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Charles Atlas: Muscle Man
How the original 97-pound-weakling transformed himself and brought physical fitness to the masses

Jonathan Black

August 2009
Charles Atlas tug of war with Rockettes
Charles Atlas playing tug of war with the Rockettes atop Radio City Music Hall Charles Atlas LTD
Like tens of thousands of young men and boys before him, Tom Manfre first caught sight of Charles Atlas in the back pages of the comic books he read so voraciously. With a sculpted chest, leopard briefs girdling his hips, a piercing look on his granite-jawed face, Atlas seemed to be jabbing his finger at Manfre as he commanded: "Let Me Prove in 7 Days That I Can Make You a New Man!"

It was 1947, Manfre was 23 years old, and the man in the leopard-pattern briefs was the toast of New York City. He'd helped President Franklin Roosevelt celebrate his birthday at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. He cavorted on radio with Fred Allen and Eddie Cantor and on television with Bob Hope and Garry Moore. He stripped off his shirt at a Paris dinner party tossed by the designer Elsa Schiaparelli. His measurements had been entombed in the famous Crypt of Civilization, the repository of records at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta intended for unsealing in the year 8113. Scarcely a day went by that a newspaper columnist didn't feature an item about Atlas—dropping by to bend a couple of railroad spikes, perhaps, or ripping a Manhattan phone book in half.


Manfre stuck a check for $29.95 in the mail and got back a 12-lesson course of exercises the author called Dynamic-Tension. For 90 days, Manfre did the prescribed squats and leg-raises and sit-ups. He followed the tips on sleep and nutrition. He remembered to chew his food slowly. Pleased with the results, he sent a photograph of his new and improved body to Atlas and was invited to drop by to meet the man himself.

"I felt like a kid in a candy store," Manfre, 86, says today. "I was thrilled! He put an arm around me and said, ‘God was good to me, and I'm sure he'll be good to you.'" When Manfre won the Mr. World contest six years later, the first person he called to thank was Charles Atlas.

Manfre was not alone in his gratitude. During Atlas' heyday—the 1930s and '40s—two dozen women worked eight-hour days to open and file the letters that poured into his downtown Manhattan office. Grateful knock-kneed boys with scrawny arms and sunken chests reported that their lives had been turned around. King George VI of England signed up. Boxers and bodybuilders gave Dynamic-Tension a whirl. Mahatma Gandhi—Gandhi!—wrote to inquire about the course. A 1999 A&E biography, "Charles Atlas: Modern Day Hercules," included testimonials from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jake "Body by Jake" Steinfeld.

This year marks the 80th that Atlas' mail-order company has been in business. Atlas himself is long gone—he died in 1972—and Charles Atlas Ltd. now operates out of a combined shrine, archive and office over a nail salon in the northern New Jersey town of Harrington Park. But the Internet has given Dynamic-Tension a new life. From all over the world, letters and e-mails continue to pour in, testament to one of the most successful fitness programs ever devised. And to its mythic founder.


The man who made history marketing his muscles was an unlikely hero. Born in Acri, a tiny town in southern Italy, he arrived with his parents at Ellis Island in 1903 at age 10. His name was Angelo Siciliano, and he spoke not a word of English.

He didn't look like much, either. Skinny and slope-shouldered, feeble and often ill, he was picked on by bullies in the Brooklyn neighborhood where his family had settled, and his own uncle beat him for getting into fights. He found little refuge at Coney Island Beach, where a hunky lifeguard kicked sand in his face and a girlfriend sighed when the 97-pound Atlas swore revenge.

On a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, he saw statuary depicting Hercules, Apollo and Zeus. That, and Coney Island's side­show, got him thinking. Body­building was then a fringe pursuit, its practitioners consigned to the freak tents beside the fat lady and the sword swallower. Alone at the top was Eugen Sandow, a Prussian strongman discovered by showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Sandow toured vaude­ville theaters, lifting ponies and popping chains with his chest. Atlas pasted a photo of Sandow on his dresser mirror and, hoping to transform his own body, spent months sweating away at home with a series of makeshift weights, ropes and elastic grips. The results were disappointing, but on a visit to the Bronx Zoo one day he had an epiphany, or so he would recall in his biography Yours in Perfect Manhood, by Charles Gaines and George Butler. Watching a lion stretch, he thought to himself, "Does this old gentleman have any barbells, any exercisers?...And it came over me....He's been pitting one muscle against another!"

Atlas threw out his equipment. He began flexing his muscles, using isometric opposition and adding range of motion to stress them further. He tensed his hands behind his back. He laced his fingers under his thighs and pushed his hands against his legs. He did biceps curls with one arm and squeezed his fist down with the other. Experimenting with varied techniques, and likely aided by exceptional genes, Atlas emerged from many months at home with a physique that stunned school chums when he first revealed himself on the beach. One of the boys exclaimed, "You look like that statue of Atlas on top of the Atlas Hotel!"

