Jones built his first Nautilus prototype in 1948 after years of wonder, study and experiment on the mechanics of muscular structures. Twenty-two years later, he released his first machine to the market. While Nautilus received a lot of press, a lot of it was negative. Weider’s publications in particular took umbrage with Jones’ machines, going so far as to run a series of derogatory articles about them, with bylines indicating that their authors were champion bodybuilders. The intent, of course, was obvious: to deter the market of bodybuilders and gym owners from purchasing Jones’ machines and to cast (at least) doubt upon their value for muscle building. Why? Because Jones’ new machines threatened the markets of the free weight manufactures and the muscle magazines that sold them. Witness the following tirade written by none other than Joe Weider in the January 1975 edition of Muscle Builder/Power:

Bodybuilders in general, and bodybuilding champions in particular, made an assault on Arthur Jones for the simple reason that he tried to stand the bodybuilding game on its head … and to think all the highly experienced, intelligent and hardworking bodybuilders are total fools …! (sic) …. Bodybuilders have learned through the years that all the standard weight-training equipment [read: barbells] is what works! …. It is so obvious that we have told only the truth in this in-depth analysis. Our conventional methods have been proven to be the best; the Nautilus has proved itself to be just the opposite! There is absolutely no argument about this comparison.

There was certainly no argument in Muscle Builder/Power as an argument requires the presentation of two sides of an issue under consideration and Weider was only interested in presenting one side (his own) -- neither Jones nor anyone who understood and advocated Nautilus were ever invited to the debate. No, this was not an argument but a smear job that ultimately backfired as many champion bodybuilders, including Mike Mentzer, Ray Mentzer, Casey Viator, Boyer Coe and Dorian Yates would ultimately employ Nautilus machines to great muscle building effect in their workouts. While Jones’ machines were big, heavy and expensive, their worst sin in the eyes of their attackers, truth be told, was that Nautilus threatened the existence of their barbell and dumbbell market. Moreover, Jones made no bones about having engineered these machines with an eye towards improving on, and overcoming the limitations of, barbells and giving the muscles precisely the type of exercise they required – and responded best to. As he wrote in his Nautilus Bulletin Number One in the early 1970s:

With the Nautilus machines, the required variations in resistance are properly provided; the resistance changes throughout the movements - in general, resistance is lowest at the start of an exercise, increases as the movement progresses, and decreases slightly near the end of an exercise. The actual rate of increase varies - depending on a number of factors. But in all cases, the resistance is exactly what it should be in all positions throughout the movements; when a set of an exercise is performed on such a machine, and when the set is carried to a point of momentary failure, then almost literally 100% of the individual muscle fibers contained in the muscles being worked are involved in the exercise - as opposed to less than 18% of the total number of available muscle fibers which are involved in most forms of conventional exercise, and as few as two or three percent of the total number of fibers in some conventional exercises.

Such an insight and innovation was a bona fide breakthrough in exercise science. And despite the carpet-bombing attacks of the muscle magazines, Jones’ machines and training theories prevailed. The reason may well be as the philosopher Will Durant once pointed out:

If one can clarify one need not agitate. Just to state facts is the most terrible thing that can be done to an injustice. Sermons and stump speeches stampede the judgment for a moment, but the sound of their perorations still lingers in the air when reaction comes. Fact has this advantage over rhetoric -- that time strengthens the one and weakens the other. Tell the truth and time will be your eloquence.

Indeed. By the late 1970s and particularly in the 1980s “Nautilus Centers” had mushroomed to an ever-expanding global audience; almost every gym had several pieces of Jones’ equipment, and some even carried his machines exclusively. It was during the early 1980s that I first read Jones’ two self-published Nautilus Bulletins and, like Mike Mentzer before me, came away thoroughly impressed by the insights of Jones and the benefit of his innovative machines. I trained for a while exclusively on Jones’ equipment, even taking a bus some 40-miles to train at a gym that offered a vast selection of the machines. While I never realized spectacular gains while training exclusively on the equipment (I would learn years later that a full range of motion is actually a detriment – rather than the sine qua non – to maximum fiber recruitment and hence maximum growth stimulation), I certainly did realize fuller muscular involvement training on the machines than I did (or could) training with barbells and dumbbells. I vividly recall witnessing Mentzer perform repetitions in smooth, controlled form on the pec deck portion of the Nautilus Compound Chest Machine with the entire weight stack – with one arm! And the sight of such a profound demonstration of human strength served to inspire my training on Nautilus equipment for many years after the fact.

Having had the opportunity to train on at least 24 different brands of exercise equipment over the decades, it might surprise some to learn that when it came time to purchase equipment for Nautilus North Strength & Fitness Centre I opted not for any newly minted apparatus, but turned instead to 36 pieces of older generation Nautilus equipment. In fact, I made sure that each piece was as old as I could find – even if the pads were ripped, the paint was chipped and the rods were bent. I knew that such imperfections were easily reparable or replaceable; what were irreplaceable were the care, design, materials and function of these early machines. The reason that underlay my selection of the more antiquated pieces was that the older Nautilus machines were the ones that Jones had spent the most time in developing and consequently they were (and remain) the most effective pieces of exercise equipment ever devised. The offset cam he created seem to me larger in these earlier machines, thus providing a wider radius and more resistance to the muscle in the one place it needs it most – the position of maximum contraction.

I should state for the record that I don’t subscribe to all of Jones’ engineering principles (one could only imagine what an “omnidirectional” rep would constitute) and I likewise don’t believe with Jones that “the barbell is an amazingly productive tool.” Indeed, such diplomacy is unfitting of a man of Jones’ intellect. The barbell is no more productive than a rock – both are inert chunks of matter, the design of which takes no account of the requirements of human muscle tissue. The principle of overload; i.e., of lifting heavier weights on a progressive basis, existed long before the advent of the barbell and the Ancient Greeks certainly built impressive physiques as a result of applying this early scientific principle – rather than this “productive tool” – to the rocks they lifted. Jones’ unique nautilus-shaped cam, along with negative cams, and the artistry of the design where muscular function dictated all, is what impressed me (and continues to). Circular cams, by contrast, such as those found on most pieces of exercise equipment, are no better than barbells, for the circular cam provides no effective resistance in the start and finish position of most exercises and usually too much resistance in the midrange point of the movement, where the muscle is not equipped – in terms of fiber recruitment or leverage – to accommodate it.

Jones’ cam, however, varied the effective resistance applied to the muscle being trained, diminishing it somewhat when the muscle was in its weakest position and increasing it proportionately as the muscle contracted, until maximum resistance was encountered in the position of full or maximum contraction. This was an absolute stroke of genius for which the bodybuilding world and bodybuilders in general (with noble and notable exceptions such as Mike and Ray Mentzer) have never understood nor attempted to apply (relying instead on such primitive and fallacious notions as “barbells worked for this guy and he’s a bodybuilding champion!” They fail to inquire however whether or not the bodybuilding champion in question had superior genetics (he always does), in which case almost any type of training effort or training equipment will produce results or whether the bodybuilder in question is loaded up with tens of thousands of dollars worth of contraband anabolic drugs (which he always is), and hence his muscles are merely puffy, swollen tissue that will deflate back down to mere mortal size shortly after he stops taking them (which he also “always does” eventually, usually for medical reasons).