cosgrove

Sassafras (Serendipity)
$4.99
I loved these books as a child and was very excited to find them on amazon. It's a great book that teaches a good lesson, I'm just glad that these great books are around for my daughter to enjoy. She love these stories, though they are a little long for a 3 year old to sit the whole time, some how my daughter just can't keep her eyes off the page and all the cute illustrations.

Leo the Lop (reissue) (Serendipity Books)
$4.99
Great little book with a message of self-acceptance and self-love. I highly recommend it for those with active "Inner Children" as well. Very therapeutic.

Serendipity
$4.99
I loved this book in my youth, and purchased this one to give as a gift, but I am disappointed that the pictures do not seem anywhere near as vivid as they did in the one I owned when younger.

The New Rules of Lifting: Six Basic Moves for Maximum Muscle
$15.95
"The New Rules of Lifting", by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove, joins a growing number of research articles and books arguing that the "single body-part per day" workout paradigm should be replaced by whole body workouts structured around compound exercises (e.g., squats, dips, etc.). Empirical data on muscle growth, the real-life need for physical functionality, and common sense, all support this new thrust.

The good news here is that Cosgrove's workouts seem sound enough. That's why I gave this book two stars. The bad news is that, in my view, everything that surrounds that core - the writing, the uninspired lay out, the less-than-clear presentation of the workouts - is below par and off-putting.

Especially the writing. Schuler's prose is rambling, self-absorbed, convoluted, sprinkled with passive-aggressive score-settling against his philosophical opponents, full of failed attempts at humour, and always takes two or three times as many words to make its points as is needed. I have no idea how this guy could have supported himself as a fitness writer for the last twenty years.

Even worse, Schuler at times makes comments calculated, I presume, to build rapport with the audience, but which only lessen confidence in him as an explicator of the science of bodybuilding. At the very least, they sound totally bizarre. Here is just one example of all I've mentioned here. What follows are the very first words of the book:

"Let me tell you about something I invented. I call it 'weight lifting'. Maybe you've heard it called 'strength training', or 'resistance training', or even 'bodybuilding'. But when I made it up in my basement, I called it weight lifting.

"Are your BS detectors buzzing? Good. If they aren't, put in fresh batteries and read that paragraph again.

"I want you to read everything in this book with at least a little skepticism. That may seem like a strange thing to ask of someone who's just paid real money for my book. But it's important, for two reasons:

"1.) If you read the idea that maybe I'm not being completely truthful, you'll read more carefully, and that's exactly what I want.

"2.) Once you've read this with something less than fawning admiration of every sentence my fingers type, you'll be able to read future articles and books with the same raised eyebrow. (Although you'll have to buy my next book, 'The Drooping-Face Curve', to get my exclusive eyebrow-raising exercises".

(From the introduction, page 1X).

I don't know about anyone else, but when I buy a work-out book, I want a clear, concise, science-backed *workout book*, not a bunch of cutesy, clunky riddles, embarrassing attempts at being funny, authorial self-absorption, an almost frantic wordiness, and explicit suggestions that we should adopt a position of mistrust toward what we find inside. And it goes on like this for 300 pages. Schuler mentions on page 93 that he is "not the type to be easily embarrassed". Clearly.

Just in case our confidence isn't deflated enough early on, on Page 13 Schuler makes a "horrible confession about my own ignorance". Evidently, Lou conceived this book around a "brilliant" new idea which he was a "genius" (his [facetious] word) to think of, and which no one in history had ever thought of before: "take every exercise in the gym and look at it in terms of its possible role in human movement". That is, base training in compound movements chosen for their applicability to real world physical function. It took Alwyn Cosgrove to inform Schuler that this idea was not new at all; it had been preached for decades by people like Richard Schmidt and Paul Check. Not only that, but a couple of hours skimming the History Channel or an encyclopedia shows that this common sense approach has guided, say, warrior training for millenia: Romans, Spartans, Samurai, Athenians, gladiators, etc. Duh. It wasn't until the roid doofuses and machine hawkers came around that anyone started yakking about isolated exercises.

As pointed out by another reviewer, another odd moment (page 91) is when Schuler reveals that, although he had already been lifting for fourteen years (see p. xii), he only tried his first squat at the age of 23 (hm). Unfortunately, he lowered his butt all the way to the floor rather than stop when his thighs were parallel to the floor. Lou found this very hard. As a result, he decided not to perform another squat - despite being the editor of Men's Fitness, and despite the squat being almost unanimously recognized as one of the most important exercises there is - until *twelve years later*, in 1996 (again...hm).

A final quibble is that while this book is called "The New Rules of Lifting", there is absolutely nothing new here at all. Lifting progressively heavy weights in compound movements, and varying one's regimen, most likely comprise the oldest weight-training philosophy in existence. Maybe this is unimportant, but I think a more honest title would have been nice, and maybe even catchier.

Anyway, perhaps what matters is the workouts themselves. Unfortunately, the section describing the workouts is rather cumbersome, and could have used a keen graphic eye for layout and a keen editorial eye for intelligibility. That said, no doubt they work - after all, *every* resistance training program works, in the sense that if you progressively challenge your muscles, they respond by growing stronger. But why struggle along with this book, when there are other, better books out there, espousing the same philosophy?

Two I would recommend are "Power Training" by Robert dos Remedios, and "Huge in a Hurry" by Chad Waterbury.

Good luck. I hope this review helped someone.