If it’s not fun, you’re doing something wrong.

The authors talk very little about actually having fun and more about finding the clicking point where you realize that you enjoy lifting and what it can do for your body. If you do not enjoy what you are doing, then you will not be in it for the long haul which is what is necessary to get the most out of any program and to maintain a healthy body.

I have to agree with the sentiment though. If you are not enjoying yourself, you need to try something else until you find something that you do enjoy. Weight lifting, running, bicycling, swimming, basketball, turning cartwheels in your front yard: they are all just a means to an end. Keep moving along until you find something that you like. Also, don’t forget to go back to things you tried before and try them again. You may find that you enjoy them more when you are coming at them from a slightly better fitness base gotten from some other activity.

When you combine serious strength training with serious endurance exercise, your body will probably choose endurance over muscle and strength.

The authors contend that if you mix strength training and endurance exercise, the workouts will actually interfere with each other. In general, you will get the benefits from the endurance exercise. If you were working out 3 days a week in the gym and 3 days a week out running, then your body will choose endurance over muscle growth, strength and power. If you did want the best of both worlds, you would need to combine the workouts and do your running and your strength training in the same workout session.

I generally run and lift throughout the year. However, I always have a focus on one or the other. When I finish my racing season, I tend to cut back on my running and concentrate on my lifting. The general idea is to put on a few pounds and to work on building muscle mass and strength. Then, when my marathon training comes back into focus, I will cut back on my lifting to two days a week and start running five or six days a week. The continued strength training is not meant to build a lot of extra muscle mass, but to maintain the strength that I do have and to provide another outlet for improving upon my endurance without further stress that is exactly the same as running.

You don’t need endurance exercise to burn fat.

The idea is that weight training can lead to an increased metabolism for a few days, while endurance exercise only revs up your metabolism for a few hours after you are done working out. If you work out hard enough in the gym and eat properly afterwards, then you will have no trouble losing weight.

I can not really comment on this. I agree that after a really tough workout in the gym I tend to be really hungry afterwards, but I am also really hungry after a tough running workout. My regimen usually includes a fairly balanced mix of weight lifting and running, and the only problems that I have controlling my weight are making sure that I eat enough to not waste away.

Aerobic fitness is not a matter of life and death.

The authors want to paint a distinct line between “exercise training” and “endurance training”; they do not believe that aerobic exercise is necessary to be healthy. They are right about it not being necessary, but I do not like their take on the matter.

Whether aerobic and endurance exercise is necessary depends upon your goals. Obviously, since I am a marathoner, I am not going to do very well in my races if I do not go out and run hundreds of miles. If I was just starting to work out for the first time and my only goals were to lose weight or make myself healthier then I would not worry as much about it. As is, my goal is to work my weight lifting around my running schedule rather than the other way around.

Lifting by itself may increase your flexibility.

The authors debunk the myth that lifting can make you “muscle-bound”, which means that all those big muscles stiffen you up compared to the non-muscular population. The truth is that any sort of activity can make you more flexible than somebody that sits around all day. Sitting shortens your hip flexors and overstretches your back muscles. Lifting weights encourages good posture and stretches out the muscles which will help lead to flexibility.

The authors admit that research on stretching can be found to hold up basically any theory. I can not really speak to whether my lifting makes me more flexible or not, though. I run more than I lift, and I stretch often. I am naturally a very flexible person to begin with. I have friends that have lifted and run just as much as I have though that can barely get their hands past their shins, which strikes me as not quite right.

You don’t need to warm up to stretch.

The authors do not believe that you really need to warm up before you stretch. Their example is that unless you are trying to put your foot behind your head as the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, you will not have to worry about hurting yourself.

I just want to point out that they did qualify this rule. In general, stretching at any random time can be good for you. If I am going to spend an extended amount of time stretching, however, I prefer to warm up a little bit as it makes the stretching a much more pleasant activity and I don’t “pop” my bones as much in the process. As such, most of my concentrated stretching happens after my gym workouts or my runs.

Stretching is not a warm-up.

The authors state that stretching does not warm up your muscles, and can actually inhibit performance. Some of the warm-ups in the book do stretch your muscles, but the idea is not to lengthen them before the workout, it is just a side effect.

I agree with this new rule. When I run, I tend to stretch a little before a workout, but only after I’ve already jogged around a bit. I save the majority of my stretching (and I stretch a lot) for after my workouts and before I go to bed. I also stretch quite a bit at random points in the day just for the hell of it.

I very rarely stretch before lifting unless I am feeling particularly tight before a set of something. I almost always stretch exclusively when I am done.

