This book constitutes a compact summary of material conventionally taught in connection with athletics. The opening chapters contain some of the classic fundamental facts about the histology, biochemistry, and physiology of voluntary muscles, with some of the more recent findings in these fields. Subsequent chapters are concerned with skills, muscular strength and hypertrophy, stress and endurance, energy requirements and efficiency, fatigue and recovery, training, nutrition, medical aspects of exercise, and physical fitness. Each chapter is followed by a bibliography, which is essential because of the brevity of many parts of the text. The book ends with a glossary, a convenient table of conversion factors for weights and measures, and a good index.
The scientific value of this book could have been greatly increased if advantage had been taken of the results of research in fields other than athletics, by greater concreteness in the discussions of the neurophysiology of muscular tone,