Several years later, he legally changed his name, adding Charles from his nickname "Charlie."


Holding up the world, however, wasn't a career. Atlas was too mild-mannered to go chasing neighborhood bullies, though on the New York subway he once lifted a troublemaker by his lapels and issued him a stern warning. A dutiful son, he learned leatherworking to pay the rent and support his mother. (His father had taken one look at his adopted home and high-tailed it back to Italy.) But Charlie hadn't built up his chest just to make purses. Eventually, he gave up on the leatherwork and took a $5-a-week job, doubling as janitor and strongman at the Coney Island sideshow, where he lay on a bed of nails and urged men from the audience to stand on his stomach.

And this might have been the last anyone heard of Charles Atlas had an artist not spotted him on the beach in 1916 and asked him to pose.

A boom in public sculpture was coming, and busy carvers were desperate for models with well-built bodies. Among the most prominent was socialite sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who, watching Atlas disrobe, exclaimed, "He's a knockout!" Further impressed by his ability to hold a pose for 30 minutes, she soon had him running from studio to studio. By the time he was 25, Atlas was everywhere, posing as George Washington in Washington Square Park, as Civic Virtue in Queens Borough Hall, as Alexander Hamilton in the nation's capital. He was Dawn of Glory in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Patriotism for the Elks' national headquarters in Chicago. Photographs of him in classic poses, nude or shockingly close to it and with more than a whiff of eroticism, suggest how much he liked the camera and the camera liked him.

And the money was good—$100 a week. Still, Atlas was restless, and ambitious, and when he saw an ad for a "World's Most Beautiful Man" photo contest, he sent in his picture.


The contest was sponsored by Physical Culture magazine, the brainchild of Bernarr Macfadden, a publisher and fitness fanatic, as well as one of the most bizarre figures in the annals of fitness entrepreneurs. (He would later found a publishing empire with True Story and True Romances magazines.) Macfadden was obsessive about his health. When he wasn't fasting, he ate carrots, beans, nuts and raw eggs. He slept on the floor and walked to work barefoot. Impressed with Atlas' photograph, he asked the young man to stop by his office. When Atlas stripped to his leopard bikini, Macfadden stopped the contest, though he waited for a second visit to hand over the $1,000 winner's check and celebrate with a glass of carrot juice.

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  Atlas got an even bigger jolt of publicity when, in 1922, Macfadden followed up the contest with "The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man" extravaganza at Madison Square Garden. Seven hundred and seventy-five men competed for the title, judged by a panel of doctors and artists. When Atlas walked away with a second trophy, Macfadden called a halt to any more contests, grousing that Atlas would win every year. Likely, he was merely hyping Atlas' next showstopper: starring in a Macfadden short, silent movie called The Road to Health, directed by one Frederick Tilney, a busy if unsung health and fitness expert. On a ride to the film studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, one day, Tilney and Atlas decided to set up a mail-order business to sell an exercise routine. When, after a few years, their collaboration ended, Atlas went solo.

But an extraordinary body did not translate into a head for business, and, within a few years, the company floundered. With profits lagging, Atlas' advertising agency in 1928 turned over his account to its newest hire, Charles Roman, who was 21 and fresh out of New York University. What the young man came up with so impressed Atlas that four months after they met, Atlas offered him half the company on the condition that Roman would run it. It was the smartest move he ever made.

Roman knew a thing or two about writing ad copy and a lot about psychology, and he'd scarcely sharpened his pencils before he coined the term "Dynamic-Tension." He would do more than save the business; he would turn it into a marketing landmark. It was Roman who would write all the Atlas ads, from the "Hey, Skinny!" strips to the "97-Pound Weakling" and the "The Insult That Made a Man Out of ‘Mac'" series. The ads went straight to the male psyche. They preyed on every man's insecurity—that he wasn't "man enough" to defend his girl at the beach. At a time when the entire country was reeling from the 1929 stock-market crash and its aftermath, Atlas promised to restore a million battered egos.


"When the Depression struck, a characteristic response in America was to blame ourselves," says Harvey Green, a professor of history at Northeastern University and author of Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society, 1830-1940. "Atlas interpreted the desire to transform ourselves as a way of self-improvement."

The story of the two Charleses—Atlas and Roman— was a marriage of muscle and marketing that permanently altered America's approach to fitness. Before them, exercise had been the habit of a few, motivated by health first with vanity a distant second. Roman's ads heralded a new view of a man's body—as a measurement of success. As people migrated from rural America to cities filled with offices, making an impression became a priority. It was why Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, had won so many readers. But where Carnegie preached advancement through social skills, Atlas evangelized for the body beautiful.

"Carnegie's message was, fit in—Atlas' was to be bigger than everybody else," says Green. "Then nobody would mess with you. The idea that physical size could give you confidence was a powerful message."

