The Man Who Made the Modern Gym (and the Man Who Took the Credit)

Harold Zinkin spent part of his youth at the bottom of a four-man human pyramid on Muscle Beach, holding up three men while the crowd watched the one on top. History may be written by the victors, but it’s also written by the loudmouths, and Zinkin was never a loudmouth. He was the man who, more than anyone, got the world training on machines instead of free weights. Almost nobody remembers him.

Zinkin was a five-foot-seven fitness enthusiast who made his name in the 1930s and 1940s among the gymnasts and muscle-posers of Muscle Beach.

Who was Harold Zinkin?

Zinkin was born in San Francisco in 1922 and grew up in Southern California. When his father died he left high school in Los Angeles, and as a teenager he became a regular at Muscle Beach. His was truly a golden generation of beach bums. At any afternoon you could spot Zinkin rubbing shoulders with Jack LaLanne, Pudgy and Les Stockton, and even Joe Gold of later Gold’s Gym fame. According to legend, LaLanne and Zinkin became friends after wrestling each other in the sand for thirty minutes to an agreed upon draw. They lived their life on the sand largely for the crowds who would stop and applaud these physical oddities.

By nineteen, Zinkin was a regular in Vic Tanny’s Gym and progressing so well that Tanny entered him into a Mr. California bodybuilding show in 1941 without telling him. Zinkin competed and, despite not knowing how to pose properly, won. Soon after Zinkin enlisted, where he served as a physical therapist in the navy treating soldiers and training away. In 1945 he finished second in the Mr. America contest the day after winning his class at the national weightlifting championships.

After the war Zinkin opened and ran his own gyms. In 1953 he moved to Fresno, and began building a machine that would change fitness.

Why the World Wanted Machines

There was a time, children, when the world was skeptical about dumbbells and barbells. It’s true. We call it the dark age and it was a scary time when ciggarette smoke was found in every room and the technology which brainwashed everyone was the television. As Jan Todd, Terry Todd and Jason Shurley found in their wonderful book on the subject, up until the 1960s many people were entirely skeptical about the value of weight training.

In the sporting world, coaches spent decades worrying that weights made athletes slow or even worse, ‘muscle bound.’ Legendary USC track coach Dean Cromwell warned athletes during the 1930s and 1940s against getting greedy for muscle. He told shot putters to stay away from weights, which he thought robbed muscles of their ‘spring.’ Heck, when legendary strength coach Boyd Epley started at the University of Nebraska in 1969, he was told explicitly that if any athletes got slower because of weight training, he’d be fired.

Closer to home for me, I am currently doing a project on the history of weight training in football (‘soccer’). In 1973 English trainer Bill Watson wrote Football Fitness which spent the first half of the book promising that weight training could help athletes be better, and wouldn’t harm them. And, with respect to Watson, who was a pioneer, his system was effectively callisthenics. Compare that with high schoolers who hit 400 lb squats!

Coaches and the general public were skeptical about weight training and, truthfully, it’s understandable. Doctors did not write about the need to build muscle and many repeated the claim that weight training was harmful. Added to that, weight training is hard to learn. There’s plates, collars, spotters and form that needs to be learned over time. People needed an easier on-ramp to fitness and Zinkin, more than anyone else, built it.

In 1957 Zinkin founded Universal Gyms. His first machines had stacks of plates, easy handles and, importantly, multiple stations. One machine could safely train the whole body and needed little if any coaching. Exercisers sat where it told them, put their hands where the handles were, and pushed or pulled along set paths.

Earlier today I squatted low bar. Before getting under it I took deep breaths and braced my trunk. I wedged myself under the bar and set it on the shelf I’d made across my shoulder blades. Then I exhaled, stood it up, took three steps back, sucked in air and slowly descended before pushing up again. It has taken me years to get halfway decent form and rhythm. If I had a leg press in my home gym, I could just sit in it and push my legs forward!

At first Zinkin’s machine sold in the dozens, always customised, but by 1963 it had hit mass production, making Zinkin a millionaire in the process. One of the most important markets was sport. Gene Mozee, a bodybuilding historian, told the Los Angeles Times that Zinkin “did more for the acceptance of weight training by college athletes than anyone.” Mozee’s argument was about efficiencies. A coach with thirty players and not much time could train an entire team using Zinkin’s multi-station. Nobody had to stand around waiting for someone else to put the bar down and no one required the specialist coaching that a deadlift required.

