So maybe Aristotle doesn’t make
everyone’s list of top fitness writers.
I put The Nichomachean Ethics
on my to-read list because it was cited in one of the books about resilience
that I read; knowing what is right helps us survive.
It turns out that Aristotle wrote
a pretty good justification for personal training: “Moreover, individual tuition, like individual treatment in
medicine, is actually superior to the public sort. For example, as a general rule rest and fasting are beneficial
in a case of fever, but not, perhaps, for a particular patient; and presumably a
boxing instructor does not make all his pupils adopt the same manner of
fighting…” (Book X, ix).
I’m not sure that we need yet
another Dead White Male telling us what is right, but the exercise of thinking
is always useful. We need to use
our brains as well as our bodies to be healthy.
