Setting up exercises: Refers to unspecified morning calisthenics. “Johnson awoke, performed his setting up exercises, and shaved before heading down to breakfast at the boarding house.”
It’s an expression that I remember reading fairly frequently when I was young, yet it hadn’t crossed my mind in years when it popped unbidden into my head recently. Although “setting up exercises” had acquired an old-fashioned patina even by the time I first encountered the expression, it is an example of a shard of usage that seems to have been trod into rubble somewhere along the journey from my youth to my present.