About 100 B.C., Cicero observed that “exercise and temperance can preserve something of our strength in old age.” Aristotle stressed the need for exercise to maintain “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”
In the Misneh Torah, the twelfth century Jewish scholar and physician, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, strongly recommended daily exercise and warned that “anyone who sits around idle and takes no exercise will be subject to physical discomforts and failing strength.”
Early in the eighteen century, the renowned British physician, Thomas Addison, said: “Exercise ferments the humours, casts them into their proper channels, throw off redundancies, and helps nature in these secret distributions without which the body cannot subsist in its vigour or the soul act with cheerfulness.”
In 1799, the Englishman, Thomas Easton, evaluated the lifestyles of 1,712 people over one hundred years of age in a book on human longevity and concluded: “It is not the rich and the great, nor those who depend on medicine, who become old: but such as use much exercise. For the idler never attains a remarkable great age.”
In 1864, an English physiologist, Edward Smith, performed the first systematic studies on the physiologic and metabolic responses to exercise. He reported a higher mortality rate among people in sedentary occupations compared with those who were physically active.
In the United States exercise and fitness were popular with the founding fathers, among them (Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson) was particularly enthusiastic about walking. “Habituate you to walk fast without fatigue,” he wrote.
INTRODUCTION
When we talk about exercise, we nearly always refer to physical exercise. Exercise is the physical exertions of the body - making the body do a physical activity which results in a healthy or healthier level of physical fitness and both physical and mental health. In other words, exercise aims to maintain or enhance