NAUTILUS BULLETIN #1
By Arthur Jones
CHAPTER 28
AGE AS A FACTOR
Insofar as age is considered as a factor in the production of the best possible rate of gaining in strength and muscular mass as a result of heavy exercise, it will almost always be found that an individual will gain most rapidly at an age of about twenty-five to thirty -- at a point well after he has reached physical maturity.
An immature individual may well -- and usually will -- require several years of training to produce the same degree of results that can be produced by the same individual within a year if training is delayed until after the age of twenty-five.
Over twenty years ago, I helped produce the most striking physical improvement in an individual that I have ever witnessed; this man was a regular army officer then over thirty years of age -- and he increased the size of his normal chest by six full inches in a period of three weeks, as a result of only eight workouts, while gaining twenty pounds of solid muscular bodyweight.
From all available evidence, it seems perfectly clear that almost anyone can greatly profit from heavy exercise up to an age of at least sixty -- and in fact, it seems that an individual past the age of forty has more to gain than a younger person.
However, certain factors are obviously determined by age; for example, during the Second World War, a large number of wounded servicemen were treated for facial injuries with skin transplants -- and in most cases, the skin for these transplants was removed from the buttocks or upper thighs.
Now, twenty-five years later, it is obvious that this was a mistake; many of these individuals are now clearly displaying heavy deposits of fatty tissue in areas where such deposits are not normal.
Thus it appears that skin from an area that normally shows increasing deposits of fatty tissue with advancing age is not changed by being moved to another area of the body -- and this is clear proof that such fatty deposits are simply an unavoidable result of age.
While some individuals can -- and will -- display a high degree of muscularity at any age, other individuals will find it almost impossible to remove all of the fatty deposits from some areas of the body when they are past the age of about forty.