Advice About Keeping Well (17)

ZEUXIPPUS. To take a cold bath after exercising is ostentatious and juvenile rather than healthful. For the power of resistance to external influences and the hardiness which it seems to create in the body really produces a more evil effect on the inward parts by stopping up the pores, causing the fluids to collect together, and condensing the exudations which are always wanting to be released and dispersed. Besides, those who insist upon taking cold baths have to make a further change into that exact and strictly ordered way of living which we are trying to avoid, and they have to be always taking heed not to transgress this, since every shortcoming is at once bitterly brought to book. On the other hand, warm baths have much to offer by way of excuse. For they do not detract so much from vigour and strength as they help towards health by rendering the food yielding and soft for the digestion, and by providing for the painless dispersion of whatever escapes digestion, at least if it do not remain altogether crude and high up, and soothing any latent feelings of fatigue. However, when Nature affords us a sense of a moderate and comfortable condition in our body, the bath had better be left alone. A gentle rubbing with oil beside a fire is better, if the body require warming, for it can take for itself the requisite amount of such warmth; but the sun permits the use of its warmth at neither higher nor lower temperature than is determined by the temperature of the air. So much will suffice in regard to exercise.