Schools, colleges, YMCAs and professional teams bought Universal machines. So did Vic Tanny, who had once entered Zinkin in Mr. California without asking and now ran a successful chain of gyms. Even college coaches who were set in their ways came round. When Jim Grabowski left Illinois for the Green Bay Packers in 1966, he found a small weight room with a Universal set in it. Jim Taylor, the Packers’ fullback, didn’t trust it and brought his own weights. The Telegraph later called Zinkin the “Henry Ford of Fitness.”

Serious strength athletes never warmed to it and stuck with free weights but they were not Zinkin’s target audience. Universal machines were for the time pressed coaches, the athletic administrators looking to spend their budget, and the gym owner who wanted to make weight training less intimdating for the general public.

Zinkin sold the company in 1968 to the Whittaker Corporation, a Los Angeles firm that started out making aircraft valves and was buying businesses at a rate of knots. By 1969 it owned about eighty of them. Zinkin stayed involved for roughly eight years, then went into real-estate development and shopping centers around Fresno.

The machines continued to improve without him. By 1974, Universal’s leading model was the Centurion, which used a system developed by Gideon Ariel in 1972 to change the resistance at different points during an exercise. Ariel was a biomechanist who had represented Israel in the discus at two Olympics and now ran a company in Massachusetts. Universal credited his computer analysis in its advertising, promising “larger, stronger, faster and more capable athletes.” Zinkin later claimed that virtually every professional athlete had used a Universal machine at some point. But, by that point, people no longer associated machines with Zinkin, and indeed, the age of machines, was about to be supercharged.

Genius or Just Plain Ass?

Zinkin’s machines transformed fitness and made weight training more accessible whether it was athletes or just the general public looking to ‘get fit.’ They were marketed well, and widely, but missed a certain something, which is crucial in fitness. They missed a loudmouth. Enter Arthur Jones.

Jones was, and is, one of the most controversial figures in fitness. An entrepreneur, film maker, and would-be bodybuilding guru, Jones is best known in fitness for two things – high intensity training, and Nautilus machines. Crucially you couldn’t have one without the other. In 1970 Jones publically debuted his ‘Blue Monster’ Nautilus machine which, like Zinkin’s early equipment, was a multi-station machine that exercisers could use with little coaching. So far, so similar.

What differed was the cam. A barbell weighs the same all the way up, but your leverage doesn’t. A bench press is easy at lockout and a hell of a lot harder off your chest, so the bar is only ever as heavy as your weakest point allows. Jones’s answer was a spiral-shaped cam, the nautilus shell that gave the company its name, which changed the resistance as you moved. It got heavier where you were strong and lighter where you were weak. In theory the muscle worked hard through the whole range instead of coasting through the easy bits. Universal got its own version of the idea a couple of years later.

Jones first commercial machine went to a customer on 30 November 1970, and the following year the Kansas City Chiefs became the first professional team to buy one. Jones was selling a training philosophy alongside his machines. He called it high intensity training (HIT), built around brief workouts, one or two sets taken to failure, and a full range of motion. He promoted it relentlessly in Iron Man, Muscular Development, which published “The Ideal Workout” in June 1970, and his own Nautilus Bulletins. Barbells, he argued, wasted people’s time. His machines offered a quicker route to muscle.

He was not, dear reader, shy about his belief. In Jones’ writings bodybuilders like Arnold and company were wasting their time with too many sets and reps. HIT built muscle quickly and without free weights. For doubters, Jones pointed at Casey Viator, a high profile Mr. America winner, whom Jones claimed trained exclusively using his protocols. He then went even further.

In May 1973 Jones supervised the ‘Colorado Experiment’ at Colorado State University. Viator, coming back from an injury and a long layoff, worked out on Nautilus equipment fourteen times in twenty-eight days. Jones reported that Viator gained 45.28 pounds of body weight while losing 17.93 pounds of fat, for a claimed muscular increase of 63.21 pounds. He published the account in the September 1973 issue of Iron Man and largely set bodybuilding alight with his stupendous results.

Universal was not blind to the value of such marketing and, three years later, ran its own experiment. Gideon Ariel put twenty university athletes through twenty weeks of training, five sessions of about two hours a week, half on Olympic barbells and half on Universal’s machines. The barbell group added 36 pounds to their bench press and the machine DVR group added 74.5.

Ariel even pointed out that his experiment was weighted against his own machines, as the DVR group had to prove itself on a barbell bench it hadn’t trained on. The brochure led with “HERE’S PROOF!” and promised Universal would double your strength gains over the barbell. The Universal experiment was arguably more controlled than Jones’, but made very little impact in comparison. Both pushed the narrative that machines were more efficient, but Nautilus and Jones could rely on spectacle.

