Part I: Getting Started with Kinesiology
Chapter 2: The History and Philosophy of Sport and Exercise
The History and Philosophy of Sport and Exercise
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding the ancient beginnings of sport and exercise
▶ Recognizing people and events that changed the thinking about sport and exercise
▶ Tracing the changes in sport, fitness, and exercise during the 19th and 20th centuries
Early humans had to expend huge amounts of energy just to stay alive.
They burned thousands of calories a day hunting, fishing, scavenging, and foraging for any and all kinds of food. And they no doubt consumed nearly as many calories avoiding being prey themselves. Anyone too unfit to outrun or outfight lions, tigers, and bears (and a bunch of other nasty beas- ties) was probably not going to be around long enough to help create the next generation.
Even after banding together to collect food and for protection from preda- tors, they continued solving many of their problems with brute physical force. Wars were fought on a regular basis, and to keep their warriors in tip-top physical condition for the next battle, societies developed peacetime games and spectacles patterned after warlike activities. Although these games evolved over time, the remnants of these militaristic origins can still be seen in many of today’s sports and exercise activities.
From these early beginnings, the science of sport and exercise medicine was born. In this chapter, we take you on a tour of the milestones between the earliest efforts to understand and improve performance and what kinesiologists do today.
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Chasing Down the Art of Prehistoric Movement
Obviously, the term prehistoric means “before history.” With no written his- torical record, no one knows for sure exactly how far back people started engaging in strenuous physical activity. What researchers do know, however, is that, in those earliest of days, just living from one day to the next was a matter of doing whatever was required to eat without being eaten.
Even though no written records exist that tell researchers about the physical strength and stamina of these people, clues do exist in their artwork — the hundreds of paintings and drawings left on cave walls around the world.
These pictures depict the things that mattered most in their lives. In addi- tion to painting elaborate pictures of the deer, birds, and bison they hunted for food and fur, these people also drew pictures of themselves engaging in physical survival skills like running, wrestling, swimming, throwing spears, and shooting arrows.
Although it’s doubtful that prehistoric humans engaged in physical activ- ity just for pleasure or relaxation, you can easily imagine that young kids who were not quite old enough to join in the hunt underwent some form of training in the physical skills they would later need when they became responsible for providing for themselves and the rest of the clan. In any event, you can be certain that your ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago recognized the important health benefits associated with being bigger, stronger, and faster than anyone or anything else in their environment.
Contemplating Eastern Philosophies and Fitness
Long before the Greeks, ancient Eastern philosophies such as Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism embraced the idea of regular exercise to promote health and fitness. The lasting impact of these early forms of exer- cise can still be seen thousands of years later in exercise and fitness centers around the world, where classes in kung fu, tai chi, and yoga are among the most popular classes offered.
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Chapter 2: The History and Philosophy of Sport and Exercise
Stressing the importance of physical activity:
Chinese philosophies
Most ancient Chinese philosophies stressed the important role physical activity plays in health and wellness. It was widely understood that exercise was essential in preventing many diseases and disorders, leading to the cre- ation of two systematic exercise programs that are still practiced, albeit it in slightly different forms, today:
✓ Tao yin: Tao yin was originally practiced by followers of the Taoist phi- losophy, which held that physical exercise was a way to achieve better health and to spiritually align oneself with the forces of the universe (known as chi). A series of Taoist exercises called tao yin are thought to be the basis of the popular form of martial arts we now call tai chi.
✓ Kung fu (or cong fu): Another form of Chinese exercise that predates much of what was done in Greece, kung fu is a series of stances and movements associated with Confucianism. The exercises were seen as a way of practicing self-discipline that would better the individual and society.
Focusing on the spiritual: Buddhist and Hindu philosophies
In India, leaders of the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies weren’t all that keen on overemphasizing the body. They thought their followers should be more concerned with spiritual rather than physical wellbeing. As a result, they didn’t feel completely comfortable with either the Taoist’s tao yin or the Confucian’s kung fu.
Instead they developed something that was more in line with their philosoph- ical beliefs, which focused on mental and physical stillness and peace — and something that has become one of the hottest forms of exercise in the world today — yoga!
Combining Sport and Science:
Greeks and Gladiators
Although followers of the Eastern philosophies had long understood the direct connection between physical activity and health, the Greeks and Romans were the ones who made a particular type of physical activity — sport — a fundamental part of their life philosophy. To the Greeks, sport had
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great religious significance. The Romans, on the other hand, developed a very different view of sport. To them, sport was important for its entertain- ment value. They were generally more concerned with the sights, sounds, and spectacles surrounding sport — and the more outlandish and over-the-top the event, the better.
The Greco-Roman period lasted roughly 1,300 years (from about 800 BCE to 476 AD), and it made sport, in one form or another, a central part of almost everyone’s daily life. With this new emphasis on sport came a keen interest in the underlying science of performance, which quickly led to a far better understanding of exactly how the human body works and what could be done to push it to its limits.
