Pumping iron keeps older man in the flow of youth, good health

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Pumping iron keeps older man in the flow of youth, good health

Exercise continues to pay off for elderly

Monday, April 24, 2000

By GORDY HOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Fifty years after he scrounged up enough weights to create the Huskies' first weight room, retired gymnastics coach Eric Hughes still shows up three times a week to pump iron at the University of Washington athletic complex.

At 76, Eric Hughes still works out at the University of Washington's weight room, which he built 50 years ago and still benefits from.
Loren Callahan/P-I

The weight room has changed. It's grown from a classroom the size of a handball court to a separate building with two-story ceilings and speakers blaring rock 'n' roll.

Hughes has changed, too. At age 76, he continues to train despite a bad back, an artificial hip and a cancerous prostate gland.

"The only thing that seems to limit me, though, is the back," he said.

Arthritis, a bad disc and scoliosis are taking their toll, he said.

As for the cancer, "I have elected not to do anything about it. Two of my three doctors tell me I'm so old I'll probably die from something else," he said.

He won't go easily.

Four sets of 25 tummy crunches into his morning, and with Nirvana pumped through the speakers, Hughes is into his routine. It varies little from workout to workout, a steady diet of three sets of 10 to 25 repetitions, depending on the exercise, neck down.

Jack Berryman, a professor of history in the UW's Department of Medical History and Ethics and a former colleague of Hughes, has long studied the development of physical activity as it affects performance in sport as in everyday life.

"The history of medicine has always been about the history of disease," Berryman said. "What's always fascinated me is the history of health, and what people can do to stay healthy."

Berryman said Hughes is a clear example of what regular hard exercise can do to stave off, if not stop, the aging process.

"He is the epitome of what physical exercise can do for a person," Berryman said. Hughes stands tall -- head up, shoulders back -- his arm, shoulder and upper back muscles well defined and able to pull down 110 pounds through three sets of 10 repetitions.

Indeed, weight training for adults on the far side of middle age can show dramatic results, according to recent studies.

Terry Todd, a fitness historian, lifter and lecturer in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin, points to the literal fountain of youth that seems to spring from seniors who workout regularly with weights.

"For reasons that are not understood completely, weight training in older adults increases the production of hormones associated with youth, including testosterone," Todd said in a telephone interview.

"And as a consequence, these people rarely look their age, except, maybe facially. Weight training doesn't affect skin."

Todd said seniors once were considered too old to build muscle through resistance training. But studies now show that they do get stronger and even are more flexible.

In a 1992 study at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged in Boston, for example, researcher Maria Fiatarone, found that frail, very old volunteers, men as well as women, tripled their muscle mass and "dramatically lowered their risk of falls" after a steady diet of resistance training.

In a study at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, women between the ages of 60 and 77 improved their ability to move heavy objects by an average 52 percent while increasing their walking speeds by 18 percent.

But take it easy, says Dr. Thomas Perls, of Harvard Medical School.

Hughes hits the gym Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

It has been a lifelong enterprise.

As a younger man he was a gymnast, a tumbler and distance runner.

He also was a canoeist, and continues that lifelong interest. He can be found regularly on local rivers leading groups of paddlers, and he continues to teach several Seattle Parks Department canoeing classes at Green Lake. He also continues to coach club-level gymnastics teams at the school.

Having toyed with weights while in the service, Hughes thought he knew a thing or two about the benefits of weight training when he arrived in Washington to seek a Ph.D. in physical education. But the practice was largely abhorred by coaches.

"They feared their athletes would become what then was called 'muscle-bound,'" Hughes said.

Although no one was able to agree on a definition, the fear of adding muscle bulk to an athlete's frame persisted well into the 1960s, with supervised and required weight-training programs not in evidence until the 1970s.

But surely in the year Hughes reached the UW, a little added bulk might have helped the Huskies of Coach Howie O'Dell. In the Huskies' 1950 homecoming game, with a Rose Bowl appearance on the line for the first time in 14 years, Washington found itself in possession of the ball, first-and-goal at the California two-yard line.

But even with legendary All-Americans Don Heinrich and Hugh McIlhenny both in the backfield that year, Washington failed to muscle the ball across the goal line, and went on to lose, 14-7, in one of their more-legendary gridiron disappointments.

As a newly arrived teaching assistant, Hughes received permission to develop an experimental weight-training class that would become a popular P.E. elective.

But he needed weights and a place to put them. He found an old handball court, and had whatever weights he needed but couldn't find made in the school's machine shop.

By the mid-1950s, a multistation Universal Gym had found its way into Hughes' training room, and there was no looking back.

This first in a series of modern weight "machines," was invented by California's Muscle Beach pioneer Harold Zinkin, and brought to Hughes by Chuck Coker, Zinkin's sales chief and father of Husky lineman Cliff Coker (1955-'57).

The Universal Gym of today remains much as it was then, a free-standing rig of rectangular iron plates threaded vertically onto a frame of metal rods. It was engineered so that a person could select a specific number of plates to lift, then yank on a single cable-and-pulley device to make them go.

The device was the first to allow an unskilled person to lift weights safely. If the lifter lost his grip, the plates would simply slide down the rods without injuring him.

Hughes was tickled to get one, but, he recalled, there were strings attached. Coker would install it on condition that Hughes research the device's cardiorespiratory (aerobic) potential.

"Chuck wanted to claim that by using the machine in a certain way (moving from one station to the next quickly) it was an aerobic device as well as a machine that built strength," Hughes said. "Unfortunately for him, the studies I was able to do didn't show very much."

Like Hughes, Universal Gym's inventor is still at his daily regimen at age 78 in Fresno.

"I have a nice gym in the garage," Zinkin said in a telephone interview. "I don't miss a day. I don't miss a muscle group. I work out good."

Zinkin and Hughes both have lightened their loads as the years advanced.

"I think about it a lot these days," Zinkin said. "I'm sure there are people my age who work out harder. But what I've concluded is, I don't need heft so much as I need mileage, lots and lots of repetitions. Whatever you do, it's important to keep it going."

Hughes is of a similar mind, and in his program's golden-anniversary year, he is keeping it going.

"I didn't really care if I had a long or short life," he said, "but I kind of set myself a goal years ago:

"I thought it would be nice to see the year 2000.

"Well, here we are."

P-I reporter Gordy Holt can be reached at 206-448-8156 or gordyholt@seattle-pi.com