I stand corrected…thanks
== Scott ==
This is exactly why I want a way to contact some of you guys in the event you or I leave this forum . There’s a small hand full of you guys I’d like to keep in touch with . I believe you can post your email in your preference section? I think mine is there.
That’s a newer model than mine, ha ha!
Scott
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These guys never receive enough credit. Massive, strong as hell with some of the best hair ever. And big proponents of the reverse grip bench.
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I remember seeing those guys on various TV shows growing up in the 80’s,… no clue who they were, or how the hell they got to look like they did, but it always stuck with me.
Many years later when I was living in LA, I was sketching at the Zoo one afternoon and saw one of the brothers (I didn’t know which one, and wasn’t as into the sport as I would eventually be) walking around, still wearing the mid-riff sweatshirt he had been wearing decades earlier in the muscle mags. Being with other animators and not meat-heads, I couldn’t really turn to anyone and get excited by my celebrity sighting -lol
S
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Interestingly, I believe one of them (I think his name was David) was trained by Mike Mentzer for a while. I don’t know David’s side of it, but Mike said his strength on the leg Press increased like crazy, and he was one of the strongest people he ever trained! Pretty cool stuff. It was on one of Mentzer‘s tapes on YouTube.
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One of them is still alive. Became a very renowned bodybuilding photographer
My first exposure to Nautilus was in the early 1980’s. I was in my final years of graduate school, and another guy in our research group came in one day raving about these great machines that the local tennis club put in. So I did a trial workout and immediately signed up. It was a full line of about 12 machines, they had the big hip and back machine, as well as a number of the dual machines for pre-exhaust. I trained that way for about 1.5 years, I think. I really loved it. I could turn myself into a limp dishrag in fairly short order, and loved the thoroughly depleted feeling I had after the workouts. Ultimately, though, I was also a little disappointed, because after a time my progress slowed down and I didn’t add as much muscle as I had hoped. That’s when I learned about genetics.
Then I graduated, and got a full time job in another state. In my new location, I couldn’t find a comparable nautilus facility, and I didn’t have the time to go to a gym three times a week. (In the early 80’s, Nautilus was pitched as 3 times per week). I also wasn’t thrilled about having to train in the evening at a public gym during the busiest hours. So I shifted back to training at home, using the simple stuff body weight and free weight stuff that I used to do in high school and college. That was OK, because I wasn’t that hardcore about lifting or strength training. Plus, I was also doing a lot of cardio. My objective was achieving balanced fitness, in a time efficient manner.
While I did ok with my body weight and free weight stuff, I still suffered a bit from lingering Nautilus envy. I kept wondering if I was missing out by not having access to state of the art, scientifically designed machines. That nagged me for a lot of years. But I eventually got over that envy.
That transition happened years later when, under different life circumstances, I joined a gym that had a bunch of machines. While they were mostly Cybex machines, and not Nautilus, they were machines. I was excited to try machines again. Then I quickly proceeded to injure my shoulders, first on the pec deck machine, and then on the seated chest press. After all that machine envy, I found that bench pressing with dumbbells was far more comfortable for my shoulders. Later on, I had some knee problems develop, probably from the knee extension and leg curl machines. Short story: the machines were not as magical as I had remembered, and neither machines or free weights solved my problem of mediocre bodybuilding genetics.
I have since had occasion to try some later generation Nautlius machines, usually while traveling and finding them in a resort gym. They were OK, but not magical.
I now find that how well a machine fits my body is more important than who made it. I also have a preference for plate loaded machines that don’t have a lot of belts or pulleys, because of the lower friction. I think a lot of Arthur’s design decisions were based on a faulty understanding of physiology. I don’t think you need to fully load muscles over the full range of movement. You certainly don’t need to pound on the muscle in a fully contracted position. Machines do have the advantage of letting you really focus on reaching failure (because you don’t have to control the path of a barbell or dumbbell). But I’ve also come to believe that reaching failure isn’t as critical as I once thought. And, of course, I’ve reached the age where my peak strength and muscularity lie in the rear view mirror…
So is Nautilus dead? The name lives on, and I’ve been told that they still make some decent machines. But they no longer have the mystique or uniqueness that they once had. Jones’s machines may no longer dominate the industry, but for several generations of people, training on machines became synonymous with strength training. That was a direct result of Nautilus’s boom years. (Though barbell stuff is making a comeback, something that started with the rise of CrossFit.)
People love antique cars, usually the one’s they wanted as a teenager. So I can see the fascination you have with what are basically antique exercise machines. But to younger folks, they may just look old and primative. I have read that the fascination with old cars, particularly muscle cars, seems to be dying off as the Baby Boomers do. Maybe that will eventually happen with vintage Nautilus stuff…
BTW - I don’t see any email address associated with your name. Maybe I don’t know how to look up someone’s profile. Or maybe you haven’t typed anything into the “About Me” box under Preference > Profile? The email you use to set up the account is not public, as far as I can tell.
I thought David was the photographer and Peter was still alive?
Youre right!
I honestly didn’t know who was who until one passed away a few years back.
S
Sorry but guess I haven’t done it right because I see it but I guess the public can’t see it! It says under my email public can never see but I can’t figure out how to change it ?
Scott
One reason I put forth the question about Nautilus being dead was that Ken Hutchins has written several books on Jones and Nautilus and Baye has some recent articles on the same and yet it seems by the interest shown in reaction to my posts about Ken’s books hardly anybody cares anymore about Jones or Nautilus.
Scott
I think a decent portion of people who frequent the Darden coaching section tend to just stay there. This is obviously to their detriment, because they are probably the biggest Jones and Nautilus fans on the site and we are having these discussions about those very two subjects in these other sub forums, where they don’t check and don’t participate. They’re missing out!
I suspected that would happen and it did. Unfortunately I can’t drag them over there so essentially with a few exceptions my thread talks to those who couldn’t care less about Nautilus.
Scott
You can “tag” people who you’d like to come over to this thread.
Just type the “@” sign and then their username. For example, if I wanted to tag myself I would do @jshaving and if I wanted to tag you I would do @entsminger. See how our usernames don’t just up as normal text, but there’s something there to be clicked on now? That means you’ve done it correctly, and those users should get a notification that you’ve tagged them, and can come check this out if they want to.
Like I said previously, i’ve read Hutchins book on Nautilus 3 times now. I dont agree with alot of it, starting with the duo squat review. It did open my eyes to the friction issues tho. Im going to switch to bearings on the machines i have, so i’ll be able to make an educated decision on how bad the friction is/was. Each time I’ve read it more things make sense, but again, some I still disagree with. I’m now reading Super Slow, specifically to use with my Nautilus.
I think Arthur Jones had a lot of things right and a lot of his ideas were really ahead of where even the science was at the time that has since been proven true. I think there’s some definite things he got wrong as would be expected with where exercise science was at the time, but going back and reading the original Nautilus Bulletins really shows a lot of truth and forward thinking that helped push the industry forward. He also does a good job of stating his reasoning behind his beliefs and he had a good idea of the function of every major muscle. I definitely felt like I learned a lot.
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Trouble is many folks just linger so I don’t know them. I used to know a lot of Nautilus guys on the old forum but have no idea who many of them are on here ?
Scott
Speaking of Superslow I don’t know if there are still superslow facilities around or not? I don’t hear about it much.
Scott