In the matter of regimen, wholesome food, sufficient sleep, proper clothing, bathing, fresh air, and physical exercise are of great importance.  The life and energy and passion of the adolescent boy must not be checked, but diverted into wholesome and constructive channels.

Excessive mental labor, a sedentary life, pernicious reading, idleness, can transform into a tormenting and persistent desire that which, without it would have been easily mastered.  On the other hand, a healthful regimen, energetic habits, amusements and physical fatigue are diversions so useful that, thanks to them, the most critical years pass by unnoticed.[49]

A daily cold shower, followed by a vigorous rubdown, is beneficial if the boy reacts favorably to it.  The bath, acts as a sedative.

The value of gymnasium work, track and field athletics, swimming, and “hiking” is constantly demonstrated in the lives of American boys.

Athletics are to be recommended as possessing a positive prophylactic value against the indulgence of sensual propensities.  Physical exercise serves as an outlet for the superabundant energy which might otherwise be directed toward the sexual sphere.  In the period of “storm and stress” which characterizes pubescence and which often leads to nervous perturbation and excitement ... there is no better divertitive from sexual thoughts than active athletic exercises pushed to the point of physical fatigue, as a relief to nerve tension.[50]

In addition, physical exercise tends to develop an ambition to excel, to become physically strong and robust.  With such an ambition, boys realize, intuitively to a certain extent, that to succeed they must refrain from vice.  Physical exercise has a fourfold moral value:  it substitutes wholesome activity for vice; it serves as an outlet for excess of nervous energy; it develops the will; it develops ambition to be virile.  All wholesome recreation is an enemy of impurity.  Jane Addams says that recreation is stronger than vice, and that recreation alone can stifle the lust for vice.[51] Recreation which involves physical activity is the most helpful to the adolescent boy.

The boy’s companions are important.  Emerson says, “You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him."[52] Books which contain high ideals of manhood and also of womanhood are obviously helpful, as are also dramas of this character.  And finally those general principles of moral and religious education must be used, without which we can have no strong foundation for clean living.

If we have failed to give proper instruction previous to adolescence, we now have a golden opportunity (and in thousands of cases, our last opportunity) to save the adolescent to a life of purity.  As a rule, he has ideas of sex life which are, at least, unwholesome.  Curiosity is at a high pitch, and passion is likely to be strong.  Nevertheless, the ambitions and ideals of a boy at adolescence are high.  He will fight to be clean if he understands that clean living means the acquisition of strength.  He would rather have virility than anything else in the world.