Brute size was all well and good, but proportions were what mattered to Atlas. "I don't stress the matter of chest expansion," he told Family Circle magazine in 1939, "because it is not important....I've had a fellow in here who could blow himself up like a frog...but it was just a trick, and he was underdeveloped in every way." Nor did big biceps impress Atlas as much as well-developed abs. In one of his lessons, he wrote, "It is all very well to have strong arms and a grip of steel, but of what use are these unless the abdominal area is in perfect condition?" The paragraph concludes: "The rectus abdomus muscles will stand out firmly like a washboard."

His values were curiously old-fashioned, even quaint. Manfre was always surprised by Atlas' interest in his life. "He'd constantly ask me questions. ‘What did you do yesterday? How's it going? Did you go to church? I've got a new exercise you should add in.'" That Atlas never stopped working to improve his exercise program also impressed Manfre. "He kept studying animals," says Manfre, "and not just four-legged ones. He'd say, ‘See that bird fly? See how he flaps his wings to push out his chest?' I'd sit there amazed."


The personal touch was his hallmark; his lessons took the form of letters signed by the man himself: "Yours for Health and Strength" or "Yours for Perfect Development" or "Yours in Perfect Manhood" or (during World War II) "Yours for a Lasting Peace." Long before personal trainers, Atlas tried to create an intimate bond with his "students." That the exercises could be performed alone at home, without risk of embarrassment at a YMCA or club, was part of their appeal. "You will understand these exercises better," Atlas empathized, "if you read them out loud to yourself in a private room where you will not be disturbed."

Of course, not everyone bought into Dynamic-Tension. Most notably, Atlas feuded with a man named Bob Hoffman, who published Strength & Health magazine and sold York barbells on the side. In a celebrated case filed with the Federal Trade Commission in 1936, Hoffman called the Atlas system "dynamic hooey" and stood on his thumbs before the commission to prove the value of barbells. The FTC was apparently impressed—but not persuaded. In its finding of fact, it declared that Atlas "has employed and developed his said system since he was seventeen years of age and has attained his own great strength by the use of his own methods without relying upon apparatus." The FTC dismissed the suit and issued an order warning Hoffman not to disparage Atlas again.

John D. Fair, author of the biography Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell, says he found articles in old issues of Physical Culture in which Atlas admitted he supplemented his exercises by using weights. But Fair also gives credit to Atlas. "He was an awfully nice guy with a great body, handsome and very strong," he told me. "He was a look, a household name. Hoffman admired him, but Hoffman was a businessman."

Terry Todd, an author and expert in sports and exercise history, who with his wife, Jan, has collected a major archive of physical culture memorabilia at the University of Texas, is also skeptical. "Dynamic-Tension can build muscle only to a limited degree," Todd says. "To build up muscle you need weights. But back then it was hard to make money in weights. You needed something cheap to make and cheap to ship. Atlas wasn't the only one who saw the value of mail order."

In fact, a fellow bodybuilder says he saw Atlas lift weights when they worked out at a Brooklyn YMCA in the early 1940s. "I never saw Angie lift heavy," says Terry Robinson, referring to Atlas by another nickname. "He just did a lot of repetitions." Robinson did not hold it against him. Atlas "was always smiling," he says. "He never showed off. He was a humble guy."

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Atlas may have sneaked a few weight curls into his workouts, but as far as anyone knows he otherwise lived the virtuous life. He was an active promoter of the Boy Scouts. Asked for advice, he would say, "Live clean, think clean and don't go to burlesque shows." On the rare occasion when he dropped by a nightclub, usually in the company of Roman, he tried to talk the other patrons into switching to orange juice. And unlike Roman, who spent his growing fortune on luxury cars, yachts and private planes, Atlas had few known indulgences beyond a taste for white double-breasted suits. He lived in a four-room, fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment with his wife, Margaret, to whom he was singularly devoted, and his two children, Diana and Charles Jr. (Charles Jr. died last year of respiratory failure at age 89; Diana, now 89, declined to be interviewed for this article.) The family retreat was a modest home at Point Lookout on Long Island.

But he seemed to love the limelight. There are innumerable photos of Atlas hoisting bathing beauties or horsing around with boxers Max Baer and Joe Louis and golfer Gene Sarazen. He seemed to delight in publicity stunts, most of them engineered by Roman. He leashed himself to a 145,000-pound locomotive in a Queens railroad yard and towed it 112 feet. He entertained inmates at Sing-Sing (prompting the headline "Man Breaks Bar at Sing-Sing—Thousands Cheer, None Escape"). To protest an office dress code, he encouraged all the women on his staff to wear shorts to work in the summer. Then he appointed his private secretary president of the Long Live Shorts Club.

Atlas may have been more canny than he seemed. He never missed the chance to promote his business, whether posing with fans or lamenting the slovenly state of American manhood. A guest "appearance" with former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey on a radio show in 1936, following a trip to England to open a London branch of the company, gives a flavor of Atlas' promotional skills:

Dempsey: Well, Charlie, I am certainly glad to see you safely back in the United States, but thought you might surprise us all by coming back on the German zeppelin.