Games, gods, and glory in ancient Greece
In 776 BCE, some of the first athletic competitions in history were held at Olympia in Greece. These games took place in the shadow of Mount Olympus because that’s where the Greeks believed their gods lived. Although the games at Olympus (held in honor of the father of all gods, Zeus) may be the only ones still remembered today, religious-based athletic festivals were quite the rage throughout the Greek city-states.
Although, like today, winners of these first Olympic games were well-compen- sated, the Greek games were first and foremost a way to honor their gods.
Some of the main athletic events and religious festivals took place in Delphi (in honor of Apollo, the god of light), Nemea (also held for Zeus), and Isthmis (honoring Poseidon, the god of the sea). Today, those who are tempted to criticize athletics for becoming something akin to religion would be wise to remember that, in ancient Greece, the very first athletic completions were virtually nothing but religious celebrations!
The “Big Daddies” of exercise science
Because athletics was interwoven with Greek religion and philosophy, it soon became an integral part of the entire society and included something the Greeks were really big on: scientific investigation. In the following sections, we introduce you to four ancient physicians and philosophers who made significant contributions to the field.
Herodicus: The father of sports medicine
Around 480 BCE, a physician/sports teacher (coach) by the name of Herodicus was the first Western physician to combine sports, exercise, and
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Chapter 2: The History and Philosophy of Sport and Exercise
medicine. He was known far and wide for recommending that his patients eat a healthy diet, exercise vigorously every day, and take frequent therapeutic massages. Still, Herodicus may be best known for the ideas he passed on to his star pupil, Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine. (You can read more about Hippocrates in the next section.)
One indication of the impact that Herodicus’s thinking has had on the field of sports medicine today is that, nearly 2,500 years after his death, one of the most prestigious orthopedic sports medicine societies — the Herodicus Society of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine — still bears his name.
Hippocrates: The father of Western medicine
Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) followed in the footsteps of his teacher, Herodicus, by placing a tremendous emphasis on the health benefits of diet, exercise, and overall fitness. In fact, a quote attributed to Hippocrates is something most kinesiologists and fitness/wellness specialists would be proud to put on the back of their business cards today:
If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, we would have found the safest way to health.
Not bad for a couple thousand years ago.
Aristotle: The father of kinesiology
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the first person to study and describe general body movements and the forces required to move various parts of the body.
He also wrote the first book on the subject of biomechanics and is the one who came up with the term kinesiology in the first place: The Greek word kine means “to move,” and ology means “to study or discuss,” so Aristotle was simply saying that kinesiologists study human movement.
Although people generally think of Aristotle as a philosopher — after all, he was one of Plato’s students — he actually knew pretty much everything about pretty much everything.
Archimedes: The father of mathematical physics
In the process of inventing all sorts of military machines, Archimedes (287–212 BCE) discovered many of the basic laws of physics that would later be used to better understand and describe human movement. Two of his laws in particular made huge contributions to the field of kinesiology:
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✓ The Law of the Lever: Archimedes figured out how a long rigid object (like a bone) can be put over a pivot point (like a joint) to move large objects (like an arm or leg) with relative ease. In fact, he’s famous for saying, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Sir Isaac Newton later used this law to come up with Newtonian physics. To get an idea of just how important the Law of the Lever (and Newtonian physics) is to the current understanding of biomechanics, just take a look at the discussion of human motion in Chapter 7.
✓ The Law of Buoyancy: This law reflects Archimedes’s understanding of water displacement — which basically means that objects will sink or float based on their density relative to the density of the fluid in which they are immersed. This law remains the basis of athletic performance in water sports and aquatics today, and it’s the reason researchers and technicians throw people into tanks of water to see how much fat they have on their bodies (see Chapter 12 for more information about hydrostatic body composition testing).
Making spectacles of themselves:
The Romans
The Romans had their own ideas of what sport and exercise were all about.
Unlike the Greeks, who saw individual athletic performance and excellence as a way to honor their gods, the Romans were far more interested in spectacle and entertainment. Basically, these guys took their X Games to a whole new level.
This is war (or at least something very much like it)
To the ancient Romans, the more blood and guts spilled during athletic competitions, the better. Thousands of citizens would jam into the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus just to watch people and animals get ripped to bits for nothing more than entertainment. Gladiators fought to the death; huge animal hunts were staged; and bloody re-creations of battles took place for the enjoy- ment of the crowds. These early fans attended not to appreciate the finer points of athleticism but to witness death and dismemberment. As a result, no one was particularly interested in scientifically studying human performance.
There was one notable exception, however: Galen, whom you can read about in the next section.
Galen: The physician to the gladiators
Galen (129–200 AD) was a Roman physician who conditioned and trained gladiators. As he patched up his wounded and dying patients, Galen made
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Chapter 2: The History and Philosophy of Sport and Exercise
some interesting observations about the way human anatomy, physiology, and neurology actually worked. For example, he was the first person to see that there were two “types” of blood: one dark (venous) and the other bright (arterial). He was also the first person to identify two separate nerve path- ways: one for receiving information (sensory) and the other for sending mes- sages out to the muscles (motor).
