In this notorious age of fanaticism over physical fitness, few people realize that muscles can be built without the help of machines. Yet that is how the most famous advocate of physical fitness began.
One day in 1909, a skinny 15-year-old Italian immigrant boy named Angelo Siciliano went with a girl to the beach at Coney Island. A large, well-developed lifeguard kicked sand in his face. Angelo, who weighed only 97 pounds, said later, "I couldn't do anything, and the girl felt funny."Typical beginning for a young man who became determined to build his muscles to prevent future embarrassment. Soon after his unfortunate boyhood experience, he visited the Brooklyn Museum and gazed at statues of ancient Greeks and Romans. When he asked how the models had developed their muscles, he was told "exercise." It seemed like a simple enough prescription, and so he started frequenting the gym, only to find that his muscles did not respond.
During a trip to the zoo, he was mesmerized from watching the lion, who "stretched himself all over, and the muscles ran around like rabbits under a rug. I says to myself, `Does this old gentleman have any barbells or exercisers? No sir. Then what's he been doing?' And it came over me. I said to myself, `He's been pitting one muscle against another.' "
It was this sudden insight that led this motivated young man to the exercise system that was eventually called "dynamic tension," and made Charles Atlas the most popular advocate of body building in the 20th century.
Angelo Siciliano worked secretly at home to build his body, and at age 19 he appeared in public at a gym to display for the first time his impressive new muscles. Allegedly, several boys froze, and one said, "Why, I'll be darned if Angelo doesn't look like the statue called Atlas on top of the bank on the corner."
And so Charles Atlas was born.
At first he wasn't sure what to do with a great body. He spent some time bending railroad spikes at a Coney Island side show before a sculptor spotted him and Atlas soon became New York's best known male model. He posed for models of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, even though these historic figures never had physiques to compare with his.
In 1921, Atlas won a contest sponsored by Physical Culture Magazine to find the "World's Most Perfectly Developed Man." He not only won a $1,000-prize, he won the contest the next year as well. Then Bernarr McFadden canceled the contest because he thought it was ridiculous and a little embarrassing for Atlas to win it every time.
Finally, Atlas figured out how to make a living with what he had. He opened a gym - but he had few takers until he learned how to use advertising techniques to convince customers that in addition to fitness, they could develop courage, self-reliance and sex appeal.
From 1929 on, Atlas sold his secrets through the mail. By the time he died in 1972, at the age of 79, an estimated 6 million people had signed up for his 13 lessons. Even then, he was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 180 pounds. He had a 47- inch chest, a 34-inch waist, and his biceps, at 17 inches, measured the same as his neck.
His system, Dynamic Tension, was a method of resisting the movement of one set of muscles by opposing it by another. For example, you fully extend your right arm, then grab your right wrist with your left hand. As you try to flex the arm, push down with your left hand, resisting the movement all the way.
If you do this enough, you get biceps like Charles Atlas.
If you're lucky.
It has been said that current isometric exercises are just refinements of this original Atlas method. The beauty of it was that it required no equipment (very appealing during the Depression) and could be done anywhere. Atlas might have been pleased with the current fitness boom but probably would have frowned on the excessive emphasis on paraphernalia. Yet, unwittingly, he was the inspiration for it.
So much for the weight room. We might all be better off if we reverted to basics and resurrected Dynamic Tension.