This is now so readily accepted few can remember where it was heresy to strength-train for fat reduction. But when Dr. Ellington Darden wrote The Nautilus Diet in 1985, he was a guest on the Today Show, defending a muscle-building exercise regimen in the face of the belief that to burn fat you had to exercise aerobically.

Muscle elevates basal (resting) metabolic rate, burning calories. Without resistance training, adults atrophy and metabolic rate declines. If you diet (cut calories) without strengthening, about 40 percent of the weight you lose is from lean-body tissue -- not fat -- and subsequently you've lowered your metabolic rate.

Actually, it's not just muscle but also bone, ligaments, and tendons are enhanced via strengthening.

In just 6 weeks, this woman slimmed and muscularized her figures.

In more recent years, legitimate strength training has been hijacked by tghe personal training industry's grossly flawed idea called "functional training."

This type of training utilizes low-grade multiple muscle contractions and its only benefit is acquiring the specific skill of the movement itself. It’s like learning to stand on your head. You might be fascinated but the only thing you’ve accomplished is the ability to stand on your head.

Although its verbiage about balance and posture sound good, there’s no meaningful physiological adaptation with so-called functional training, and its proponents can’t point to any quantifiable objective data supporting their theories.

In contrast, the meat and potatoes system I use is based on the developments of Arthur Jones and those who’ve stood on his shoulders such as Ellington Darden, Wayne Westcott,  Miriam Nelson and – on the rehab side – an orthopedist in Minnesota, Dr. Brian Nelson.

This is a system that puts 89-year-olds back on their feet again after 28 sessions of five exercises. It’s a system that made the West Point Cadet football players 60 percent stronger in 16 weeks.

The Late Arthur Jones, Exercise Pioneer

I owe my fitness life-style to Arthur Jones. And so do a great many people across the world, though few realize it.

It should have been front-page news that Arthur died Aug. 28, 2007. In recent years, he seldom left his modest home in Ocala, Florida. Decades ago he basked in the national limelight as the inventor of Nautilus, an African elephant rescuer, and an old coot married to a young babe bellowing “Younger women, faster airplanes, bigger crocodiles.”

Arthur Jones, 1927 - 2007

 

Arthur chortled that people used to call him crazy but once he made millions he was eccentric. He was even a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and buddies with Hollywood’s John and Bo Derek. He built a two-mile-long runway next to his ranch and jetted everywhere, once owning three 727's.

“I don’t know many people who have three jets in their yard,” I told him upon our initial meeting in 1985. His retort: “Well, where do you keep yours?”

All this form a man who ended his formal education before high school then spent a lifetime learning – incessantly. In his dying days, he was still reading several books per week.

I’m sure Arthur became a pilot in the military and I don’t know if it’s true, but I once heard him claim to have been at Pearl Harbor. He also bragged of being a mercenary fighter pilot and emphasized that it wasn’t for the cause . . . “I just liked flyin’ and killin’.”

Before Nautilus, Arthur was the patriarch of Wild Cargo, which aired on TV back when we were relegated to black-and-white broadcasts and offered but three channels.

I was privileged to work for Arthur but despite some one-on-one exposure and a few 2:00 a.m. phone calls, I know him best through Ellington Darden, my mentor whose mentor was Arthur.

Long before it became his vocation, Arthur was inventing his own exercise equipment for personal use while chasing wild game with TV cameras. When a hostile government forced him from Africa, Arthur took sanctuary in Lake Helen, Florida,  hometown of his fourth of eventually six wives (or could it have been the fifth of seven; it’s tough to keep track). Since bodybuilding was his secondary passion, he took one of his exercise machine inventions to a trade show and was surprised at the reaction it received. Nautilus was born.

“Function dictates design,” was but one of his many mantras, and he expounded on this and a set of exercise principles he delineated in Nautilus Bulletin Nos. 1 and 2, self-published works that rocked the muscle-building landscape of the 1970’s and stand today as classics for those who value exercise.

The cam was the central ingredient in Jones’ revolutionary equipment and its similarity to a mollusk shell inspired the name Nautilus. Essentially, the cam is a lever set between the weight stack and the exerciser. The length of the lever varies as the elliptically-shaped cam rotates throughout the range of motion.

