Charles Atlas

 By Bruce Shawkey

When I was losing weight as a teenager, I decided to buy a copy of the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. I think I ordered it out of a comic book, and it cost $10 or something thereabouts. It costs around $42 now, and it's in book form. When I ordered it, it arrived in loose pages.

I see people are bitching online about the book because it's not true to the original course. You can get the complete course online for free from the Internet Archive. I'll delve more into that in a moment.

Atlas designed the course because he was a poor Italian immigrant (born Angelo Siciliano in 1892) who could not afford expensive barbells and other weight training equipment.

His Dynamic-Tension System was based on other bodybuilding pioneers who used Isometric training methods in place of, or in addition to, expensive equipment.

I started using the course, the pages in hand. I confess I did see results, even enlisting my sister to take photos of me. Here are a few photos of Atlas demonstrating the various exercises.


  







That last one I didn't try! Anyway, this went on in my basement for several weeks, or maybe a month or two, until I felt I was sufficiently exercised, and moved on to other forms of exercise, mostly jogging and, later, when I had more money, joining exercise clubs, especially those with swimming pools. 

His print ads were brilliant. They were printed in cartoon form from the 1930s on, and in many comic books from the 1940s onwards – in fact continuing long after Atlas's death. The typical scenario, usually expressed in comic strip form, presented a skinny young man (usually accompanied by a female companion) being threatened by a bully. The bully pushes down the "97-pound weakling" and the girlfriend joins in the derision. The young man goes home, gets angry (usually demonstrated by his kicking a chair), and sends away for the free Atlas book. Shortly thereafter, the newly muscled hero returns to the place of his original victimization, seeks out the bully, and beats him up. He is rewarded by the swift return of his girlfriend and the admiration of onlookers.

Atlas died from a heart attack in the hospital on December 24, 1972, in Long Beach, New York at age 80.

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