A beautiful mind: Arthur Jones, the man who invented the nautilus machine and revolutionized strength training. (Person to Person).

COACH: For whatever it is worth, you were the giant of the industry. When did the idea of a strength machine with variable resistance occur to you?

JONES: It goes way back. It all started when I was a kid and used to do all the little exercises that kids did to become strong. There were few weight-lifting gyms in the country as most people believed that the weights made you "muscle bound," slow, and clumsy. I got around to them in the 1940's, but it wasn't really an organized thing.

I had very good results with my legs and my arms. They grew quickly and to a very marked degree. But my torso muscles, latissimus, pectoral and the like, did not grow in proportion.

So I was having mixed results, good in some areas and not so good in others.

What I understand now, 60 years later, it's obvious that the problem was geneties. I simply had better potential in some areas, which is true with everybody.

But I didn't know that then and no one else did. Or at least, if anybody did, I never met him.

So I experimented.

It was obvious to me that the barbell and dumbbell were almost miracles compared to all other forms of exercise -- calisthenics and the stuff they had us doing in school. These were worse than worthless.

They were hurting a lot of people, helping no one, and I've seen nothing to change my opinion of them in 60 years.

I tried different routines, different numbers of sets and repetitions. Some worked better, some worked not so well.

Then I started trying to improve the tool. That was a long, slow process.

I built my first machine in a YMCA in Tulsa in 1948. It may have had some slight advantage over training with a barbell, but nothing spectacular. I was aware of problems, but I didn't understand them. Neither did anyone else.

I went on to build several other exercise machines all over the world -- South America, Mexico, Singapore, Africa. The first real breakthrough was a machine I built in Africa in the late 1960's. It was about the 15th machine that I had built. The idea popped into my mind in the middle of the night: The problem with the torso muscles was that to exercise them you had to involve the arms. Therefore, you were limited by the strength of your arms.

I wanted to devise an exercise that involved only the torso muscles, latissimus, and pectoral muscles -- an exercise that didn't move your hand directly. It moved your elbow. But to work those muscles with a barbell, you have to grip something with your hand. You are therefore limited by the strength of your arms.

I thought, "Well, what if I can build a machine where the resistance is against the elbows?"

I had already built a machine that didn't do that. So we modified it, thinking we had solved the problem. But we hadn't and that machine failed. But it failed in such a dramatic fashion that I knew why it failed and I knew what would be required to make it work.

The machine had to rotate on a common axis with the related body part. That was something that I had not understood. Modifying that machine would have been impossible. But I knew how to start from scratch and build a new one.

When I came back from Africa to this country in 1968, I built such a machine. It worked beautifully and that was the first step.

COACH: Was there any source or person that you learned from?

JONES: No, it was all just trial and error: Build it, strap it on you, run down the runway, and see if it will fly

There was no source to go to. There were lots of opinions, but little of any value.

COACH: We were there when the whole thing started, when four college shot putters admitted that they were working with barbells in secret because their coaches had forbidden it. The coaches used the term "muscle-bound" to discourage weightlifting. But these guys -- Otis Chandler who competed at Stanford and went on to become a famous newspaper publisher, and the other three putters, all from NYU - had been weightlifting in secret and all had achieved marvelous results, both in strength and in their throwing. That was the beginning of modem training.

Everyone had trained with free weights until you came along with your famous variable resistance machine, the Nautilus. What basically was the difference between free weights and the Nautilus?

JONES: It is quite simple. A Nautilus machine is nothing more or less than an improved barbell, a logical barbell, a rational barbell.

The only real difference is that a Nautilus machine provides your muscles with the required overload throughout a much greater range of movement. The machine's variation in resistance is based on actual requirements of the muscles, rather than being arbitrarily dictated by the random resistance provided by a barbell.

The free weights were the best tool available in their time. But they were not a perfect tool. I attempted to improve it.

COACH: How long did it take you to make the first marketable machine?

JONES: The first one was sold on Nov. 30, 1970. And it took off from there.

COACH: We became aware of the Nautilus when you first advertised it in Coach in 1976. We realized that something tremendous was happening.

But you never bad-mouthed the barbells.

We saw so many of the scientists and coaches gravitate toward your product. One strength coach, who became our columnist, Dan Riley, became a big advocate of the Nautilus machine.

JONES: I remember Dan well. He was an enlisted man on the staff at West Point when we did an experiment there in 1975. Let me tell you a funny story about him. The last time he visited me in Florida, he reminded me of it.

Personally, my strength training has always been an on again, off again thing. When I trained I got spectacular results, very fast and very noticeable. I'd improve by the day, by the week, by the month, you could see the muscle grow!

At West Point, Dan had been working out with weights for years. He saw what we were doing. I don't recall whose idea it was, but we made a bet.

At that time, we were about the same size. The bet was that within a month, starting from scratch, my arms would become bigger than his.

In a period of about four weeks, I added something like two-and-a-half inches to the circumference of my arms, which is an enormous increase. In that same period, Dan lost a half-inch. The reason he lost was simple: In trying to beat me, he over-trained. He did too much.

That is the most common mistake in training today -- training too much. Too many exercises, too many sets, too many workouts. For years I told people to work out three times a week. Today, I would advise no more than twice. And in some cases, you can get very good results training just once a week.

It took me a long time to learn that and I had to do it the hard way. That's primarily what limited my growth for years. I was over-training. I would not train for two years and then I would hop on. I would grow at a spectacular rate, but only up to a point. Then I'd get disgusted and quit.

This happened maybe 20 times. Until one time, instead of quitting when I reached my previous peak, I cut my workouts in half and the results were immediately positive. I'd been over-training.

COACH: When did you realize that your system of variable resistance had achieved universal acceptance?

JONES: I don't think it has ever achieved universal acceptance.

COACH: But it's all over the world, isn't it?

JONES: Yes, but it's still not universal by a long shot. The only advantage a barbell has is in competitive weightlifting. You need to use barbells. Not so much for the strength, but for the skill involved.

COACH: What changes do you envision in weightlifting and where do you see the industry going from here?

JONES: Downhill. Most of the superstitions that were in effect 60 years ago when I started are still alive and well. And there are also a bunch of new ones.

COACH: Looking back, do you feel that you've accomplished all you started out to do? Were there any aspirations that you had that you never addressed?

JONES: Well, we developed some medical machines that have been successful to a degree, but not as successful as they deserve to be.

We developed a lower back machine that should have made me the richest man in the world and won me the Nobel prize in medicine. Neither of which has happened.

Chronic lower-back pain is the single most expensive, generally non-life-threatening medical problem in the world today. Most of what they are doing to treat this is a waste of time. Our piece of equipment will solve 80 percent of that problem.

My wife returned from Europe a couple of weeks ago and told me that one of our associates over there had opened up his 100th clinic using our back machine. We're treating people who have tried everything else and failed. They are long-term, chronic sufferers who are dysfunctional and depressed, and 80 percent of them are cured. MedX produces this device.

I spent over $100 million of my own money and 20 years developing this equipment.

COACH: Just before you retired from the marketplace, you were developing computerized testing. How far did you go with it?

JONES: We developed the first equipment capable of testing for strength. It's impossible to understand anything that you cannot measure. It's a more significant thought than you would think at first glance.

Think about this: You do A in order to produce B. How do you judge what you are doing unless you can measure the results?

We have the first and only equipment capable of measuring any aspect of human functional ability - strength, endurance, range of motion. No other tool can do it. Ninety-nine percent of the theories and so-called research you hear about are utterly phony because they cannot measure their results.