Recently I saw an advertisement for Nautilus that said quite simply, “Nautilus…Strong Medicine”. Later, in the March 1997 issue of All Natural Muscular Development, I read the following quote from Vert Mooney, M.D….”Modern medical care should have the same precision and reproducibility in exercise programs that is expected in a dosage of prescribed medicine.” I also read a column by Richard Winnett, PhD. where he was exploring the idea of exercise dosages. These recent experiences have brought me to the realization that exercise is strong medicine and should go through the same process of determining an optimum dose amount and frequency that researchers use when inventing a new drug. Such a process should be able to produce a prescription for exercise that would be roughly appropriate for the vast majority of the population.

Let us explore how we could apply this process to exercise. First we must recognize that the human body is an organism, and this organism is able to make adaptive responses to various stimuli and that once identified, such responses should be reproducible across the vast majority of the population of that given organism. A drug is a stimulus that will act upon an organism, then under the correct circumstances , the organism produces a response. Likewise exercise is a stimulus which acts upon an organism that produces the response under the correct circumstances.

When one is researching a drug, the basic equation is detailed below:

Stimulus>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Organism>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Response

With regard to the stimulus, the basic issues to be identified are the concentration of the drug and the dosage of the drug. Analogous issues in exercise would be the intensity of the exercise and the amount of exercise performed per session. With regard to response, our researchers would wait to record the desired response and note at what point in time this response occurs. The amount of time it takes this response to occur is what dictates an optimum dosing schedule. The key when designing a therapeutic drug is to optimize the concentration so that minimum dosing is required to produce a maximum response. Likewise, the key in exercise should be to optimize intensity so that minimum exercise duration is required to produce a maximum growth response.                                                                                                                                                          continue