Total Gym

From the Ancients to Total Gym and Beyond

Did you know that ancient Greek athletes principally only ate fresh cheese? In some ways sports medicine has come a long way since then, but you may be surprised to learn that many of the functional training techniques that professional athletes are adopting today actually owe their roots back to those original cheese heads.

For example, ancient athletes mostly employed training regimens that leveraged their own body weight in addition to tools like stones, logs and animals. That doesn’t mean that you should start throwing your dog like a discus, only that the important thing is to lift things of varying weights to gain “functional” strength. The same held true for their military training where the body was the weapon and therefore must be in shape and functionally able to survive.

That’s one of the reasons why I love the Total Gym so much. It’s all about taking your body (a living weight stack) and translating it to a sliding incline plain (calibrated to gravity). It gives you a functional way to move your body (or at least a chosen % of your body) through multi-plane movements. One of the hidden benefits of this form of training is the flexibility enhancement that is attained by the natural stretch within the range of motion of the exercise.

This functional approach to training has been gaining traction with athletes today but only after decades of falsely assuming that only formal weight lifting was the key to top performance. Like I’ve always said, half your workout is downhill!

I personally started doing body weight exercises in the early to mid 60’s (not quite ancient Greece, but close!) and then transitioned to weights for body building in the mid 70′s. I immediately saw the multi-purpose benefits that could be attained by training on the incline plane body weight resistance machine.

Then the most fantastic thing happened, just by changing my body position I could change to over 200 different exercises to hit every part of my body. Essentially, I could reproduce virtually any form of functional training from a single piece of equipment. All of this culminated in 1974 when we designed the first ever Total Gym.

Do you have any unusual functional training techniques that even an ancient Greek athlete might be proud of? Share them in the comments field below…