The Daily Dozen: How the Father of American Football Taught Office Men to Exercise

Nick Sly

Under-desk treadmills for the office have become a trend in the last few years. Companies like Walkingpad sell foldable versions for the office and home. The company boasts that, “No matter the weather, there is no excuse to not hit your 10,000 steps.”^[1]But, exercising at work is nothing new. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the father of American football, Walter Camp, prescribed exercise at work for a very specific purpose: to revitalize men.

In 1920, Walter Camp, a former football coach and Yale Athletics administrator, published in Collier’s Weekly magazine his Daily Dozen, a series of calisthenics exercises based on observations of tigers at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. Camp likened the office working man to a tiger stuck in a cage. The tiger did not move around a lot yet maintained a muscular body through simple movements. Therefore, Camp created exercises like “Hips,” which required one to stand with good posture, feet pointed straight, and place the hands on the hips.

Camp was a prolific writer, completing more than thirty books and over 250 articles on football, “roughing it,” and exercise from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Historians most often discuss his role in turning the English sport of rugby into the American sport.^[2] However, he was also an important part of the discourse on the middle-class dilemma faced by the white collar worker: how can one engage in revitalizing leisure like football or hunting without abandoning a respectable, middle-class identity?

During this period, as more men began leaving the offices of small firms and entering corporate office buildings, men began questioning their manhood. Their ability to own their own company, a signal of masculinity in the nineteenth century, became more difficult. Offices of the nineteenth century resembled the artisan shop: they were mostly male, relied on handwritten work, were more personal, and had more opportunities for advancement through apprentice-like relationships. The new modern offices of large insurance companies and banks of the early twentieth century became more characterized by impersonal relationships, difficulty in advancing and entrepreneurship, mechanization, and specialization of tasks. They also began hiring more women. The realities of a salaried position at a large company meant office men were surrounded by female stenographers, had little opportunity for advancement, and remained idle at their desk. The office space had become feminized by both women’s presence and the nature of corporate office work.

Camp argued that a small amount of exercise done at the desk could achieve what he found in the wilderness experience. Before he introduced the Daily Dozen, Camp had written about the importance of venturing into the wilderness and “roughing it” in his book, Keeping Fit All the Way (1919). Other health advocates had similar ideas. Dudley Sargent, head of the Sargent School for Physical Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggested that the blood becomes sluggish when men perform brain work in offices. Exercise would loosen the blood and improve office worker’s efficiency. C. Ward Crampton, Director of Physical Education, Health Instruction, and Athletics for the New York City public schools, said that due to work stress, men were succumbing to “ease diseases” like hardened arteries and high blood pressure. Men lost strength through office work, a sedentary lifestyle, and access to the city’s vices. To restore it, Camp suggested they venture to go fishing and camping in the wilds of Nantucket. For Camp, it was not sufficient to simply take a break in the wilderness; they needed to do something manly.^[3]

Manliness and its association with success went through significant changes in this period. In the early nineteenth century, work provided the means for manhood, brute strength, individual will, and self-fulfillment. By the end of the century, modern office work threatened those means.^[4] In the 1880s, neurologist George M. Beard published his theories on a “new” disease called neurasthenia, which he described as a reduction in nerve energy produced by modern life. A work hazard, neurasthenia necessitated that office men, and women, restore vital electricity to the vital organs like the heart and lungs in order to live a healthy lifestyle.^[5] Camp’s Daily Dozen was a cure for both the mental disease of salaried office positions and physical disease of a sedentary lifestyle.

His work as a football star and coach led to positions in the New Haven Clock Company, the Senior Service Corps, and President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet. Camp led members of Wilson’s cabinet in a series of exercise sessions, which prompted the media to call the group “the Walter Scamps.” It was through these positions that he developed what would later become the Daily Dozen. During World War I, he estimated 65,000 Navy men used his exercises. For Camp, poor health took on greater importance for men going to war. As he argued, “Since the Civil War we have grown rich and fat, flaccid and spineless.” Camp recruited football stars like “Cupid” Black from Yale to help train soldiers.^[6] A number of men gave their testimonials to using the Daily Dozen and how easy the exercises were to perform, even hinting before the sale of the regimen that it was useful for office workers. They felt manlier and more athletic than their colleagues thanks to the regimen. In 1918, members of the Augusta Physical Reserve in Augusta, Maine, gathered in the street to perform the Daily Dozen, saying they would surpass the fitness of the Walter Scamps. The Daily Dozen was supplementary to an early morning hike in the hopes the cabinet would perform better at their desk jobs.^[7] Camp prescribed the Daily Dozen as both an additional exercise and a replacement. In the event a man was unable to venture into the wilderness or attend a military-style exercise, they could do a Daily Dozen at their desk. And, the Daily Dozen would improve both physical health and mental acuity. When Camp sold the Daily Dozen as a set of vinyl records, his business partner Health Builders made the biological benefits more specific.

In 1922 Health Builders published the Daily Dozen as a $15 course consisting of an instructional booklet and a set of five 10” records with music to which to exercise. Health Builders went so far as to assign specific health benefits for each exercise. “Hips,” for example, would help relieve constipation and headaches.^[8] Camp and Health Builders showed that better health could improve men’s work output and make them more attractive candidates for promotion.

Exercise took on greater meaning for men in this period. Men had a responsibility to build themselves up physically in preparation for war and improve their work efficiency. Exercise had become more than a leisurely health activity, but a form of work. However, exercise fulfilled a personal meaning for men. It became a means to regain what they had lost by joining the corporate hierarchy: their manhood and their sense of worth. The simplicity of Daily Dozen exercises assured new, young office employees starting their careers at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, as well as senior managers, that revitalization was accessible.

Featured image caption: Cabinet officials exercising at Walter Camp’s exercise school, 1917. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

Nick Sly

Nick Sly is a PhD candidate in the history department at Michigan State University.

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