Poor Ron, imagine being the owner of this site. It is worse than the wild west where everyone is trying to be the fastest or whatever in town. You ride into town and are met with bullets, arrows, tomatoes and pumpkins! Only the reckless and fearless dare proceed.
Well, it is a challenge to offer anything of value to the converted. They really have lost the capacity to accept new ideas. Instead, they cling to all that makes sense to them. I don't blame them, either, and that is why new knowledge has little chance of taking hold.
We saw Arthur Jones try to persuade millions to embrace his ideas. Heck, in 1970 everyone read his advertisments in Ironman that went on for many pages. The information was that good. Eventually the HIT methods lost favour because most people who tried it didn't progress like Arthur promised them. Neither were Nautilus machines superior to just lifting weights. That must have been a bitter pill for Arthur and it wasn't long before he abandoned his association with muscleheads. A few notables kept the flame burning but when Mike Mentzer died in 2001 there wasn't much reason to peddle that stuff anymore. Well, Ellington Darden has probably made a good living with HIT and at least the system tries to be both scientific and consistent.
The raw and vulgar truth is HIT doesn't work. Oh, there might be a few souls who swear that it does. It is a great way to get injured. You see, if Arthur was mistaken about basic things like how muscles contract then his whole theory comes crumbling down. Muscles don't contract like boxcars but slide into each other. The logic from Arthur was superb. Unfortunately, the theory is literally false. It isn't even a close approximation to the truth.
What is sad is the meagre amount of experiments done by scientists to settle debates about which method is most effective. It would be an easy thing to do. Arthur spent millions on experiments but I am not sure all that information is available to the public to study.
Anyway, let us do a simple experiment to see how theory applies to what we do in gyms. Suppose you are hired to design a leg extension machine. You have unlimited funds and can buy all the various leg extension machines made by different companies. That, in fact, is partly what happens in some big equipment companies. Then you can use yourself and even recruit other experts so that collectively you come up with what you feel is the best design.
What are the necessary things that must be right to make an effective machine? Well, it has to pivot in the right place and duplicate the movement of the leg extending itself. You would be surprised at how little agreement there is re something so essential. Surely all companies can get this pivot point right? Well, a clever engineer might be able to devise a self-locating pivot point that best suits each individual. I don't think this has been done yet but it is conceivable. The thing is the machine should be simple and not the most expensive design out there.
The one thing almost all leg extension machines agree about is the angle of the user when seated. Usually the user is tilted back a bit but not too much. The reason for this is to keep the body upright and make it easy to get on and off the machine. Over 25 years ago I believe Icarian came up with a design where the user actually leaned back while sitting. I remember that it felt good when I used this machine perhaps around 1980. Others said the same thing. Yet when Nautilus, Universal, Cybex and just about everyone else built their leg extension machines the angle while sitting was just a bit titled up. The idea was to keep long legs from hitting the floor. There is always a problem accommodating the exteme sizes in populations and the very tall and very short challenge designers. Usually compromises have to be made and equipment usually suits people from about 4-10 to 6-7 or so. Those shorter or taller will not feel comfortable on most pieces of gym equipment. The extremely obese will also have a problem accessing most equipment because they won't fit in or the machines won't handle the bodyweight.
What seems to happen in the design community is that designs become established and then this is the way those machines are made. The angle of seats on leg extensions vary by a few degrees but that is all. Well, I thought about the leg extension machines that I made and realised one problem was that users tend to rise off the seat when attempting heavy resistances. I wondered if there was a way to compensate for that. I didn't like the Nautilus solution of using belts to keep the user in position. I came up with a version that Icarian had used decades before but tried to see if I could go further re an angle than they did. The intention was to tilt the user's legs upward so that more of his bodyweight would be under the pivot point. So far the solution works and it feels very good. I doubt my design will affect the way leg extension machines are made in the future but there you are.
In a similar way many ideas that we absorb over the years re training seem to become what makes sense to us. That is our reality and we have kept these ideas because they seem to work. The trouble starts when we stop growing. How come all those ideas don't generate more growth? Surely they must work! Millions of believers cannot possibly be mistaken. Well, it seems that they can be and in fact are mistaken about lots of things. I will develop this idea in another post.
