I Tried a Vintage Mail-Order Bodybuilding Course and There Is a Reason No One Else Does Them.
“I CAN HELP YOU GREAT WEAPONS, WIDE SHOULDERS AND A GIANT CHEST IN FOUR WEEKS,” promises the Body-Tone brochure. It is the “World’s Fastest Strength and Muscle Building System”. It cost $ 20 in the late 1950s, but today the program is available free of charge at the Stark Center Archives . I’m ready to start.
Welcome to Retro Week , where we light up the flux condenser and introduce you to the 1950s know-how of everything from making casseroles to building fallout shelters to joys for kids to relax and play with trash.
In due time, I would have learned about Body-Tone from the cryptic advertisements on the back of the magazine.
After you write to this address, you will receive an envelope with three items in the mail. (Someone saved them, and it’s available in the original envelope on Etsy ; God bless you, Etsy.) First, there’s a letter from Tom Buckley himself that appears on his own stationery, smiling and muscular. Then nine pages of questions and answers on orange paper , crafty selling you the system. Finally, the registration form . You have to take fifteen body measurements, write an essay about your current exercise and health condition, and decide if you want to pay all at once or in installments. In 2017 dollars, the program cost $ 169 at a time, or $ 42 in five installments, for a total of $ 211.
The Q&A is full of such gems:
Q: What is the fastest way to make a muscle grow in both strength and size?
Answer: Any muscle in the human body can be made to grow bigger, thicker, and stronger at the highest possible rate by simply contracting that muscle only once a day, but by doing it as hard as you can, and, for some time, a period of about 6 seconds.
Question: At this rate, you could increase your strength by 50 percent in just 12 weeks, right?
Answer: Quite right. That is, if you do one-off contractions every day. If you do this every other day or less, the rate of increase in your strength will be much slower.
Question: Why can’t I do it myself without completing the Course?
Answer: Actually, you can. That is, if you know all the actions of the muscles involved and the attachment points of each muscle. However, this subject is usually only taught in KINESIOLOGY courses in college.
Well, I’m sold. The first lesson promises to develop my shoulders, especially my biceps, but before Tom Buckley tells me how to do it, he wants me to think about my diet.
To get enough protein to build muscle, he says, I have to divide my body weight in pounds by 2.2 (hey, that’s easy to convert to kilograms) and then eat that many grams of protein every day. For me it is only 64 grams. This may seem like an understatement if you are used to the rule of thumb of “one gram per pound” from modern weightlifters, but it’s actually a pretty good figure: 1.0 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. On average, a person needs about 0.8 g / kg , and serious athletes need 1.2 or more.
My new buddy Tom says I don’t really need any protein supplements other than milk, but he loves getting all of his protein in a special shake every morning:
I’m not sure what pre-cooked soy granules are, but they are very similar to the TVPs that I can buy in bulk from Whole Foods. TVP is made from soy flour, which I cannot find on its own, so I guess both will have to be replaced. Then I just add wheat germ, skim milk, raw ( pasteurized ) egg and … wait a second, what’s wrong with the yeast? 20 grams in one rounded tablespoon doesn’t sound very realistic; the largest amount I could find on the internet was eight grams per level tablespoon .
Anyway. I mix the ingredients in an Osterizer Classic (I don’t have Waring Blendor) and take my husband into the kitchen to try it with me.
The result is a frothy, tasty drink very similar to a vanilla milkshake. I call this a “muscle cocktail.”
Vanilla milkshake, huh? The soy granules have not completely dissolved in the blender, or maybe it is the wheat germ I see floating around. Vanilla improves flavor, but why would you need two teaspoons full? Is there an unpleasant aftertaste to hide?
We take the first sips. It immediately seems awful to me: the liquid part is soft and watery, the flakes are sticky and cause vomiting. Vanilla does not hide the fact that it is like drinking sawdust soup.
My husband sips thoughtfully. “It’s not bad. Do you know what it tastes like? The bran muffin dough.” He has fond memories of helping make bran muffins as a kid. to “see if it tastes colder.” (It doesn’t.)
Exercise
So what are you actually doing in the world’s fastest strength and muscle building system? Each week, you study the anatomical diagram of the muscles you are trying to build, and then do a few exercises, each of which, as promised, takes six seconds.
Exercise 1.
Now, to flush the inner head or short head of the bicep, take the position as shown in Exercise 1. Notice that the elbows are pressed to the sides. Fists are clenched, knuckles directed away from the body. The arms are fully bent. The head is slightly tilted downward. Now bend your arms very hard, then harder, harder and harder, until your fists and forearms start to shake. This should take about six seconds. Relax completely now.
I squeeze the muscles as directed and after six seconds I feel a burn. After a few minutes, I finished my daytime exercises and my arms felt like I had just finished a hard workout in the gym. Could there be something in this theory?
