2. Alpha Exercise

The Exercise Scheme

Copyright 2002, Terry Duschinski.

Fat-to-Muscle Makeover

Ocala Family Physicians'

Medical Exercise Center

Call 804-5241

Email: Terry@FloridaFitness.com

I owe my exercise regularity to the Nautilus machine. The brainchild of Arthur Jones, an eccentric man with strong analytical ability, these machines and his evangelical zeal reformulated “weight lifting” into a highly civilized endeavor requiring a half-hour three days per week. The machines provided a higher degree of safety and, used correctly, greater time efficiency compared to either free weights or calisthenics.

Thanks to Dr. Ellington Darden, abundant reading material was available to help master the nuances of “Nautilus training.”

Jones attracted press attention, even a write-up in Sports Illustrated during my sophomore year of high school. A few years later, Robin Yount of baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers won the American League Most Valuable Player award, and it was said that Nautilus training helped strengthen him into a home run hitter. Athletes who had never previously strength trained for their sports became Nautilus devotees.

Those impressions remained with me until I was ready, willing, and able to join my first Nautilus club about 10 years later. Of course, health clubs feature many different brands of equipment today. Jones even moved beyond Nautilus to a company named MedX before his ultimate retirement.

Today, circuit strength training – the backbone of this program -- is a standard operating procedure in just about every mainstream health club. It’s a series of strength exercises on individual machines.

Numerous companies make machines copying Jones’ initial concepts. It is not difficult to use these machines effectively, but there are a few critical factors you might never suspect. How you interact with the machine makes a difference. It will take several sessions to equip you with a mastery of exercise machines, but once we’re finished you’ll think “how simple.”

The first thing to understand is that strength-training machines perform one simple task, they supply resistance. But they do so in a multi-faceted manner that sets machines apart from other training methods.

One distinguishing feature is that machine resistance out-maneuvers gravity. In comparison, free weights travel up and down; you change the exercise by positioning your body at different angles, such s a flat bench, an incline bench, or an upright bench.

Machines use a network of levers, sprockets, and brackets to create movement paths that can be either linear, curvilinear, or rotational.

Well-designed machines match biomechanical function to the capacity of the targeted muscle group. They provide a concentrated training stimulus because they vary the required torque from angle to angle along the muscle’s range of contraction. This was first accomplished by the trademarked Nautilus cam, but today multi-bar linkages or even offset levers are also incorporated into machine design. Essentially, the cam or linkage acts as a lever upon the weight stack. It gives you greater resistance in your stronger angles, and lighter where you are weaker.

There are several other characteristics of exercise machine DNA but only a mechanical engineer, a physiologist or a biochemist would remain awake toP hePar about them.

Jones’ interesting theories stood the test of experimentation. The most notable endeavor was a 1972 study involving West Point cadets who were also members of the football team and concurrently involved in spring practice. Over a period of 16 weeks, the resistance loads they could use on each exercise increased by almost 60 percent. The cadets’ only strength training consisted of three-times-per-week Nautilus workouts, one set of approximately a dozen exercises.

Sandwiched around 1972, Jones also became involved with a young man who resided near the headquarters of his upstart company in Central Florida. Recognizing this young man’s genetic potential for muscular development, Jones personally supervised the workouts of Casey Viator who at age 19 in 1971 became the youngest Mr. America ever. Three years later, Jones conducted an experiment with Viator that resulted in a documented gain of 60 pounds of muscle in just 28 days. It should be noted that Viator had been out of training recovering from an injury previous to the experiment, and he had lost almost 30 pounds, but nonetheless his results were staggering.

Your results are more likely to be 3 to 5 pounds additional muscle in 6 weeks, although I’ve personally witnessed as much as a 12-pound gain.

Effective use of strength-training machines means that a properly strategized workout need not be repeated for at least 48 hours. Although you may recover to your pre-exercise level quickly, the adaptation process – or growth – requires at least two nights’ sleep and several meals.

A workout program is constructed on the basis of intensity, frequency and duration. These equate to how hard, how often, and how long.

Sticking to the basics, therefore, our strategy of time efficiency dictates an emphasis upon intensity – how hard we work out – so that duration (how long) and frequency (how often) can be minimized. We’ll paint a crystallized view of intensity a couple of sessions from now.

As for frequency, two or three non-consecutive days per week is a good regimen for beginners. As you get stronger, extend your adaptation period another day or two between workouts, and eventually maybe even strength train only once per week. As you cut back on strength sessions, add aerobic training two to three times per week, which we will elaborate upon in later sessions.

Regarding duration, 8 to 12 exercises generally cover the body’s major muscle groups. Each muscle group benefits equally, studies show, from one set as it does from two sets or three sets. A set is a collection of consecutive repetitions, and it too will receive elaboration in a following session. You may perform additional sets if you like, but you'll be wasting time, and violating a Jones mantra.

"I don't care how much exercise you can stand; I want to know how little you need."

Perhaps this places your workout regimen in a new light?