If You Like Exercise … Chances Are You’re Doing It Wrong

Introduction Mickey didn’t need exercise. With a 21-inch neck, 73-inch chest and 25-inch arms, he could do one-arm chin-ups “’til the cows came home” – and never once touched a barbell. No one knew his age, but everyone knew he was pampered. When I first saw him, communication was one-way. Mickey refused to acknowledge anyone and spent most days as would any male - watching TV with a remote. His choices: Soap operas and American football. When I last saw him, Mickey was lifeless - a stuffed version of the Wal-Mart greeter at the entrance to the Center for Exercise Science at the University of Florida. It was no laughing matter to his owner. According to some, the man who invented Nautilus® machines treated Mickey better than members of his own family. Arthur Jones purchased the primate from a circus, which made Mickey the only African lowland gorilla in captivity in a private collection. And Jones knew animals - it was his business. He housed the beauty in a cage the exact size of that at the circus to make him feel ‘at home’ and then built an addition to make the enclosure 3-4 times larger and L-shaped – the original space plus a glassed-in extension that formed the interior wall of a 60-foot-thick concrete tunnel. The tunnel connected the runway of the world’s largest private jetport to a conference facility where Jones hosted daily seminars “to educate medical doctors.” The jetport was nothing to sneeze at – a 747, three 707’s, 14 other airplanes and - on occasion - The Concorde.® Jones did things IN LARGE and animal care was no exception. The tunnel wall shielded his collection from the noise of the jets while the glass yielded a view of the beast before conference proceedings. But Mickey failed to cooperate. He would not enter the extension. They lured him with bananas to no avail. The great ape reached for the bait but always kept a large toe in the cage. Call it what you will, Mickey refused to leave the comforts of home. In many ways his behavior resembles the body’s reluctance to change. Every time you exercise, the body is forced to adjust its physiology to accommodate the ‘intrusion,’ which is why frequent exercise attracts the same routine(s) and why trainers preach the same sermon despite their occasional rush to certify in the latest. Change is threat, and threat, according to Jones, elicits a sequential response: Ignore, ridicule, adopt, copy and steal. I have been labeled as not ‘current’ in the field of exercise - reluctant to change, stuck in the past, beating a dead horse, not open-minded. I can see more than assumed but the more I click the remote, the worse the picture. For the past half-century the field of exercise has marched backwards: From a “thinking man’s barbell” to no barbell at all, from full-range to partial-range exercise, from valid tools to toys, from great to poor – all in the name of “progress.” Along the way someone declared that the muscles of the “core” were important, that traditional training with barbells and machines was “non-functional,” that body weight was the preferred resistance, that balance and circus stunts were missing links to athletic performance, and finally, that there were enough dummies out there to plow it through. Jones put it his way, “Not all people are idiots, but they follow the advice of idiots, usually in the form of self-proclaimed experts.” “Quite frankly,” he said during his heyday, “most of the people involved in exercise disgusted me, and I clearly understood that a very large percentage of them were either fools or frauds, or both. A situation that has changed primarily in the direction of becoming more widespread.” Astro-physicist, Carl Sagan expressed it his way: “One of the saddest lessons in history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge – even to ourselves – that we’ve been so credulous. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.” Arthur printed Sagan’s quote on poster board for his conference guests - too little too late. The field of exercise was “neck deep in outright fraud and foolishness” and Jones could not turn the tide, even though some thought he had. The man who set out “to reach a small part of humanity” ended up, in some way or another, influencing everyone who has exercised since. But truth did not prevail . . . Max Planck, inventor of the quantum theory in physics in 1900 explained why: “A new scientific discovery does not prevail by convincing its opponents and leading them to see the light, but only because its opponents will eventually die and then a new generation will grow up who are aware of the truth.” A slow process. Like Mickey, no one knew Arthur’s age. He had three stock responses, one of which was, “I’m old enough to realize it’s impossible to change the thinking of fools. But I’m young and foolish enough to keep on trying.” And try he did - dedicating every waking hour to the truth and conducting research around one principle, “Let the chips fall where they may.” He invariably answered unsolved questions with, “Let’s find out” - and then followed-up. In the end it was apparent that the field of exercise was not comfortable with the truth - big money could be made without it. “I am arrogant enough to believe,” said Jones in the end, “that my lifetime of interest in the field of exercise has produced developments that can provide great benefits to millions of other people if my discoveries and developments are not flushed down the toilet of history.” The medical community has a large and heavy hand on the crank. People will listen to the advice of a physician over that of a trainer who suggests the same, “You need exercise.” Unfortunately, there are fewer doctors than trainers who understand the value of exercise, and fewer yet who are aware of - or believe in - the contributions of Arthur Jones to the fields of exercise and rehabilitative medicine. After all, he quit school in grade four. “During the last thirty years,” he said, “most of the worthwhile characteristics of civilization, no small part of the Earth itself, and practically all of the benefits of progressive exercise have been so perverted that almost nothing of value remains; the problems are known, but ignored – the answers are available, but denied – primarily, it seems, because far too many people are interested only in avoiding controversy or are unwilling to face up to difficult solutions.” To his followers it wasn’t the outcome that mattered, it was the effort - and with Jones, the effort was always IN LARGE. According to Jim Bryan, Jones went “FAR out of his way to help people,” which is why reference to his ideas and accomplishments in this book is deliberate, frequent and necessary. At a time when most offerings in the field of exercise require a courtesy flush, the words of Arthur Jones resound, “The truth cannot be ignored forever.”