Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.

Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual...It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.

Modernity turned Olympic athletes into Roman gladiators, captives. The Greek ideal was to never do activities that reduce one's humanity.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful.

Exercise invigorates the body and sharpens the mind.

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors — as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

In ancient Greek cities, only the citizens were allowed to lift weights and work in the gym: slaves were forbidden. It's no wonder that the robots of Babylon seek to ban gyms for men in our time.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic: and certainly to a kingdom or state, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

The culture of the ancient Orient affirmed not only ideas of man's dependence on the supernatural forces that were external to him; there was also a tendency to cultivate certain rules of behaviour in relation to these forces, including techniques of training the body in relation to these forces to regulate and perfect bodily and spiritual processes. Various systems of exercises linked with religious beliefs were evolved to change the state of the mind, the consciousness, to achieve complete unity with the universe, to become one with the energy of nature. These techniques for influencing one's own organism through the mechanisms of psycho-physiological self-regulation and control - techniques that are much in fashion today - could not have survived for centuries and have penetrated other cultures with a different ethnos, if they had not contained some real knowledge of the most subtle and hidden structural.

What exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals.

The art of wrestling, which in the present day is chiefly confined to the lower classes of the people, was, however, highly esteemed by the ancients, and made a very considerable figure among the Olympic games. In the ages of chivalry, to wrestle well was accounted one of the accomplishments which a hero ought to possess. Wrestling is a kind of exercise that, from its nature, is likely to have been practiced by every nation, and especially by those the least civilised. It was probably well known in this country long before the introduction of foreign manners.

Exercise is as much of a vital necessity for man as air, water and food, in the sense that no man who does not take exercise regularly, can be perfectly healthy. By “exercise” we do not mean merely walking, or games like hockey, football, and cricket; we include under the term all physical and mental activity. Exercise, even as food, is as essential to the mind as to the body. The mind is much weakened by want of exercise as the body, and a feeble mind is, indeed, a form of disease. An athlete, for instance, who is an expert in wrestling, cannot be regarded as a really healthy man, unless his mind is equally efficient. As already explained, “a sound mind in a sound body” alone constitutes true health. (Chapter VII, Exercise)

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic; and certainly to a kingdom, or estate a just and honourable war is the true exercise. A civil war indeed is like the heat of a fever; but a foreign war is like the heat of exercise, and serveth to keep the body in health; for in a slothful peace, both courages will effeminate and manners corrupt.