I first read about Charles Atlas in the People's Almanc and he seems like a good supplement to any weight training workout. Does anyone have any opinions on Atlas or isometrics in general? Below is the article from the Almanc.

About the famous body builder and weight lifter Charles Atlast who marketed the Atlas fitness course, history and biography.

FOOTNOTE PEOPLE IN U.S. HISTORY

CHARLES ATLAS (ANGELO SICILIANO) (1894-1972). "The 97-lb. weakling."

Angelo Siciliano was a fairly husky boy in southern Italy. When he came with his mother to Brooklyn at the age of 11, however, he began to sicken and grow spindly. He lost interest in school and could not climb the steps to the family flat. "I was a 97-lb. runt," he later recalled. "I was skinny, pale, nervous, and weak." One Halloween, he was beaten by a boy wielding a sock full of ashes. Then, at the age of 16, he looked at a statue of Hercules in the Brooklyn Museum and marveled at its muscles.

A week later he joined the YMCA and began to lift dumbbells, pull elastic stretchers, and toss medicine balls. For home use, he built a barbell out of a broomstick and two rocks. He wrote away for the Swoboda Course and investigated Strongfortism. He became obsessed with strength.

One day he watched a tiger stretching in the zoo and asked himself, "How does Mr. Tiger keep in physical condition? Did you ever see a tiger with a barbell?" He concluded that lions and tigers became strong by pitting muscle against muscle. Angelo abandoned his barbells and fell to staging tugs-of-war between hands, legs, fingers, and thighs. By means of such exercises, he doubled his weight and returned the beating to his Halloween tormentor.

He acquired a mighty form: a chest that expanded to 54 3/4 in. and biceps of 17 in. His friends at the gymnasium took notice and declared that he looked just like the statue of Atlas on the corner bank building. The name stuck, and eventually Angelo legally changed his name to Charles Atlas.

As a young man he took a job as strongman in the Coney Island Circus Side Show. He tore telephone books in two, lifted two men off the floor, and lay on a bed of nails eating a banana while three spectators stood on his chest. "Women used to faint when I did that," he said. "They couldn't stand watching a beautiful body like mine being abused."

At the sideshow, he was noticed by an artist who asked him to pose. Soon he became a popular sculptors' model, and parts or all of his image appeared on public buildings around the country. His upper body became a torso on a centaur in the lobby of the Capitol Theater on Broadway. He became George Washington in New York's Washington Square, Alexander Hamilton in front of the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, the Dawn of Glory in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Patriotism in the Elks National Headquarters in Chicago, and Energy in Repose in the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He made enough money to quit Coney Island.

In 1922 Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of Physical Culture magazine, selected Atlas as the world's most perfectly developed man. The title and prize money enabled Atlas to set up his own mail-order muscle-building business. Advertisements in comics, pulps, and sports and movie magazines showed Atlas clad in a tightfitting leopard skin, muscles bulging. A 1925 appeal asked, "Do you want to be a tiger?" and opined, "It's the Tiger Men who grab everything they want these days. The new race of Tiger Men win the battles of pelf and power in the mad, dizzy, jazzy marathon for personal success. They whiz by you in stunning big limousines and have fine homes and bulging bank accounts."

About the famous body builder and weight lifter Charles Atlast who marketed the Atlas fitness course, history and biography.

FOOTNOTE PEOPLE IN U.S. HISTORY

CHARLES ATLAS (ANGELO SICILIANO) (1894-1972). "The 97-lb. weakling."

In 1928 Charles Roman took over the marketing of the Atlas course and rewrote the ads. He coined the term "dynamic tension" to describe Atlas's isometric exercises and concentrated on selling just plain muscles. "Just tell me where you want handsome steellike muscles," the ads proclaimed. "I'll add 5 in. to your chest." Later Roman created a comic-strip panel which showed the newly muscled he-man returning to punch the bully who had kicked sand in his face and stolen his girl.

Atlas supplemented Roman's ads with personal appearances. He bent railroad spikes and gave them away as souvenirs. He ordered the spikes in kegs from ironworks and bent 1,500 a year. He pulled six automobiles down a mile of road. He pulled a 145,000-lb. railroad observation car down a track and a boatload of friends around New York Harbor.

Subscribers paid $30 for 12 lessons in such arts as deep breathing, arm wrestling with oneself, doing push-ups on chairs, relaxation, and diet. He-men were told to avoid alcohol, tea, white bread, and doughnuts. Character building was an essential part of the training. Atlas told kids who came into his office, "Live clean, think clean, and don't go to burlesque shows." He told a businessman, "Burn your bonds. Tear up your stocks. Give away your property. Get on a healthy basis. My God, man, it's the body that counts!" Atlas believed that he was building character. "With good health goes honesty and integrity. If you've got good health, you think twice before you do anything wrong."

By W. W. II, Atlas had branch offices in London and Buenos Aires and students all over the world. Among his alumni were Max Baer, Fred Allen, Harry Von Zell, and piano manufacturer Theodore Steinway. A correspondent named Mahatma Gandhi wrote to him from India to say, "I have heard of the wonderful work you are doing and I wonder if there is some way you can build me up." Atlas prescribed a diet and some easy exercises. "I didn't charge him a dime," the strongman recalled. "I felt mighty sorry for him. The poor chap, he's nothing but a bag of bones."

Ultimately, 6 million aspiring he-men bought the course, making Atlas a millionaire several times over. He bought a seaside home at Point Lookout, Long Island, and lived in semiretirement, building furniture out of driftwood, working out at the New York City Athletic Club, and posing for publicity photos as a remarkably vigorous septuagenarian while Roman directed the mail-order business. He died of a heart attack at the age of 78. The isometric exercises he had pioneered had long since become part of the training used by the armed forces and professional athletes.

© 1975 - 1981 by David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace
Reproduced with permission from "The People's Almanac" series of books.
All rights reserved.

I've never done them but they're supposed to produce strength equal to or greater than the normal training. However, the problem is it strengthens only in the joint angles trained and little gains at the other angles.

Except that if memory serves me right Charles was later sued because he kept using weights, but his program touted that he used isometric movements only to achieve his physique. Comparing ourselves to lions, tigers, and bears oh my is really stupid.

Sandow, Saxon, Lalanem etc all acheived legendary feats of strength using resistance training.

Charles Atlas never used weights and that was found in a court of law to be true. Bob Hoffman founder of York Barbells admitted he made the whole story up in his magazine. The Atlas course is a great course and over a million students can't be wrong! I have yet to see any of these steroid induced monsters of today, pull a train or bend a horse shoe.

Why would you bring up a thread that's over a year old. And a million people can be wrong...remember when the earth was flat?

You might want to look at the World's Strongest Man competitions and nail bending competitions...it happens all the time.