Interestingly enough (given what they were doing to actual living people in the Colosseum), the Romans had strict laws against dissecting human cadavers.
In fact, it was a lot easier to see the inner workings of a human being from a front row seat at the Circus Maximus than to stand around an autopsy table.
Prior to his work with the gladiators, Galen, who was considered the top phy- sician at the time, was limited to dissecting living and dead animals. You could say that getting hired to work with gladiators gave him his big break.
Watching the Rebirth of Kinesiology:
The Renaissance
Not a lot happened between 476 AD and the 15th century, a period known as the Dark Ages. But then the flames of scientific knowledge slowly started to be rekindled, one small candle at a time. (Read the sidebar “Hey! Who turned out the lights?” for details on why scientific inquiry came to an almost com- plete halt during this period.)
Although plenty of people during the Renaissance (which means “rebirth”) made valuable contributions to what scientists now know about the human body and how it works, four pillars of art and science did more than all the others to get the study of kinesiology back on track and headed in the right direction: Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, and Isaac Newton.
Leonardo da Vinci: A renaissance man among renaissance men
The term renaissance man has come to signify a person with many interests and exceptional expertise in many areas. If anyone ever epitomized
that description it was the Italian inventor, architect, musician, painter, sculptor, mathematician, engineer, and — most important to those studying kinesiology — anatomist and artist, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519 AD).
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Although many people first think of da Vinci as the painter of some of the most famous art masterpieces in all of history (like Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man drawing), in medical circles, he’s best known for using his artistic genius to create some of the most accurate and detailed illustra- tions of the human body before the invention of computer-generated imagery.
Da Vinci’s almost photo-quality drawings of the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones are so precise and clear they still appear in anatomy textbooks throughout the world.
Galileo Galilei: Measuring heavenly bodies (and ours) in motion
Like his Italian countryman da Vinci, Galileo Galilei (1554–1642 AD) was also a true renaissance man, but he tended to stick more with the sciences. Also like da Vinci, Galileo is probably best known for his accomplishments that are totally unrelated to kinesiology. Because of his work as an astronomer, physi- cist, mathematician, and philosopher, he is considered the father of physics and even the father of modern science.
Galileo’s major contribution to kinesiology came in 1638 when he wrote his last book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. The two “new” sciences he wrote about would today be called kine- matics and strength of materials. Both of these sciences have to do with kine- siology, but kinematics (the geometry of motion) is so important that you’ll find it discussed in several places in Chapter 7.
Hey! Who turned out the lights?
As a new religious philosophy — Christianity — started to take hold across the Roman Empire, peoples’ appetites for killing and maiming other humans just for sport waned. Interest in sport, science, medicine — and almost everything else for that matter — came to a screeching halt with the fall of the Roman Empire around 476 AD. For more than a thousand years, from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance
and the Western explorers’ discovery of the New World around 1500 AD almost nothing hap- pened to further the understanding of the work- ings of the human body or contribute in any way to what kinesiologists do today. This thousand- year dead zone of intellectual and scientific inquiry is often and quite appropriately referred to as the Dark Ages.
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Chapter 2: The History and Philosophy of Sport and Exercise
What happens when you tick off Church elders
Although the Dark Ages are officially thought to have ended around 1500 AD, more than a cen- tury later, the Roman Catholic Church was still going after scientists it viewed as heretics (basically anyone who disagreed with Church doctrine).
In 1638, one of the most famous scientists of all time (and a big-time contributor to kinesi- ology) — Galileo Galilei — got into serious trouble with Pope Urban VIII and the Roman Inquisition for agreeing with the Polish astron- omer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543 AD) that the sun was the center of the solar system
(a position technically called heliocentrism).
The Church saw heliocentrism as a direct attack on God because Church doctrine taught that humans were so important to God that he must have made our home, Earth, the center of the universe (a view called geocentrism).
It turns out, of course, that Galileo was right all along, but that didn’t keep the Pope from putting him under house arrest until Galileo’s death in 1642. The good thing is, while locked up, Galileo had time to write his book Two Sciences, which kinesiologists find so valuable.
William Harvey: Figuring out the lifeblood of kinesiology
It’s pretty hard to think about doing any strenuous physical activity without the heart pumping away like crazy, sending blood and oxygen (and a whole lot of other important stuff) to every part of the body. But believe it or not, it wasn’t until 1628 that someone — an Englishman named William Harvey (1578–1657 AD) — finally figured out what the heart, the lungs, and the entire circulatory system were actually up to.
You can see exactly how much Harvey contributed to kinesiology by looking at what scientists thought circulation was all about before he came along.
Here are a few tidbits:
✓ They thought the heart’s job was to heat the blood, and the lungs’ job was to cool it.
✓ They thought (courtesy of Galen; see the earlier section “Galen: The physician to the gladiators”) that two entirely separate blood systems existed: arterial blood originating in the heart and venous blood origi- nating in the liver.
✓ They thought that, when the arteries dilated, they were sucking in air and that, when they contracted, they were sending “vapors” out through pores in the skin.