If there’s anything more perfect, more – dare I say it? Filled with shibumi – than reading Trevanian on a rainy Spring day, I don’t know what it is. I’m making my way through The Crazyladies of Pearl Street right now, and we’ve got one of those famous April showers going, and it’s Sunday, when I don’t have much to do.
Life is good.
It only takes one book like Practical Programming to expose what you see in the mainstream “fitness” magazines for the ridiculous crap that it is. This book sets out what you need to know in order to get strong. And it’s laid out in a pleasingly straightforward fashion, with none of the “Get hyoooge!!!!” hype that always seems to obscure what little practical advice exists in the Glorify Beef newsstand publications.
Basically, there are two things you have to do consistently if you want to experience continued progress in your training. One, you have to make sure that you work hard enough to overload your body and force it to adapt. Second, you have to give it enough time, rest, nutrition and stimulation to recover.
This second point is where about 95% of the gym population goes wrong. As someone once said, a workout that you can’t recover from is a wasted workout. We’ve all seen the folks who spend hours in the gym, killing themselves day after day, only to stay in the same place year after year. Rippetoe and Kilgore (two violent sounding names, but the authors seem to be level-headed enough) lay out very succinctly what one needs to do at various stages of his or her training career in order to not only stimulate the body to grow, but then allow it to do so.
The book is divided into two rough halves. The first one is background information that one needs to know in order to understand the basic workings of Selye’s adaptation response, nutrition, exercise and so on. The second takes the reader through three stages of an athlete’s career: novice, intermediate and advanced. Probably 90% of consistent gym-goers fall into the intermediate category, and these are precisely the people who could most use this book. Novices will experience progress doing anything, and advanced athletes usually have good coaches working with them. It’s the general gym crowd, those people who have advanced beyond the “I’m getting bigger and stronger every workout!” stage, who founder and fail to see progress. Practical Programming will show you why.
My only, very small, complaint about the book is a certain dryness of style. The book is academic in tone, and at times reads like a physiology text. The authors could stand to lighten things up a bit here and there, and might garner a wider audience than they now enjoy, thus allowing them to get their message out more effectively. But this is a small gripe, and a much larger plus is the fact that the book is very well written and edited. This is a huge relief in a field that is riddled with poor writing and even worse editing. It’s no exaggeration to say that many of the books in the fitness field, especially those geared toward smaller segments of the weightlifting population (bodybuilders, for instance), are so poorly written that at times it becomes difficult to figure out what the author is really trying to say.
No such problem here.
I’ve got the usual Amazon link above, but another place you can get this book is at the Aasgaard Company. They specialize in strength-related books and have great customer service. I recommend taking a look through their site if you don’t already know about it and are interested in strength development. They have lots of special deals if you order more than one book, or a book and a poster or two.