Atlas: No, but if they ever reach the stage where they have flying gymnasiums I might do that, Jack.


Dempsey: How did you find the English people, Charlie? Did they seem to be in as good physical condition as our boys over here?

Atlas: On the contrary, they appeared in much better physical condition than our boys. The Englishman ... doesn't allow that chest of his to slip down below his belt, where you find most of the American chests. If some of the boys over here don't begin taking daily exercises, they'll be carrying their paunches around in baskets."

As the world prepared for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and the specter of National Socialism grew more alarming, Atlas bemoaned the poor state of U.S. distance running and touted the value of exercise to improve the readiness of American troops. "A study of the reasons for rejection of army applicants made by Atlas," read one syndicated newspaper story, "shows that nearly one-third of the defects are those which could be largely minimized by proper care and training." He was past the age to serve in the military, but he posed for a Treasury Department sale of Victory Bonds.

Though never a zealot like Macfadden, he was single-minded in trumpeting the value of health and the means to attain it. His exercises were framed with detailed lifestyle advice: on how to dress, sleep, breathe, eat and relax. (He urged "Music Baths.") He penned long treatises on various maladies, and his company published books on everything from child rearing to relationship advice. In his view, marriage itself was subject to the vagaries of a robust sense of well-being. "The lack of glorious, vigorous health," he noted, "would prove to be, if the divorce records were analyzed, the most common reason why so many marriages ‘crack up.'" He even counseled on the best way to start the day: "Get up immediately on awakening in the morn­ing....Don't dillydally. GET UP!"

By the 1950s the business counted nearly a million pupils worldwide and the Dynamic-Tension regimen had been translated into seven languages. Ads in more than 400 comic books and magazines brought in 40,000 new recruits each year. Celebrity pupils included comedian Fred Allen, Rocky Marciano, Joe DiMaggio and Robert Ripley. (Ripley once wrote in his "Believe It or Not" column that he saw Atlas swim a mile through storm-tossed waters off a New York beach to tow a rowboat and its panicked occupants back to shore.)


Even as Atlas' days slipped into mundane routine, and he himself slipped into middle age, he would show up most afternoons at his Manhattan office to answer mail and preach fitness to fans who came by to view their idol in person. Dinner in Brooklyn was invariably broiled steak and fresh fruit and vegetables. He often ended the day practicing Dynamic-Tension in the mirror, though he also exercised regularly at the New York Athletic Club, where he was secure enough to offer marketing tips to potential rivals.

"I was working out at the club in the late '50s when I ran into Atlas," remembers Joe Weider, founder of Muscle & Fitness magazine and a former competitive bodybuilder then marketing barbells. "He came over to me and tried to offer me some business advice. He said a 100-pound barbell set was heavy to ship. Then he said, ‘Joe, I just send a course and some pictures, and I make so much more money than you. You should do that, too.'"

Atlas suffered a jarring blow in 1965 when Margaret died of cancer; he was so distraught he briefly considered joining a monastery. Instead, he fell back on what he knew best: tending to his body. He took long runs on the beach near Point Lookout. He bought a condominium in Palm Beach, Florida, and kept up a morning routine of 50 knee bends, 100 sit-ups and 300 push-ups. Occasionally a photo of him appeared, bronzed and flaunting his godlike chest, his measurements almost exactly the same as those enshrined in the Crypt of Civilization. In 1970, he sold his half of the company to Charles Roman but continued on as a consultant. On December 23, 1972, Charles Atlas died in a Long Island hospital of a heart attack. He was 79 years old.

It was the beginning of the fitness boom. The year Atlas died, maverick inventor Arthur Jones introduced his first Nautilus exercise machine, which offered variable resistance; it was joined on the workout floor by the Lifecycle exercise bike, which got its marketing kick from the budding science of aerobics. Other workout routines—Pilates, step aerobics, Spinning—would lure members to ever-multiplying health clubs. Charles Atlas Ltd., meanwhile, was selling the same mail-order course, but without Atlas as living icon and with neither branded equipment nor a franchised gym, the company profile dimmed. One day, Roman received a letter from Jeffrey C. Hogue, an Arkansas lawyer who said he'd idolized Atlas since the course rescued him from terminal insecurity decades earlier—and he wanted to buy the business.

"We met at the Players Club," Hogue recalls. "Mr. Roman told me how much [money] he wanted and I did something I advise no client ever to do. I didn't negotiate. It just didn't feel right."


Hogue declines to disclose the sale price, but he says he had to borrow a considerable portion of the money. The company's global reach surprised him, he says—he recounts that the first letter he opened was from a student in Nepal—but it was making only a modest profit.

And then the Internet brought Charles Atlas back to life.

