Again, truthful statements in the fitness industry assume foreknowledge of
the truth. But what is the truth? And who in this industry is qualified to pronounce what
it is or what it should be? The present bearer of the supposed truth is the exercise
physiology community. It is important for all Guild members to realize where and how this
career group began. (I hesitate to refer to exercise physiologists as a professional group
or as a discipline. These words they do not deserve.)
But before I explain this history, it is imperative to underscore the wide-spread
reluctance on the part of most people to take a stand. Some shrug their shoulders and make
fun of me for caring. [Arthur Jones has done this.] They say, "Don't rock the
boat." or "Ken, simply play them into your hand." Also, most people want to
avoid ugly confrontations that hurt peoples feelings.
Well the problem has not improved by me being cordial and sociable. Not that I am cruising
for trouble. But the Guild is going to make some tough statements about the fitness
industry and let the chips fall wherever they fall. If a few weak, wining, mealy-mouths
get their feelings hurt, so be it. And if all the mealy-mouths get their feelings hurt,
then so be that. We have only two choices: brace ourselves to paddle upstream OR acquiesce
to another 20 years of being elbowed aside by jocks with phoney credentials and dangerous
ideologies.
I am not sure where the following story originates but Ellington Darden believes that it
is original with Dr. Terry Todd.
For many decades there were two basic personalities found in college physical education departments. There was the husky football player and the track man. During the football season, the track man served as the team water boy, later to be called the team manager, later to carve out a specialty now known as the athletic trainer. The quintessential water boy hung around the other athletes because he liked athletics, although he did not possess the body to excel at most sports, especially football. Of the few athletic pursuits in which he could indeed excel were long-distance track events.
The track man excelled not only at marathon events. He was also more academically bent than his brutish counterpart. In fact, one was considered slow and stupid if he lifted weights or looked as if he did. And whereas the less literate football player scraped by to get his degree to become a high school coach or to get out the college door unbecomingly to go into a sales career, the track man often stayed in school. He sought higher degrees and tended to learn the ropes of the academic community.
The track man also sneered at his brutish counterparts for their patronage of the muscle or body culture magazines such as Strength & Health, Iron Man, or those marketed by Joe Weider. Although it is true that most of the material published in such media during the last 50 years was rubbish that should have embarrassed anyone with any brains, it was the only source for information that appealed to people who were interested in their muscles. Since the track man was shortchanged of the geneticpotential to develop dramatic cosmetic (muscular) improvement from use of the barbell, such media had no appeal for him. In fact, it repelled him. He could not appreciate the value of exercise as it might emphasize his muscles. The track man had no inclination to impart his academic talents here. He pressed on with academic work at the university.
Although the track man was slated to become faculty, even a department chairman, coaching was not really his cup of tea. He wanted to continue doing what he excelled as an athlete and no one seemed willing to hire him to compete in endurance events.
Eventually the track-man-evolved-jogger created his special niche at the college. He developed a following of students, he obtained his own department, he devised his own lesson plans and curriculum, and he adapted and perverted tools and procedures from legitimate scientific disciplines to aggrandize the trappings of a scientific discipline. These tools and procedures pressed into service to feign reams of research so poor no formal scientist would stoop to read included: the Beckman Cart (VO2), flexibility testing, the isokinetic dynamometer, skin fold, underwater weighing, spirometry, the treadmill, the bicycle ergometer, cholesterol testing, and several others.
His undergraduate credentials were obtained with watered-down-for-PE Majors anatomy and physiology courses and a deliberate dearth of the higher math, physics, genetics, embryology, analytical chemistry, and organic chemistry that other science students are required to study. The result today is a degreed academic who lacks the discriminating mind and the exacting discipline or the formal science course work and background to pass judgement or instruct others in the rigors of controlled research.
This impersonator of science and technology now has influence in the very departments he avoided in his undergraduate work. Yes, he studied volleyball, tennis, bowling, recreational therapy, and a host of other frivolities in order to avoid the science disciplines in which he lacked confidence or competence. Now, as a Ph.D., the exercise physiologist has an office in the medical school, engineering students consult him for their projects, and HMO's and nutritional companies seek him to sit on their advisory boards for marketing purposes.
The modern exercise physiologist has little appreciation of the mechanical
physics applied to effect efficient and safe muscular loading -- the essence of exercise.
Neither is he a physiologist in the sense that he has come up through the ranks of
formalized biology. He is the product of the nerdish water boy. He is hell bent on jogging
and interprets his exercise notions and objectives within the same perspective. This
partly explains the tremendous bias-toward-aerobics emphasis among exercise physiologists.
Although the exercise physiologist displays some of the trappings of sophistication, look
closer. You will see the same dumb jock, merely dressed up in a three-piece suit and
Florsheim® wing tips.
My father was a country doctor (M.D.) for 40 years. And although he relied on the advise
of the local football coach whenneeding the history or details of a sports injury, he was
privately disparaging of the coach's home-spun, poorly-articulated medical remedies.
Granted, some seemed to work and any physician has the duty to investigate the worthiness
of potentially-beneficial treatments. Even so, my dad and any other physicians were
irresponsible to disregard formally tried and tested remedies in preference for the
coach's collection of hocus-pocus. (Of course, in the event that the formal treatment
fails, then all bets are off.)
My father and his colleagues now subscribe to and read publications such as The Physician
and Sports Medicine and The Journal of the ASCM. These publications are written by
athletic trainers, physical therapists, and exercise physiologists who possess Ph.D.'s,
even MD's. Although my Dad is on to them, most of his colleagues little suspect that, in
essence, they embody the same dumb football coach that they ignored thirty years before.
