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may then be less incentive to participate in other skilful activities which
would involve exercise. In sport, too. the advent of machinery is making
it possible to satisfy skill hunger with a minimum of exercise; golfers'
trolleys, power driven boats, mechanised bowling alleys, even ski lifts,
tend in this direction.
I do not need to enumerate all the other factors of life in the affluent
society which tend towards physical debility. They are now so obvious
that the vast majority of citizens are aware of them. My own observations
in London, however, suggest that there is a reluctance and even a
positive resistance by many men and women to submit to a steady
physical decline. Despite the motor-car and despite other inducements
to practice skills in non-active ways many people retain a strong desire
to seek satisfaction in vigorous skilled activity. Evidence for this belief
is provided by the figures for classes in physical activities in London's
evening institutes and youth centres. These classes all of which involve
coaching as well as mere practical performance take place on weekday
evenings. In the ten year period 1950-1960 there was a 47 % increase
in the number of classes other than dancing. They rose from 1,778 to
2,618. Of the total in 1960 more than 600 classes were held in men's
and women's recreative gymnastics and in women's keep fit activities.
The most spectacular increases in popularity over the ten year period
were in badminton (6 to 312 classes), football training (70 to 341), judo
(50 to 228), table tennis (69 to 144) and weight lifting (69 to 144).
There was a significant decline in dancing especially ballroom dancing
and in boxing. More significant evidence of the same popular concern
is the post-war boom in outdoor activities, such as camping, fishing,
sailing, mountaineering, ski-ing. The evidence is to be found in abundance
in regions as far apart as the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland,
the Appalachian Mountains in the United States and in the mountains
of Australia and New Zeeland.
At the present time, then, affluence is reducing the need to take
casual exercise, is destroying opportunities for doing so and is leading
to a general reduction of fitness which many people are unwilling to
accept. We are having recourse to competitive and non-competitive
sport and physical recreation as antidotes to flabbiness. It remains
to be seen whether we shall halt our physical decline in this way, whether
one or two games a week are sufficient to keep us fit to play one or two
games a week if we take little other exercise. In spite of our concern
for fitness, shall we gradually come to be content with a much lower
standard of fitness than we have been used to ? Shall we see more and
more people resorting to less vigorous forms of recreation at an earlier
and earlier age? Shall we become content with a standard of unfitness
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