It turned out the World Wide Web was the perfect marketing tool: cheaper even than the back pages of comics, international in scope, the ideal vehicle for mail- order sales. Seemingly immune from inflation—the course now sells for $49.95, only $20 more than in the early 1930s—Atlas' promise to "Make You a New Man!" was only a click away in banner ads on youth-oriented sites. The company says it now does 80 percent of its business online. "We are literally overwhelmed by the Web site activity," says Hogue, who declines to provide figures on revenue or growth. And such high-profile brands as the Gap, Mercedes and IBM have licensed the Atlas image or "Hey, Skinny!" comic strips for retro advertisements.

Charles Atlas came from a simpler time. His publicity stunts would hardly have interested today's celebrity magazines. He neither drank nor smoked, and his personal life was free of scandal. Steroids, had they been available then, would not have interested him. He sprang from the back pages of comic books and promised every bullied, insecure young man the means to take control of his life.

If he hadn't been real, no one would have believed him.


Jonathan Black wrote Yes, You Can! (2006), about motivational speaking. He is now at work on a book on fakery.

Editor's Note: This article has been revised to make the following corrections: The name of the co-author of Yours in Perfect Manhood is Charles Gaines. Fellow bodybuilder Terry Robinson used the nickname of "Angie" to refer to Charles Atlas.


 
Charles Atlas was born in Acri, a tiny town in southern Italy. Upon arriving at Ellis Island in 1903, Atlas spoke no English. He was skinny, often ill and picked on by bullies in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Charles Atlas

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The Truth About Rest-Pause Training
Is It Overhyped?
by Calvin Huynh | May 16, 2019

TAGS BODYBUILDING, TRAINING
WAIT, WHAT'S REST-PAUSE TRAINING?
Rest-pause is an intensity extending method that's long been praised for its strength and hypertrophy benefits.

It's where you perform an exercise to technical failure. After your initial set, you pause briefly. This "rest period" is typically 15-30 seconds. Then you'll do another set until failure before taking another brief break. You do this until you've completed a targeted number of total reps.

The total reps you choose depends on a variety of factors, but generally speaking, it should be double the amount of reps you were able to perform during the first initial set. So for example, if I were able to bench a weight for 8 reps in the first set, I'd aim to accumulate 8 more reps in the following sets to hit the targeted total of 16.

Here's what that might look like:

Set 1: 8 reps to failure (8 total reps completed)
15 seconds rest
Set 2: 4 reps to failure (12 total reps completed)
15 seconds rest
Set 3: 2 reps to failure (14 total reps completed)
15 seconds rest
Set 4: 1 rep to failure (15 total reps completed)
15 seconds rest
Set 5: 1 rep to failure (16 total reps completed)
DOES IT WORK?
Yes, it can work for both muscle and strength gains because you're able to maintain high motor unit recruitment. It also allows you to use the same high loads for all sets, unlike something like drop sets where you reduce the load with each subsequent set.

Anyone who's tried rest-pause knows it works... to a degree. The research confirms its efficacy, too, but a lot of coaches have probably exaggerated how well it works, especially as it relates to strength and size. Are the benefits of rest-pause more from the rep scheme itself, or is it just a matter of basic lifting principles like intensity, volume, and effort?

I'd argue it's more of the latter, especially when you compare it to boring old traditional lifting where you do a set, take a full rest period, and then do another set.

Dumbbell
REST-PAUSE AND HYPERTROPHY
A 6-week study comparing strength, hypertrophy, and muscular endurance between rest-pause training and traditional training found all measures were equal after the study, except lower body endurance and lower body hypertrophy, both of which were higher in the rest-pause group (1).

If taken at face value, this study shows you can get equal strength but induce more muscle growth and more endurance benefits by switching from traditional sets to rest-pause sets. However, if you look a little closer, you'll realize you probably can't have your cake and eat it too.

Both groups (which included both men and women) trained 4 times a week with 2 days designated as upper-body push days and 2 days devoted to training back, biceps, and legs.

The rest-pause group lifted with 80% of 1-rep max to failure with a rest-pause protocol that included 20-second rest periods between sets until lifters reached 18 total reps.
The traditional group did each exercise for 3 sets of 6 using 80% of 1-rep max. They rested 2 to 3 minutes between sets.
This study should get a lot of credit as its design was better than most studies. It used trained individuals, controlled for the same 1-rep max, and made sure both groups did 18 total reps, but unfortunately there were some issues that would obviously favor the rest-pause group:

1 – INTENSITY WAS MATCHED, BUT EFFORT WASN'T.
Both groups used their respective 80% of 1-rep max, but the rest-pause group trained to failure while the traditional group not only didn't train to failure but couldn't have, given their protocol.

The traditional group did 3 sets of 6 at the same load of 80% of 1-rep max. In general, someone using 80% of 1-rep max load should be able to crank out at least 7-8 reps when taken to failure (6), but they were only instructed to do 6 reps per set.

