Tired of the unending amount of equipment and complication involved with New Age fitness (read: Wii Fit), Todd Levin decided to try out a classic mainstay of health and power: Charls Atlas’s 1922 Dynamic-Tension course.

Next, I stood before a mirror, held my hands as if grasping an imaginary rope just above my head, and pulled downward toward my knees while tensing my arm and chest muscles to provide resistance. According to my new fitness guru, if I “hold in the mind’s eye AT ALL TIMES the Ideal of Physical Perfection,” soon I could advance to other vitality-building exercises, such as gently and rapidly punching myself in the stomach, and washing my genitals with ice water. Yet somehow this still felt less degrading than a spinning class.