"It's an optical illusion" was the candid statement of one baffled (Yardling last week after watching Norman W. Fradd, assistant director of Physical Education execute a complicated gyration designed to strengthen a music of whose existence most of his charges were completely unaware.

Twentieth Anniversary

For twenty years now Fradd has been conducting these Special Corrective Exercise classes designed to improve the physical balance of the Freshman group. Every fall after the physical examinations he selects between a quarter and a third of the yearlings and gives each of these a series of exercises lasting six weeks and intended to increase the mobility of the body and to correct such deformities as round shoulders, away backs, "bay windows", and even flat feet.

To accomplish this he runs three different workouts, one from November to the Christmas holidays, the other two during the winter months. For the first three weeks of the course general trunk strengthening exercises are given to 230-pound mammoths and 105-pound weaklings alike, after which specialized practices are employed to correct individual shortcomings.

Youth Yields to Age

In the course of these workouts candidates learn of more ways to throw a medicine ball than they had previously thought remotely conceivable, practice simulating pointer dogs, folding jackknives, and steel springs, contortions which the gray-haired director executes with the greatest ease, while his younger and potentially better adapted charges resemble octogenarians when attempting to accomplish the same maneuvers.

In 1919 when the classes first began, their site was in the former Freshman Athletic Building, now used by three was changed to the old Hemenway Gymnasium, whence at length the classes arrived at their present location, a third story indoor Athletic Building room filled with medicine balls, stools, mats, ladders parallel to the floor and walls, and other weird apparatus.

David Hyde, instructor in Physical Education, and Lyle Clark; football coach and instructor in Physical Education, are now aiding Fradd by acting as assistants, since classes number only 15 or 20, and from 350 to 300 boys must be instructed each winter.

Key to Fitness

"Form in physical skills is the key to success in sports. Postural habits in study or business may keep you healthy or cause you to bog down" said the director, and it is his aim to produce this form by increasing the range of movement which, in Freshmen, is very limited.

During the last three years the physical stature of incoming students has greatly improved, the reason for which Fradd thinks lies in the fact that the system of corrective exercises, adopted at many colleges, male and female, has also been taken up in a large number of preparatory schools, to which reports on graduates are sent each year by the Department.

Not All Non-Athletic

While in the long run the participants of these corrective courses are liable to be of the non-athletic type, such is not always the case, as is evinced by George Owen, Jr. '28, a nine-letter man who underwent this period of corrective training.

Besides his duties hero, Fradd also handles special infantile cases or others who cannot join in group activities. At present he says that he is hampered by lack or room in which to expand the course entering its twenty-first year.