Furthermore, if you consider the following personal differences, the participants might have easily done an even greater number or reps:

Individual differences: Research consistently shows that different people can crank out a different number of reps even with the same 1-rep max (2).
Adaptation differences: The more endurance you have, the more reps you can complete before failure at a given 1-rep max percentage, even when using as high as an 80% load (3).
Gender differences: Women can perform more reps given the same 1-rep max (4). Any guy who's trained with a girl can easily testify to this. Some women are just insane volume queens.
Considering all this, there are plenty of reasons to think the traditional lifting group stopped short of, or pretty far from, failure. The study had another problem, too.

2 – PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD WASN'T MATCHED.
The rest-pause group used progressive overload, but not the traditional group. Since the rest-pause group was instructed to train to failure until reaching 18 total reps, progressive overload was naturally built into their program.

Hypothetically speaking, as they got stronger, their weekly progression for a given exercise could've looked something like this:

WEEK 1
Set 1: 6 reps
Set 2: 4 reps
Set 3: 4 reps
Set 4: 3 reps
Set 5: 1 rep
WEEK 2
Set 1: 6 reps
Set 2: 5 reps
Set 3: 4 reps
Set 4: 2 reps
Set 5: 1 rep
WEEK 3
Set 1: 7 reps
Set 2: 5 reps
Set 3: 3 reps
Set 4: 3 reps
As the rest-pause group grew stronger, their protocol allowed them to apply progressive overload. They were able to do the same number of reps with the same weight in fewer sets. They were also able to set rep PR's for their first few sets.

Contrast that with the traditional lifting group. They had to complete the same number of reps using the same weight for the same number of sets for 6 weeks, regardless of whether they got stronger. The strict design of the study didn't allow for any progression.

Yes, the study concluded greater muscle growth and endurance in the lower body for rest-pause training, but I think it would have played out differently in real life.

If the traditional sets could be taken to failure and some form of progressive overload applied, the strength and size advantage would likely favor traditional sets, especially considering how longer rest periods are better for strength and muscle growth (5).

On a side note, I don't disagree with the muscular endurance advantage found in the rest-pause group. Taking short breaks while doing high intensity work is a great way to induce endurance/work capacity adaptations. This is an underappreciated benefit of rest-pause training. But as far as maximizing on strength and size adaptations, rest-pause is likely suboptimal.

Lifter
LOOKING AT REST-PAUSE FROM ANOTHER ANGLE
The sad fact is, most of the literature on rest-pause is poorly designed because effort is almost never matched. For example, one specific study showed rest-pause squat training had higher muscle activation, but the rest-pause group trained with a higher intensity (7).

Fortunately, we have another study that tells us a lot (. This one doesn't resemble the exact rest-pause protocol most coaches prescribe, but it did match for effort by making both groups train to failure. Korak and collogues compared the neural activation, strength, and volume between a rest-pause group and a traditional lifting group.

Both groups completed 8 sessions of bench press training where 4 sets of 80% 1-rep max were taken to failure. The traditional lifting group lifted conventionally while the rest-pause group racked the bar for 4 seconds after every rep. A metronome was used to keep tempo consistent between groups.

Because both groups went to failure, neural activation was similar between groups, showing that effort matters a lot in fair study design.

Strength increases between groups was the same despite the rest-pause group performing about 32% more reps. This shows us that while rest-pause can lead to more volume, the additional volume doesn't really enhance strength.

Anecdotally, this explains why most powerlifters build their programs around traditional sets instead of rest-pause. Adding intensity-extending methods might not enhance strength given that substantial volume/intensity/effort is already in place.

WHAT REST-PAUSE IS AND ISN'T
All things being equal – the number of sets and proximity to failure – rest-pause is likely to be suboptimal to conventional training in maximizing strength and hypertrophy because the latter allows more total volume with adequate (long) rest.

Rest-pause only does well in research when design favors it, but it does have some merits in real world application. Christian Thibaudeau points out that it might help someone train harder because it's more appealing to certain individuals, especially those who enjoy heavy weights but need to do more volume work (9).

Here's how I recommend programming rest-pause:

As a time saver. If you're short on time or want to get more work done in a shorter period, rest-pause is a great method.
As a fresh and novel stimulus. It's an exciting way to do more volume because as great as traditional sets are, they can get boring.
Ultimately, rest-pause sets are great and you should sprinkle them in, but they're not better than traditional sets, especially when you match for effort and apply progressive overload.