The next day, my biceps and triceps were slightly sore . Soreness is not a perfect indicator of muscle growth or anything else, but a completely useless exercise will not cause soreness. I’m still skeptical but impressed.
Lesson three begins, like all lessons, with unrealistic expectations:
Your shoulders should be really good by now.
I’m pretty sure it is not possible to see results in a day or even in a baseline of two weeks. All diagrams show people with very good musculature, and apparently no fat. No matter how good the exercise program is, I suspect it never makes me look like a Superman cartoon.
Each lesson should complement the previous one, and you do each exercise every day. I don’t have twelve weeks to spend on this, so on the first day I do the first two lessons ( biceps and triceps ). I add a few more every day until I soon complete the full set of eleven lessons. (The twelfth is a wrap-up that talks about maintaining strength and also provides a handy table of all the exercises we’ve learned so far.)
In lesson three, I flex my forearms while standing in a bunny jump pose. In lesson 5, I contract my pectoral muscles in three different ways, crossing my arms in front of me. In the seventh lesson, I learn to suck in the stomach and hold the hollow body . I clench my buttocks in the ninth class , standing on tip-toe in the tenth class and accept a beautiful posture bodybuilding Lesson 11 :
My legs are cramping during some calf and hamstring exercises. “Don’t worry,” Tom says; just come out. Tom also supports our enthusiasm for the program with stories of how strong people have more fun:
When two men start jostling each other, the superior leg strength of one of them immediately becomes apparent. And quite often hooligans seize little people. Now I think about a situation where one person is trying to throw another in the water. They grab each other’s bodies and use their legs for movement, balancing movements. Here, the full strength of one person against another is manifested in complete disregard for any acquired fighting skills.
Once I know the exercises, I can complete a full workout in about 12 minutes. I do this while standing in the kitchen with the necessary equipment close at hand: a tea towel to wring out for grip exercises, and a chair for some things that are in a sitting position. At some point I have to pass the broomstick over the rungs of the stairs so that I can lower the bar at three different heights. Instead, I just put my hands on the high, medium and low shelves.
And yes, I still get a little sick every morning. Not enough to hurt, just a little stiffness, like I did a good job the day before. Maybe I can become a muscular Greek god in twelve weeks.
Could this work?
Tom Buckley cites some very specific research in his introductory questions and answers, explaining that the idea of six-second daily contractions came from Erich Müller of the Max Planck Institute. Mueller’s older articles do not appear to be available online, but this 1959 article (paywall) summarizes his findings. Buckley didn’t misrepresent them at all: Mueller says that you only need to contract a muscle once a day, and that if you switch to once a week, you will lose muscle less quickly when you stop exercising. (According to Buckley, you should switch to weekly workouts when you seem to have reached your natural limit.)
Some men develop faster, others more slowly. Some of them reach their maximum development in two to three months, while others may take a year or more. You will quickly understand which category you are in after the first few weeks.
But Mueller is not responding to Buckley’s more radical claims: Are you really improving your results by 4 percent every week? Which means you can gain 50 percent more strength in just 12 weeks, right?
To get those answers, we need to look into our time machine back in 1981, when John Ata of Loughborough University of Technology put together this review of approaches to strength training (sorry, another paid access). He writes: “The idea that such a trivial investment in training can provide such a solid return of strength, and that years of hard work with resistance, lifting 1,000 tons or more each year, was unnecessary effort, caused tremors in solid foundations body. an establishment of power that, after a generation, is still barely settled. “
But the promises were not destined to come true. Instead of a 4 percent increase each week, a later study adjusted the number of applications to a 1.8 percent increase. Then the researchers in 1960 “drew attention to the fragile structure of conclusions based on observations of 71 alternative ways of teaching only nine subjects.”
It still sounds good, but the real nail in the coffin was like this. It turns out that instead of reaching maximum strength in months or a year, as Buckley said, people who do isometric exercises stop gaining weight after two to five weeks. If you’re the right fit for a start, you’re at the two-week end of the spectrum. If you start out as a weakling, you can increase your strength by 10 percent at first. But five weeks is your limit: more time on the program won’t do you more good. Ready.
Well my friend, I hope you enjoyed the course as much as I enjoyed preparing it for you. … may you continue to improve in strength, power and physique. Good luck!
I think I will continue to do these exercises a little longer. Exercise is an easy 12 minute exercise that works every muscle without causing a sweat, so it’s comfortable for a few days when I can’t go to the gym. I could shove the map in my suitcase next time I go.
But the general promises of getting these massive arms and giant chest are empty. I wonder how many people have written to their friend, good old Tom Buckley, asking for a refund on his money-back guarantee.