So what?

The “varying resistance” level better matches your force output capacity. It makes the weight as difficult to lift in one point in the range as it is in another – instead of being too light in one place and too heavy in another.

Because of this, one set should be sufficient. The alternative would be to perform multiple sets, setting different resistance levels and concentrating on different areas in the range. A Nautilus single set is performed to a point of “momentary muscular failure,” another of Arthur’s snappy sayings.

If you’re capable of lifting 100 pounds, set the weight at 80. Then keep doing repetitions until you can no longer move the weight – despite trying as hard as you possibly can, or as Arthur would say “If I stuck a gun to your head and said ‘do another’ I’d have to pull the trigger.”

When you can no longer lift 80 pounds while you were capable of lifting 100 pounds when your muscles were fresh, you’ve achieved a 20 percent inroad – get it? But if you stopped lifting while still able to do 80, you have no way of calculating inroad.

More detail of this are explained in a series of articles I did several years ago, particularly the second of eight installments (see box). Arthur’s principles are also espoused in the surrounding video, shot at a MedX-equipped medical center in Florida a few years ago.

More Detailed Info Download PDF file of published study reviewing Jones' exercise principles 8-part Exercise Orientation articles (Part 2, in particular)

In this spot last week, we railed against the quackery and gimmicks now corrupting the personal training industry, contrasting them with the solid, proven principles of Jones. Experimentation and research set him apart from -- and far above -- everybody else in this industry. Of course, being the innovator instead of an imitator is another Arthur distinction.

Others have intriguing concepts and interesting claims, but Arthur is the only one I’ve seen put his ideas to the test, and then refine them according to his findings. I first heard of him in about 1970 after a Sports Illustrated article about this crazy man claiming you needed only seven reps of an exercise, half-hour workouts, just three days a week. And you built muscle, even to the point of winning a Mr. America contest (Casey Viator, 1971).

With Nautilus, Arthur conducted large-scale research at Colorado State and West Point in the 1970s. After selling Nautilus and starting MedX in 1988 to concentrate on spine rehab, Arthur endowed the University of Florida with research grants.

Everybody else talks a good game, but Arthur compiled quantifiable data to back his verbiage. He founded both Nautilus and MedX and you could say he even spawned Hammer Strength, another manufacturer, since its equipment was designed by his son, Gary, albeit to Arthur’s chagrin and condemnation.

I frequently quote a saying I’ve heard attributed to Arthur, although he may have borrowed it from someone else.

“Success comes from good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

I like that one a lot, and Arthur fashioned several large-scale failures amidst the notoriety of Wild Cargo and the Nautilus phenomenon. Though my assesment carries meager authority, Arthur was far superior an inventor than a businessman. But another buisness lesson he taught was very relevant, althought I actually heard it through Dr. Darden.

"It's like Arthur says," Ell mentioned, using a customary preamble to many of his statements. "You do something with factors A, B and C in it and you're successful. So, you try something else and put in factors A, B and C but this time you're not successful. You were never even aware that your successful outcome had factors D, E and F in it, too."

I owe my fitness life-style to Jones because his equipment and the “Nautilus Clubs” it generated decades ago made effective exercise time efficient, and thus palatable. He revolutionized an industry but despite his customary braggado he once condeded "I just caught the wave at the right time."

When he invented MedX spine equipment, he believed he'd discovered previously unknown characteristics of human physiology. He could hardly contain himself. He would tell any of us around him at the time that our situation was "like being with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk."

"I just won the Nobel prize," he would say. "They don't know it yet, but..."

He died, unfortunately, without the prize but deserving the gratitude of many.

-- Terry Duschinski

A look at a MedX-equipped medical exercise/rehab center.

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Nautilus Principles Effective and Time-Efficient

How much is your time worth? Time you could spend plying a trade in exchange for a fee is easily measured. Time you could be spending with your family is even more valuable.

If you're currently working out four hours per week, reducing it to one hour total -- and making it more effective -- would save you money and/or preserve value that money can't buy.