Strength-For-Life by Shawn Phillips: my thoughts (part 2)

Ok, as I was reading on - more thoughts popped up...

Some other concepts and notions that I liked:

• I like the emphasis on focus and mental concentration - that rings truth to me. I think it's one of the best characteristics of the book.
• Goal setting is one other part that I found extremely powerful.
• The training program is sound, in general and nutrition plan makes sense and is easy to follow.
• The program is laid out with great degree of detail, which should make it easy to digest for a beginner.
• I liked that the author's ego doesn't seem to be running the show (he also doesn't refer to himself as an expert or "Trainer of Champions" or "Coach Ilg" or anything like that). The material is served in a clear systematic way.
• The book covers pretty much all bases. Some of them may be arguable but I think for a beginner it can provide a pretty good structure and a lot of guidance.

At the same time I ran into some things I do not agree with:

• some concepts are served as facts whereas they often are opinions at best and unsubstantiated claims at worst.
• some notions are presented in an overly simplistic, sometimes somewhat dogmatic, way.
• the part explaining why three meals per day are inferior to 5-6 meals per day and especially why skipping breakfast is a mortal sin doesn't quite hold the water. There is sufficient evidence that skipped breakfast is not going to bring metabolism down to a screeching halt. The notion of breakfast being a critical meal of the day is a popular belief and in my opinion is nothing but.
• I believe that a program that consists of 18 intensive sets per workout three times a week with at least 4-5 sets going to failure in addition to intensive interval training another three times for a total of 6 times a week can be too much for an average trainee and cannot be maintained without burning out and overtaxing your body's recovery capabilities for longer than a few weeks. Same applies to Body-For-Life program as well, which I believe can be overly intensive and lead to overtraining for many people with average genetics (that's what happened to me).
• In a section for women (p.112) he states that "you won't get big on 15 reps, but you won't get anything else either", which I think is a statement that is not entirely correct and somewhat misleading. You absolutely CAN get big on 15 reps and even 20 (there's even a famous "20 squats" program on which people have been known to grow muscle like crazy), although only if the weight is heavy enough; i.e. intensity and amount of resistance are the key. So women don't get big doing 15 reps not because of some magic number of reps that somehow prevents them from growing muscle but because of low intensity and very light weights that are typically used by them, which simply does not provide enough stimulus for the muscle to grow.

Overall I'd give the book four stars. It is very similar to Body-For-Life (with only a few modifications) and overall is a sound program (although certainly not a miracle pill) based on traditional principles (nothing revolutionary about it) of strength training and cardiovascular fitness and I believe that it can certainly serve as a good headstart to a typical out-of-shape sedentary person with little knowledge of exercise science who decided to finally take control of his body.

P.S. Well, what do you know... Just when I was about to put away the book thinking that I pretty much got the gist of it I suddenly realized there were two more chapters - 14 and 15. After reading those my entire opinion about this book changed dramatically! Let me tell you, the part about Mastering Motivation (chapter 14) is nothing short of brilliant! Stages of motivation described in it didn't simply ring the truth to me - they were tolling a 500 lbs bell from the top tower of the cathedral! That chapter alone made me want to own this book! This chapter alone lifted this book into a completely different category - way above all other fitness books I ever read. A ubiquitous Body-For-Life doesn't even hold a candle to this one in terms of understanding mental and spiritual depth of transformation (physical or otherwise). This guy totally gets it! He is one of a very few who seem to be capable of looking past the weights, sets and reps! Wow! Thanks, Nicole, for recommending this book!

Strength-For-Life by Shawn Phillips: my thoughts

A friend suggested this book. It's brilliant, she said, and it is talking about physical transformation based on principles that are exactly what you seem to be looking for: a holistic, goal oriented approach targeting both mind and body, unlike many other "get fit quick" books.

First thing I did, what I always do in situations like that, I Googled it. Often I find myself looking not just at readers' average rating (like the one you find at Amazon.com) but also critical feedback - usually those will be reviews from readers who gave the book 1 or 2 stars. Not always objective they, nevertheless, often give the gist of what the book is not. I often find that 5-star reviews can be excessively enthusiastic, sometimes to obsession point and therefore even more misleading.

So I googled author's name and the first book that popped up was one of his other ones - something about getting fabulous abs quick. Negative reviews on that one were REALLY negative, blasting the book for excessive narcissism and it being nothing but a re-hashed collection of those same age-old training ideas that have been around for decades glamoured up by photo images of the author sporting his perfect six-pack along with attractive models. There were also comments of the author being a less lucky shadow of his more successful brother Bill - creator of Body-For-Life program (I'll publish my thoughts on it later). Not a good image.

Despite the negative feedback on that other book I still decided to give this one a try. Plus I found it in the library so I figured - what do I have to lose? And I'm glad I did. I found it may be lacking some philosophical depth and scientific backup but it doesn't matter. It has good intentions and honest attitude. I had a feeling that Shawn truly believes in what he preaches. And like with almost any book I've read in the last year or two I discovered certain points that I do not agree with but it also gave me a lot of good hints and plenty of food for my inquisitive mind.

A couple of things that really got me thinking. One thing that really struck me was an excellent metaphor in the goal setting section of the book. He used Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation to illistrate why we sometimes fail to reach the goal. He compared the magnitude (importance, desirability) of the goal to the mass of the object and its remoteness (how far away this goal is) to distance in a physical sense. So, he concedes, if the goal is too far away in the future (distance) the gravitational pull may just not be strong enough to bring the goal to you even if it very desirable and important (mass)! Isn't that brilliant? I think it is.

The second point has nothing to do with the book per se but, like I said, it fed my mind with some valuable pointers. For instance, he suggests that goals should be ambitious but realistic. For a long time - since I was first exposed to ideas of the Law of Attraction - I was developing a tendency to scorn this whole "setting a realistic goal" thingy. Ha! - I was thinking - "realistic goals" are for those unenlightened souls who do not dare to dream big, aim high enough. It's simply selling themselves cheap - my Ego was arrogant and quick to judge. And when I was just reading that section of the book all of a sudden I heard this voice in my head. It quietly said literally this: "Vlad, it's all a matter of interpetation. Setting realistic goals doesn't have to mean short-changing yourself. It may simply mean making sure that the goals you are setting are deemed achievable by you! What good would it do you if you set a goal you don't believe you could achieve?" This is where the light flashed in my head. But of course!! It's so simple. It's not about how big the goal is it's about what YOU believe you can or cannot achieve within a certain timeframe!! It's about FAITH! So limitations are in what you believe is and isn't possible - not in the magnitude of the goal! If you - in full conviction and unshakeable faith - can concieve that 10 pounds of fat can be lost overnight - you will be able to wake up 10 pounds lighter the very next morning! The thing is not that it's impossible - it's that you believe it is!! A typical self-talk would probably go like this: "10 pounds overnight? No way! Totally impossible! How about - in a week? Nahh, I don't think so! Ok, do you think you could do it in three months? Well, I guess I could; I think it's possible." That's it!!!

(...to be continued... haven't finished the book yet)