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   "Beyond the Universe" by Bill Pearl chapter XIX
    My Heroes Have Always Been Ironmen
John Grimek, my second all-time hero, next Eugen Sandow, was featured on the cover of the first physique magazine I had purchased. The photo remains ingrained in my memory, as if it were yesterday.  From the eighth grade on, when writing about someone I admired, John always got the nod. He was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, on June 17, 1910, and  became the World's Best Built Man and the World's Most Muscular Man of his time.
Not considered a full-time strongman, Grimek performed many impressive feats of strength, which included lifting heavy weights, bending bars and spikes and hitting a thick iron poker across his forearm until it bent. He was the A.A.U. American Weightlifting Champion of 1936, and several times North American champion. He also achieved the highest total of any American weightlifter at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936.
John won the A.A.U. Mr. America title in 1940 and again in 1941. Then a ruling was passed making it impossible to win the contest more than once. He went on to win the first Mr. Universe contest held in 1948 and the first Mr. USA title in 1949.
Grimek and I appeared on the same stage at the annual Ed Yarick Show held in Oakland, California, in 1954. The event was based around a variety-show format: fourteen acts, consisting of bodybuilding, weightlifting and hand balancing. Former heavyweight boxing champion Max Baer acted as Master of Ceremonies. The show opened with my posing routine and closed with John's routine of muscle control and posing.
The Ed Yarick Show of 1954 was John's final public posing exhibition. For the next several years, he turned over all the requests for appearances to me. He was responsible for my trip around the world, to India, Mexico, England, etc. We corresponded regularly for the next forty years, with John always replying on the back of the letter I had written him. When my travels took me near York, Pennsylvania, I'd either phone or stop by. When he made trips to Southern California, he reciprocated.
John visited our Pasadena Health Club in the mid-1970s and gave some excellent advice in the form of a comment. One of the members asked, "John, how long have you been training?" John replied, "I've trained regularly for the past fifty years." The member's mouth dropped before replying, "Man! Why so long?" John blurted out, "What the hell! I had to live that long!"
In the late 1990s, I was still learning from John. He remarked that his right hip was causing such pain that for the past few years he was only riding a stationary bicycle. Thinking back on John's career, with the importance weight training had had in his life, I decided in this instance not to follow in John's footsteps. Regardless of my injuries, I started out lifting weights--I would go out lifting weights. My final lesson learned from John came on the night he passed away: Even the likes of the great John Grimek must face the inevitable.
John Carroll Grimek died on November 20,1998, at age 88.

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Another "genetic marvel".  No drugs and it would weigh maybe 150 lbs.  And have hair.  Here's to it assuming room temp and blaming it on pre-existing congenital problems.  Like stupidity and an ego the size Rome.  Fuck this idiot.