This inroad into the bastions of medicine owes its success, in part, to the marketing of
sportsmedicine. Sportsmedicine has become a marketing buzzword. At first, mainstream
practitioners ostracized other doctors who expressed an interest in the subject. To say
that you were starting a sportsmedicine practice indicated that you skirted your
publicly-granted, state-paid-for responsibility to treat sick people. I have heard exactly
this stated by so-called sportsmedicine doctors on several occasions: "I do not want
to be around sick people. I want to work with only young, healthy people that permit me to
enjoy my practice."
Nevertheless, you can see that the exercise physiologist has gained undeserved authority.
He now has the authority to influence legislators, insurance companies, the military,
N.A.S.A., and health maintenance organizations.
His growing clout was somewhat threatened during the 70s and 80s. Although his influence
grew dramatically, he realized that he was too specialized around running. As Nautilus
pushed strength training to public acceptance, the exercise physiologist rushed to perform
and publish studies on a subject he had only previously avoided as beneath his dignity.
Ellington Darden cited a statistical study in his Ph. D. dissertation. In this
pre-publication study a statistical evaluation was applied to published studies in the
Research Quarterly, the classic publication of physical education. The statistical
evaluation was power. Power is not a test. Power is defined as the probability of
disproving the null hypothesis. My layman's understanding is that this probability
determines whether a study is worthy of publication. According to the author of this
study, James K. Brewer of Florida State University, most of the studies published in
Research Quarterly during the ten-year period from 1960-1970 were not worthy to publish
due to their deficiency of power. This deficiency was primarily due to the inadequate
sample sizes used in most of the studies. Therefore, there were few studies statistically
worthy of reading for ten years. [The Research Quarterly did not print the study performed
on it. Later a similar study by Brewer was published by American Educational Research
Journal. in Volume 9, Number 3, Summer 1972.]
Since then, the problem has grown worse. There is a tremendous pressure for a new
University faculty member to produce as much published research as possible during his
first five years. His career depends on this. This is true in legitimate science as well
as in the flaky halls of exercise physiology. Now there are thousands more would-be
researchers doing hundreds of thousands more studies with yet-more questionable tools and
methods.
I like the statements made from time to time by Arthur Jones on this subject. At one
lecture, a researcher protested with words to the effect, "Mr. Jones, We've heard all
of your analogies of Nautilus exercise philosophy using elephant hunts, airplane skills,
and bull-fighting. We are not interested in your experiences. Just present your
data." Arthur's response in effect: "Gentlemen, I have no data. And neither do
you. And if you can't use logic to derive principles from concrete knowledge in classical
physics and biology, you are nowhere."
On other occasions in the 1970s and 80s Arthur claimed that he had the best measuring
tools in exercise research, and that his tools were inadequate for reliable use. I believe
that Arthur was and is still correct on this issue. At least Arthur and a few of his
associates were aware of the shortcomings of the measuring tools. I cannot say that for
academic community.
For all practical purposes legitimate exercise physiology began with the advent of
reliable measuring tools. This need was first addressed by Arthur Jones. Throughout the
1970s and early 1980s, he detailed the problems of measuring muscular strength with a
repeatable positional reference. Arthur possessed tools for testing the exercise
physiology community could only fake. Although his early tools still contained the
inaccuracy of bodytorque influence, this was later corrected -- for testing purposes only
-- by programming the subject's bodytorque into the static test readouts. This, however,
did not suffice for the resistance variation due to bodytorque encountered during dynamic
exercise.
In 1985, I solved the problem of bodytorque during dynamic exercise. I then was in charge
of exercise programs for the Nautilus-funded Osteoporosis Project at the University of
Florida Medical School. There, I devised the variable counterbalance for bodytorque
cancellation. This was the final breakthrough to perfect a measuring/exercise tool that
eventually became the MedX®. Although I am not sure I approve of its use for testing the
general public, it is, indeed, the only true measuring tool for exercise research. It is
also a tool of tremendous value when used for rehabilitation in the exercise mode. [I have
never been associated with MedX or any of their final products.]
In 1988, Ellington Darden presented to me the book, Designing Resistance Training Programs
by S. Fleck and W. Kramer. He mentioned that it was touted as the most complete collection
of research studies regarding strength training. Supposedly, it contained every formal
study published on the subject within the previous 50 years. However, it contained
absolutely no reference to Nautilus. I asked Ellington why not. His response: "One
rule of academia is that it is improper to discuss research other than that which has been
published in formal, refereed, academic journals." In other words, 18 years of
Nautilus thought, research, and literature was off limits for discussion. For all
practical purposes to the academic pundits, Nautilus never existed. And although I agree
that new ideas and old notions must be considered critically, the exercise physiologists
chose to create research history as though no one else existed.
Now that Super Slow Philosophy has superseded Nautilus Philosophy, the exercise
physiologists are yet more in the dark regarding the essence of exercise, yet they
continue to feign advanced rather than backward information.
More than you might suppose, the exercise physiologists have had an impact on what
supposedly-informed people believe about exercise. Since the exercise physiologists have
systematically avoided defining exercise or the opposite of exercise, sedentaryism, their
notion of intensity has been focused on amount of activity or on heart-rate elevation.
High-intensity activity or exercise, to most exercise physiologists, thus indicates an
activity such as marathon running. The injury rate for their recommendations was so
appalling, that in the 1980s they backed away from running and jogging. Today they blame
their over-emphasis on high-intensity exercise as part of the cause for the high incidence
of sedentaryism in the United States. First off, the exercise physiologists have never
experienced nor witnessed the possible benefits of high-intensity exercise. Second, they
fail to recognize that most people who are sedentary are so involuntarily. They are
sedentary due to psychological or physical debility. Normally healthy people are active if
for no other reason than sheer boredom. And the activities the active people often pursue
are often the injury-prone recreations that do not constitute true exercise -- the same
activities once recommended as high-intensity by the exercise physiologists.