Any Success with Nautilus?

[stuntmovie]

When Nautilus first reached the public, almost all the "competitive" bodybuilders claimed that the Nautilus Principles and Nautilus equipment was useless for building muscle.

Has anyone on this Board trained exclusively with Nautilus equipment and made the gains that most have made using free weights? Or does anyone know any competitive bodybuilder who has used Nautilus equipment exclusively (or almost exclusively)?

Some bodybuilders in the past have claimed to use Nautilus for the majority of their contest prep, but in most cases those same competitive bodybuilders have been associated with Nautilus in some capacity.

[smblkolds]

The Nautilus "system" was  circuit training, one set per machine quickly, to get you in and out of the gym fast. Good way for gym owners to make alot of money in memberships. Constant flow of people in and out. This was my experiance about 1983.

[stuntmovie]

Yea, SMB, but did it work?

[swilkins1984]

They are useful but the biggest gains come from free weights which involve stabilization from various muscles. Nautilus like all machines are supplements to basic free weight movements and I don't think should be used as the sole workout. That said the Nautilus Pullover (old model if you are lucky) is an awesome machine that no free weight can perfectly mimic. My thoughts is to use free weights as the bread and butter exercises and save machines for extra refining.

[Bluto]

they got some good machines and some not so good and some one might prefer free weights and sometimes not

something like that

[smblkolds]

Nah. For size multiple sets worked for me better.