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  Quoting Dave:
Anyone who refers to the last half of the 1900s as the source of the training experience is either exaggerating or on oxygen. I require neither artificial support, fortunately, though I don’t go anywhere without my walker. The fact is, I noticed my muscles and their miniature presence at a very young age, and my cutting-edge mother was feeding me vitamins and red meat. Thanks, Mom -- I needed that. She also bought me a V-shaped spring hand-gripper for my eighth birthday instead of a dumb old baseball glove, the popular item with the ordinary all-American kids in my neighborhood. Mom was sharp.
The gripper led to spring chest expanders, which led to a set of rusty discarded weights and more weights, and more weights. Chins and dips, pushups and sit-ups became everyday rituals. Then one eventful day I joined the YMCA. They had a weight room in a broom closet next to the boiler in the basement. Nothing holding me back now -- 17 and force-feeding. I graduated the “Y” crash course within a year and enrolled in the trendy University of Vic Tanny on Journal Square in Jersey City. My tenure was terminated when the management failed to open one fine morning, having hastily removed the equipment while I slept the night before. Common practice of early gym ownership: sudden relocation.
I am the egg man. The shell is beginning to crack and my eyes are beginning to open. My, what a big world you are and it’s only 1960.
I took a job with Joe Weider down the street in Union City. Aggrandized Weider Barbell Company, 3,000 square-foot office and warehouse, the place where musclemen were said to be made. Did I say, “nothing holding me back now”? After winning Mr. New Jersey at a smooth 235, I flew west to help George Eiferman sell Joe’s barbells in Santa Monica, the home of Muscle Beach.
I thought I was in Paradise.
The first thing I noticed was Paradise had a Dungeon: sunshine, warm blue sky, sparkling ocean, bank on every corner and a dark, smelly Dungeon with weights scattered everywhere. Oh, boy! I shackled myself to a wall and put in my time.
The less light and harder the work, the better. Train, eat protein, groan and grow. It’s the iron and us. Life was not easy, but it was simple.
We all know I don’t exaggerate, but I do guess on nearly every occasion. I learned about 95 percent of what I know today -- or, rather, need to know -- about building muscle shape, size, hardness and strength in those honest and bittersweet days. It’s all in the doing, not in the research and development, not in the zoom-zoom treadmill or the latest hormone precursor from Germany, fat-burning enzyme complex by Monsanto nor the tailored, computer-generated training principles in four-color printouts.
Try selling that to the high-tech informed world.
I’m happy with what I know and I’m happy with what I don’t know. I’m not a conventionalist, old-fashioned or stubborn, nor am I intellectually lazy. (If I took a lie-detector test, the readings on the last two subjects might flutter a wee bit.) I don’t want to waste my time and energy on nonexistent shortcuts and convoluted methodology. Have weights, will travel. Add protein and a smile.
One fact rises before and above the rest: We are all different. Mentality, temperament, emotional complexity, body chemistry, physical structure, genetics, economy and environment are scrambled pieces of a puzzle picturing who we are.  And who is better able to arrange the pieces than the individual whose portrait lies in the scrambled heap? 
You know the best and fastest way to do this? Work out and eat right, one day at a time, every day and always. The pieces start to fall in place, come together and form a picture. The odd-shaped bits become familiar, they mix and they match. The more you shuffle and align and press together, the clearer and more complete the scene becomes. There are no startling new techniques for the masses of musclebuilding enthusiasts, no recently researched ingredients to produce staggering muscle growth (deadly pharmacological advances excluded) and no highly evolved camber, pulley or leverage equipment to do the job better than the rusty, old weights in a dark and stinky corner.
What worked in the '50s and '60s works now.
Aren’t you glad? It’s simple and up to you. You’re in control. Not the marketeers of devices, secret knowledge or mysterious smoldering concoctions. Hustle and hype maim and disfigure.
I don't wish to defame myself, but not having made any recent earth-shaking discoveries, let my contribution here be a collection of six unconnected considerations or convictions, conclusions, contradictions, claims, clarifications and curious comments. I'll zip through them like a bee amid wildflowers, distributing nectar or the same busy creature buzzing about a picnic not intending to sting. Oops... Ouch... That hurt... Sorry.
1) Are you sick of the hype or what?
There’s so much confusion in the minds of the aspiring musclebuilders. They start out with a simple idea of losing some fatty weight, gaining some muscle tone and getting stronger and more energetic. They hop on a treadmill and knock themselves out in three nauseating minutes. Oxygen-deprived, they stagger around the gym doing a little of this and that until they subconsciously lead themselves to the rear exit, accidentally lean against the emergency bar and coincidentally find themselves standing in the parking lot next to their snappy recreation vehicle. Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.
Now what?  Knowledge rules. Information is king. Facts, figures and data unleash. Brightly colored magazines on the newsstand adorned with muscular he-men and their demure, down-home girlfriends promise “How To Build The Perfect Body In 30 Days.” YES! I don’t care if it takes two months, even three. I’m in no rush. I will learn everything. This mag is for me. Oh, my. More healthy girls inside.
Hmmm. What are HMB, DHEA, ANDRO, GABA, COQ10, HGH, ZMA, FBI, CIA? Explain periodization, HIT, Heavy Duty and Volume Training? Where’s the pump, the burn, the rhythm and pace? They all determine the remarkable physical shape and strength I shall achieve in the next 24 to 48 hours. I really, really didn’t think it would be this fast and convoluted.
I’m flyin’ but I’m still on the ground… what the heck am I doin’? Train every day a lot: train once in a while till I throw up; take a layoff and don’t overtrain, apply high intensity, don’t strain, no pain, no gain, light weight/high reps, heavy weight/low reps, meditate/no reps. I think I’m hallucinating.
Who am I? Where am I going?
The naive, absolute beginner is the first to fall victim to the outrageous tricks of the trade. Send some HGH, COD, ASAP.
The long-struggling intermediate, more often than not, drops like a frustrated housefly batting his wings against a shiny, captivating window. “Think I’ll give that DHEA another try,” he says.
The seasoned musclehead in a weak moment and under the cover of night can’t help himself. He, too, succumbs to the mysteries of desperation and deception. When the streets are dark, I’ll go to GNC for this week's two-for-one special.
What happened to lifting weights three or four days a week for 60 extraordinary, enthusiastic minutes and hitting the cardio with gusto for 15? Where was everybody when they were handing out large portions of protein, hiding the sugar and allowing the good fat to do its life-enhancing work? We want order in our workouts, ironheads, basic exercises and hard work, focus and determination in performance, feel of the muscle in action and application of your God-given common sense. This ain’t nuclear science, steelsters. It’s simple weight lifting for hardy guys and gals with brains, courage and goals... who don’t take “no” for an answer.
Imagine a big box wrapped in your favorite colors. It’s yours and is filled with treasures worth more than jewels. All you have to do is “seek to accomplish” the goals you established when you picked up your first pair of dumbbells not too long ago: flat stomach, strong shoulders and back, muscular arms and speedy legs... or some reasonable version thereof.
Open with care and healthy pride because contained within are “apples of gold in settings of silver,” the qualities that are at once responsible for and developed by your health and fitness achievement: the priceless, incomparable and devoted characteristics of discipline, patience, perseverance, determination, humility, gratefulness and appreciation. These make up your crown.
Train hard, eat right and be happy.
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