For example, in 1975 Sports Illustrated went to see Jones and found a fifty-two-year-old who kept a 665-pound, one-eyed alligator in a pool outside his research gym, had hosted a television show called Wild Cargo, flew his own planes and said he had been shot six times. Nautilus sales, the magazine reported, had risen 200% in each of the previous four years. Most NFL teams had the machines, and so did businessmen, housewives and orthopedic surgeons. At a Dallas training center which had fifty Nautilus machines, people were queuing outside at six in the morning to use them.

That same year Nautilus ran an eight-week program with the cadets at West Point, with Dick Butkus among the Nautilus staff. Terry Todd, the former champion lifter turned historian, later explained the sales method. Get the machines into one professional team, tell the next team the Dolphins were using them, and you could “create a kind of frenzy.”

The Universals stopped being sexy. Some football coaches, one coach later recalled, just handed theirs to the women’s teams. Others sent them to the junior high. For about fifteen years hundreds of gym owners called their businesses Nautilus Fitness Centers, and to use it they needed at least twelve Nautilus machines. In 1980 the University of South Carolina’s PE center had five, which had cost about $15,000.

One Kiesel, quoted in the student paper, put it plainly. “Nautilus is a principle, not only machines.” When Ronald Reagan was recovering from being shot in 1981, he was reported to be working out on Nautilus equipment in the White House. Forbes put Jones on its list of the four hundred richest Americans. and the California chain that became 24 Hour Fitness spent the 1980s as 24 Hour Nautilus.

The Los Angeles Times later said Nautilus had the American conditioning business more or less to itself from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, sold through smart clubs where trainers steered members through half-hour sessions. The New York Times said the machines replaced the grim barbell gym and its large men with fashionable clubs full of recreational athletes. Zinkin, meanwhile, was building shopping centres in Fresno.

Jones sold Nautilus in 1986 to a Texas oilman. With the money he bought a ranch near Ocala, Florida, stocked it with elephants, rhinos and crocodiles, and parked three secondhand Boeing 707s on it. Universal, meanwhile, was still selling. Two years after Jones left, a research firm ranked it the industry leader, with $30 million in sales to Nautilus’s $20 million. Nautilus went through bankruptcy court in 1990 and by 1993 belonged to a textile company that wanted the name for sportswear. Universal went in 1998 to Flexible Flyer, which made sleds and swing sets. The Nautilus name moved on in 1999 to the company behind the Bowflex, which later renamed itself Nautilus, Inc.

In July 2004 NPR rang Zinkin to talk about his friend Joe Gold, who had built Gold’s Gym and had just died at 82. That September Zinkin fell at home and died, also at 82. The Los Angeles Times headline said he had invented the weight machine. Arnold Schwarzenegger, by then governor of California, remembered doing balancing acts with him on Muscle Beach.

Jones died in the summer of 2007. His obituaries were bigger. The Associated Press said his machine had led fitness out of the locker room and into hotels and offices. Iron Man put the whole billion-dollar fitness industry down to Nautilus and the philosophy behind it. BarBend’s history concedes that weight machines existed before Jones, then files what came next under “The Birth of the Machine Age.” Greg Webb, who had gone to work for Jones in 1977 and was by then a vice president at Nautilus, Inc., called him “the founder of modern-day exercise.”

Nautilus, Inc. had bought Universal the year before, at an asset auction, for $2.31 million. It used the name for a line of adjustable dumbbells.

Further Reading

For anyone interested in learning more about Zinkin, Jones and the history of weight training, here are a few places to start.

• Harold Zinkin and Bonnie Hearn, Remembering Muscle Beach: Where Hard Bodies Began (1999) Find the book.
• Jason P. Shurley, Jan Todd and Terry Todd, Strength Coaching in America: A History of the Innovation That Transformed Sports (2019) Read more.
• Mary Rourke, “Harold Zinkin, 82; Muscle Beach Pioneer Invented Weight Machine,” Los Angeles Times (24 September 2004). Read here.
• Arthur Jones, Nautilus Bulletin No. 1 (1970). Read the bulletin.
• Arthur Jones, “The Colorado Experiment,” Iron Man (September 1973). Read here.
• Barry McDermott, “Exercise You Later, Alligator,” Sports Illustrated (21 April 1975) Find the article.