Legendary Arthur Jones on bodyweight training


 Arthur Jones quote (after he sold his gym equipment company Nautilus for millions of dollars), who with his gym machines pretty much shaped gyms as we know them today:

"Apart from a rather limited number of hardcore bodybuilders who are misguided enough to believe that they have a chance to compete against the outright genetic freaks that now dominate bodybuilding competition, just about anybody else in this country can produce nearly all of the potential benefits of proper exercise without spending much if anything in excess of about twenty dollars. You can build both a chinning bar and a pair of parallel dip bars for a total cost of only a few dollars, and those two exercises, chins and dips, if properly performed, will stimulate muscular growth in your upper body and arms that will eventually lead to muscular size and strength that is very close to your potential.

Adding full squats, eventually leading up to one-legged full squats, and one-legged calf raises, will do much the same thing for your legs and hips. Using this very simple routine, when you get strong enough to perform about ten repetitions of one-armed chins with each arm, your arms will leave very little to be desired. Or, instead, you can do what many thousands of others are now doing and piss away thousands of dollars and years of largely wasted effort while producing far less results. The choice is yours. One of the best pair of arms that I ever saw on a man belonged to a guy that I knew about fifty years ago in New York, and he never performed any sort of exercise apart from chins and dips, and damned few of them."

 - Arthur Jones in 1996

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