William McAdoo Gibbs was dead on when he declared, "You can not defeat an ignorant man in argument."

The Gibbs quote is a good way to summarize an after-school situation I encountered nearly 30 years ago. While driving through Palmerton, I saw a student of mine smoking a cigarette.I liked the boy especially his independent streak. Though his grades provided little proof, he was a sharp thinker who excelled at defending the unpopular side of an argument in a class discussion. He also seemed more mature than the typical eighth grader.So I asked the lad to stay the next day after class, told him what I had seen him doing the day before, how almost all adults try to stop smoking sometime, and that studies had found the people who are the least successful at kicking the habit are the ones who started the habit in their early teens. He listened the way he listened to all things I said in class, attentively.Then I tried to shame him by asking him how his parents would feel if they knew he had started smoking. I got a shock instead.He said, "My dad lets me smoke in the house."He explained that his dad first offered him a cigarette while they were watching a television show a few months ago. The boy thought the offer meant that the dad had figured out that he had been stealing a cigarette every now and then. He decided to play dumb and asked, "But isn't that bad for your health?"The dad extended the pack of cigarettes and said, "We all have to die of something, son, don't we?"The sad surmise of this story is that I did not see the boy as being the sort of guy William McAdoo Gibbs was complaining about, but his dad surely was certainly the sort so ignorant that he couldn't see the other side in any argument. Would the son with time and the game preserve-like safety that small towns offered small thoughts grow into, inherent in a sense, the father's ignorance?Whether the ignorance gene got passed on or not, I do not know. What I do know is that to some degree the father is right: We all are going to die of something sometime.The question is: How do you want to feel in the meantime?Even that boy's dad, I'm sure, didn't want to feel 85 at 55.That's just one of the many reasons why it's worthwhile not only to never smoke but to also work out regularly even if your job is physical and even as you age.A study conducted with 5,200 people over 28 years in Finland and recently published in the journal of American Geriatrics Society determined that working out hard is far better than working hard when it comes to maintaining mobility as you age. According to Medical News Today, the study defined mobility as the ability to maintain and change body positions, carry and handle objects, walk, and move things you need to be able to do to avoid spending your golden years in a nursing home.Additionally, the positives provided by working out can actually negate the negatives created doing something extremely physical for a living like lumberjacking, landscaping, commercial fishing, home building, or farming, according to Taina Rantanen, the leader of the Finnish researchers.Professional baseball provides a suitable analogy as to why this is so. Think of former players' arm strength as energy expenditure, the different positions on the field as different jobs, and the after-career condition of the throwing arms as old-age mobility.Pitchers throw far more often and in a far more anatomically dangerous manner than any position players. In the analogy, they equal workers engaged in heavy physical labor.Position players make fewer and far less anatomically dangerous throws. They equal people working out not for a pay check but to improve health or maintain fitness.It's no surprise then that far more pitchers have arm pain after their careers than position players, which is analogous to the aforementioned overall loss of mobility. While this may be a seemingly obvious statement considering that pitchers frequently have their careers shortened by arm injuries whereas it happens to position players infrequently, it accentuates a situation many parents of young athletes forget.A lack of balance in the body begets injury.The overall rise in injuries in youth sports, especially baseball throwing injuries, directly correlates to the relatively new move to specialize in one sport at a young age.Where the best teenage baseball players two generations ago would almost certainly be playing other sports competitively in the off-season, now they often play fall ball in autumn and practice baseball skills with a trainer in the winter.Is it any surprise that single-sport teenage baseball players were found in one study to be 10 times as likely to injure an arm than those who only played during the traditional season?