This is about Arthur Jones, not one-dimensional dogma & opinions. HIT works, so do other worthwhile programs, *IF* you follow them.
True HIT as it's meant to be used has not been practiced is not followed by most here. Too tough to do or continue is the biggest issue, not efficacy-the rest is rampant speculation while ensconced comfortably behind a keyboard.
What's also interesting is that here you have a pivotal figure of the BB machine age, and you have someone in Australia who's been building machines for decades, and yet not a shred of appreciation for Jones' creations.
The Rise of the MachinesNY Times Sept 2
IF you have ever found yourself in a new gym, paralyzed with fear and confusion in a landscape of sleek weight-lifting machines that look as if they might require an advanced degree in aeronautics to operate, then you can thank Arthur Jones.
Mr. Jones, who died last Tuesday at age 80, invented Nautilus exercise equipment, which helped to spur the modern exercise revolution and the rise of the gym in American life.
But as the fitness culture has evolved, how will Mr. Jones figure in the history of this American subculture? As a pioneer? Or as a wildly successful entrepreneur in the long line of American physical fitness gurus, peddlers and hucksters whose theories and machines have come and gone for generations?
The advent of Mr. Jones’s first machine more than 35 years ago, a multistation contraption he called the Blue Monster, formed a key part of the evolutionary bridge between free weights and the array of high-tech resistance equipment that populates health clubs and late-night infomercials today. Swaggering and charismatic, Mr. Jones, a ninth-grade dropout, was a master at selling his high-end products. By doing so, he accelerated the machine-oriented fitness boom.
Mr. Jones, a weight lifter himself, unveiled his first machine at a weight-lifting convention in Los Angeles in 1970, having hauled it there in a rented trailer from his home in Florida. His timing was perfect. A fitness movement was beginning to take hold in the country after the publication of “Aerobics,” in 1968, the hugely influential best seller by Dr. Kenneth Cooper that advocated running, swimming and similar exercises to condition the heart and lungs.
Mr. Jones’s Nautilus machines helped to bring strength training into the fitness mix, though he had little use for aerobic exercises, saying most were “worthless for any purpose.” He considered Dr. Cooper “a borderline idiot who knows nothing about constructive exercise,” according to an interview he gave to the Arthur Jones Exercise Web site, operated by a fan.
Like the Universal multistation gym, the Nautilus made exercise simpler. No longer was it necessary to juggle all those cumbersome plates, bars and bolts of free weights. Lifting was now a simple matter of shifting a pin on a machine’s weight stacks.
But the Nautilus went further than other machines at the time, employing a system of pulleys and cams that ensured constant resistance on a weight lifter’s muscles during the entire range of an exercise’s motion. Mr. Jones argued that this system made weight lifting more efficient than anything else on the market, and, thus, more effective. “A thinking man’s barbell,” he told Forbes magazine.
The ease of these machines made weight lifting more attractive to a broader range of people and helped move the activity from the male-dominated domain of body builders in dank Y.M.C.A. basements to today’s well-lighted fitness megacomplexes, complete with juice bars, baby-sitting nurseries and classes in Pilates Magic Circle and Warrior Flow Yoga.
By 1983, he found himself on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of at least $125 million.
The fitness movement was also booming. According to the Boston-based International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, there are now more than 29,000 health clubs in the United States with more than 41.3 million members.
But though Mr. Jones was lauded in obituaries last week for being a revolutionary in the science of fitness, numerous studies have found that some of his principles — using variable resistance machines rather than free weights, and single-set, high-intensity training — do not produce greater gains than conventional weight lifting.
Mr. Jones’ greatest expression of brilliance, however, may have been in his ability to promote his inventions and himself.
“He was so memorable, and he was so bright, very verbal and also combative,” said Terry Todd, a former champion weight lifter and now director of the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin. “He had the ability to energize people and to create an aura around these Nautilus machines.”
Mr. Jones managed to get the machines into the weight rooms of several professional sports teams, which suddenly made them de rigueur for all sports teams, not to mention upscale health clubs. “You could say to other teams, ‘Oh, you know the Dolphins are training on this Nautilus and — my God — they’re making great gains and the stuff is really cutting edge’ and this and that, and you could create a kind of frenzy,” Mr. Todd said.
Mr. Jones, who sold his interest in Nautilus in 1986, never appeared to have any doubt about his influence on the exercise market, and dismissed most criticism of his inventions as the mutterings of fools.
Except for himself and an obscure 19th-century Swedish doctor named Gustav Zander, he said, “I have been unable to find any proof of any actually meaningful contributions to the field by anybody else.”
Mr. Jones was an unlikely ambassador for the fitness revolution. He chain-smoked, drank quarts of coffee every day and paid little attention to his diet. According to a 1985 profile in Time magazine, he “wore horn-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting pants” and carried a .45 Colt.
For all of Mr. Jones swagger, Brian D. Johnston, creator of the Arthur Jones Exercise Web site, said the entrepreneur became embittered in his final years and felt underappreciated by the fitness industry.
“He was pretty much fed up with the exercise industry,” said Mr. Johnston, president of the International Association of Resistance Trainers, based in Sudbury, Ontario, which teaches Mr. Jones’s principles. “He pretty much lost any interest in exercise science, pretty much survived on cigarettes, chocolate, scrambled eggs and a lot of coffee.”
