of your toes when bending, and press through your front heel when pushing up and down.
Now, some of my blubbery acquaintances, who do not follow my advice and whose faces are covered in acne that looks like Italian pie with round pieces of cheap greasy salami in it, tell me that we are on the way to creating a piano that can store sheet of music in a tube and then play the music back by itself. This then means that data will be stored in dimples of in and out and paper or 1 and 0 for writing purposes meaning that whole books can be complied into tiny somethings that fit into infinitesimal small other things. I then tell them that they need a wider rim on their bowler hat which they can pull over their faces and that they should wash their faces with a combination of tonic water, gin, urine, carachjestipot, also from the rummy seers of Beirut, and Pennzoil peroxide to get rid of that nasty look. Their point is is that in today’s world we must carry reams and reams of papers, manuscripts, taxes, and naughty, incriminating letters from our dearies and mistress in our briefcases, suitcases, boxes, etc., etc., which make them very heavy. So lift them! Do biceptual curls, tricepsual curls, shoulderual press, stamp presses, and procedural presses. Do not worry if you look like a baboon, swinging dangerous, heavy loads out and about your finely polished wooden cubicle. Enjoy it! You’re exercising! Tell your co-workers, bosses, subordinates, and slaves to join along. Kick out that chair from beneath you and replace it with a big, bouncy, yoga ball, or better yet, a tiger from Africa! Next time you’re carrying the 5 gallon bucket full of water to the watering barrel do lunges, lift it over your head, and ROAR LIKE A MAN!
NOW THAT YOU HAVE LISTEN TO DR. ALEXANDER KUCY, MD., PH D., JD., USMC.,’S SPEECH THIS AUDIENCE NOW OWES ME A PENPIECE A PIECE! YES, THIS MOST INFORMITATIVE MEDICAL LEDCUTRE ON MUSCLE BUDILING IN SUIT TO WOO THE LADIES, TO BEAT THE BULLIES, TO IMPRESS THE MANAGERS, AND TO HUSH UP THE MOTHERS, WAS NOT FOR FREE. AND NEITHER ARE MY BROCHURES! SO WHO WANTS ONE?
*lights dim*
@ Alexander K. Wow, That is some good writing, let me rephrase that, old-fashioned writing there. You tried hard to imitate the style of “Exercises for Gentlemen” and I tip my hat to you for your excellent effort. Must have taken quite a while to write those +2000 words. Shows how invested you are to this site.
I nominate YOU to recieve “EXERCISES FOR GENTLEMEN” as your award for writing such a piece. Who else is with me? Say I!
I!
Few exercise I can do in Office are:
1. Stretching the Wrists Backwards
2. Rotating the eyeballs
3. Flexing the back forward and backward
4. Rotating the Ankles and knees
I use a moderately heavy book to do forearm curls.
I am but seventeen years old yet I know the importance of exercise of mind and body. I never go to the gym and I rarely use weights. Every night before I sleep with few exceptions, I do the following:
40 plyometric push-ups with raised legs
40 normal raised leg pushups
80 squats
90 calf raises
200 crunches
These numbers increase as I gain more stamina.
A lot of people have mentioned just taking the stairs instead of elevators and escalators, but it’s even more beneficial to run up the stairs.
Here’s a great exercise for anyone who wants to strengthen their grip. It’s especially good for rock climbers and guitar players.
1. Hold your arms straight out in front of you, parallel with the ground, with your wrists bent back so that your palms face outward.
2. Tighten your hands into fists.
3. Open your hands and splay your fingers as wide (and as far back) as you can.
4. Alternate 2 and 3 as fast as you can. Try to do 3 sets of 100. Your forearms will BURN.
My hands felt noticeably stronger after only a few days of doing this exercise.
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