NAVY: Potbellyacher

The studied opinion of James Joseph (“Gene”) Tunney is that the potbelly is one of mankind’s most degrading afflictions. As director of the U.S. Navy’s Physical Fitness Program, he is determined to eliminate it from the Navy. Last week he was scouring the country to line up 600 educated musclemen. With these 600 assistants, he hoped to slenderize the Navy’s 325,000 men and keep them thin. Lieut. Commander Tunney had already bagged 70 (among them Harvard’s famed Footballer Eddie Mahan).

Not long ago Tunney set forth in a memorandum to the whole Navy his recommendations for building muscle, banishing potbellies. The Tunney memo proposed that each officer should equip himself with a pair of three-pound dumbbells, should join his men every other day in a series of 30-minute exercises, with heavy emphasis on five abdominal routines (“All abdominal exercises except stoop-overs are performed with buttock muscles taut, hips locked and stomach sucked up”). Also suggested was a two-mile jog on alternate days. No man to evade practicing what he preaches, Tunney has spent a lot of his time in the Navy exercising with recruits (see cut).

There are still many in the Navy who have not yet been converted to the Tunney program. Says Tunney sadly: “I dare say that 50% of the officers and enlisted men . . . cannot properly stand at attention.” Tunney feels that, so far as enlisted men are concerned, this deplorable fact is largely due to the pants they are forced to wear. He denounced the pants bitterly on the ground that they invariably stretch, inducing the wearer to stick out his belly to hold them up. Hence potbellies, which, according to Tunney, lead to moral collapse.

On the whole, the Navy takes Lieut. Commander Tunney with the seriousness he requires. Among the regular Navy personnel, he is held in high regard as a heavyweight champion who was defeated only once in his career (by Harry Greb, a man whose posture left much to be desired). Since he put his full program into effect at Norfolk, naval recruits after six weeks of training have increased their strength by 41.6%, their intelligence ratings by 17%. The Navy has not yet got around to installing steambaths, which Tunney highly recommends, but it has taken up widely his patented exerciser, which he turned over to the Navy without charge. The Gene Tunney Exerciser (price to sailors: $3) consists of a long board, equipped with pillows for head and rump. Thirty-one inches above the headpiece is a pulley reeved with a rope with handles on one end, ankle straps on the other. When pulled, the rope raises the feet.. When slacked off, it raises the upper torso.

Among the claims made for the exerciser: “It will reduce the waistline, considerably strengthen the abdominal muscles, increase breathing capacity, tone up the whole alimentary tract, strengthen the heart, improve the muscle action of the entire body. . . . Where cadence is achieved it will furnish its own music—the music of rhythm.”