Workouts for philosophers. Seneca, Epistles 2.15.3-4

Seneca's advice for physical training: hard, brief intervals of running, weightlifting, and jumping. When you are out of breath, stop, and spend the rest of your day elsewhere (attending public and private business, cultivating literature, eating and drinking sparely because you don't need to carb-load).

Multa sequuntur incommoda huic deditos curae: primum exercitationes, quarum labor spiritum exhaurit et inhabilem intentioni ac studiis acrioribus reddit; deinde copia ciborum subtilitas impeditur. Accedunt pessimae notae mancipia in magisterium recepta, homines inter oleum et vinum occupati, quibus ad votum dies actus est si bene desudaverunt, si in locum eius quod effluxit multum potionis altius in ieiuno iturae regesserunt. Bibere et sudare vita cardiaci est.

Sunt exercitationes et faciles et breves, quae corpus et sine mora lassent et tempori parcant, cuius praecipua ratio habenda est: cursus, et cum aliquo pondere manus motae, et saltus, vel ille qui corpus in altum levat, vel ille qui in longum mittit, vel ille, ut ita dicam, saliaris aut, ut contumeliosius dicam, fullonius: quoslibet ex his elige usum rudem, facile.

Many misfortunes follow those given over to the care of the body. In the first place, they must confront strenuous exercises, whose toil exhausts their spirit and renders it incapable of attention or keen study. Their mental acuity is then further blunted by a great mass of food. Slaves of the body get the worst reputation in public office, as men whose lives revolve around oil and wine (†). They judge a day well spent if it gave them a good sweat, if they quaffed more drink than they lost, so as to repeat the game tomorrow. Eating and sweating like this is the life of someone about to have a heart attack.

There exist exercises simple and short, which tire the body swiftly and save us valuable time, providing precisely the ratio of work to recovery that we need. I mean exercises like running track, carrying weights in the hands, and leaping: the high jump, or the long jump, or the Salian jump, which I might refer to more crudely as the fuller's (‡). Choose any you like, and adapt it for rough and ready usage.

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(†) Olive oil was used to lubricate the body for exercise in the Greek palaestra. Wine was drunk afterwards to facilitate recovery.

(‡) Before modern industry, textile manufacturers took raw wool to fullers (also known as tuckers or walkers in English), who would pound it clean, using feet or clubs and often some liquid. Fulling was regularly coordinated by songs, keeping time for the fullers and making the work more fun. In Rome, fulling was the work of slaves, who danced on the wool in a vat of urine and dirt (creta fullonia, fuller's earth). The Salii were Roman priests of Mars, famous for dancing in procession around the city of Rome regularly each year in March, carrying odd oval shields (ancilia) and singing the Carmen Saliare, a hymn in archaic Latin that was already hard to interpret in antiquity. I have followed Madvig in guessing that Seneca here refers to their well-known leaping (cf. exsultantis Salios in Vergil, Aeneid 8.663), meaning that the MSS misread an original saliaris as salutaris or saltaris.