Stretching after a workout of any kind will give you the best gains in both flexibility and in reduced soreness. When you stretch after your workout, you are giving your body an opportunity to lose some of the lactic acid build up that can lead to sore muscles the next day.

A good warm-up doesn’t have to make your body warm.

The authors believe that doing low intensity warm-ups such as treadmill running will not prepare your lower body for lifts such as heavy squats. Warm-ups should be specific to the muscles that are going to be worked and the manner in which they are going to be worked.

I do not agree with this new rule. I always begin my workouts with an easy jig jog on the treadmill. It gets my heart rate up, raises my internal body temperature by a degree, and gets my blood flowing. It suppresses my digestion (since I always eat something before lifting) and makes my body ready to do work.

However, as the authors state, there should also be a warm-up specific to the exercise that you are doing, and I agree with that 100%. Before I do squats or deadlifts, I will usually do a set of 15 with no weight at all, not even a bar. I just go through the motions and pretend I am holding the bar. I may look silly, but I feel that the dual warm-up better prepares me for the workout.

Normally, though, I only do a second warm-up for the first exercise I am going to do, which is usually some form of squat, deadlift, or lunge. Once in a while I will throw an empty set of something into the middle of a workout, but not very often.

Fast Lifting is not more dangerous than slow lifting.

Conventional wisdom states that fast lifting is dangerous and that weights should be moved at a slow, controlled, deliberate pace. The authors maintain, however, that some exercises should be done at that slow pace, and some should be done fast. There are some exercises where it is unnatural to move at a slow deliberate pace, and doing so can deform you muscle and lead to injury more easily than doing the same lift at a naturally quick pace.

In my own experience, my weight lifting tends to be at the slower pace. I tend to save the fast exercises for when I am running or on a bike. I can not necessarily disagree with their points, however. The trick is doing a lift that you are prepared for at a pace conducive to your goals. Even the authors suggest that beginners start with exercises that can be done at a slow, smooth and controlled pace, and that intermediate and advanced lifters need to work up to faster lifts that they have never done before.

You’ll get better results working your ass off on a bad program than you will loafing through a good program.

You can build big muscles with a bad program if you work hard enough. It will hurt, and you might injure yourself, but it can be done. You can also have the best program in the world, but if you do not challenge yourself, then you will never get anything worthwhile out of it.

The trick is to put the effort into a good program. You will make better gains than you would with a bad program, and you will be much less likely to hurt yourself.

I can say from experience that this is true, and that it extends well beyond weight lifting. My first few years of running for RIT, I was putting in 85 to 95 miles a week for most of three seasons, and 60 to 70 miles a week for the rest of the year. High mileage is nice, but there has to be more regular rest and recovery. Our workouts would be great, but our race performance on the weekend would suffer because we were always tired and beat up. We had one workout that was 5 hill repeats that were three quarters of a mile long with a half mile recovery jog down the back side. The problem came from the fact that the park we were running in was seven miles away, which meant we were doing a 19 or 20 mile speed workout.

That being said, some of my best race times came from those first few years before I hurt myself. It is only the last year or two that I have been managing to get myself back into that kind of shape. At some point I will return to the high mileage, but it will be a seasonal thing and not an year long training method. My best marathon to date, which was almost a half hour better than I ran when doing the high mileage, came off of around 40 to 50 miles per week.

Don’t judge a system by the physique of the person promoting it.

The authors warn against following workout advice from somebody who is clearly out of shape or does not care for lifting at all, but at the same time not to choose a workout program just because the person promoting it has the best physique or the heaviest bench press. All that that tells you is that their system works for them.

Most practitioners should be in at least decent shape. How somebody looks or how much they can lift has a lot to do with their genetics and discipline. Their program very well may work for you. But, it may not. Somebody who may not be as large could possibly have the best program for you, so you will want to keep an open mind and experiment.

It is hard not to judge a book by its cover, though. It’s the first thing that you see and all that you initially have to go on for whether something is worthwhile. My process is to usually read and compare different workouts and try to see what fits into my schedule and my experience level. I will then try it for 3 weeks or a month. If I like the workout, then I will continue with the next phase until I’m ready to try something new or reach a point in my running season where I have different goals. If I do not care for something, then I will move on.

There is no magic system of exercises, sets, and reps.

The authors present two corollaries to rule #9:

• Everything works.
• Nothing works forever.

The warning here is that you should not believe all of the hype about a program. It very well may work (at least for somebody), and it very well may work for you. However, it will not work for you forever, and it may not work for you at all.

There are certainly plenty of hokey systems out there; I can think of numerous commercials telling you that with 20 minutes a day 3 days a week using their machine, you’ll have great abs and bulging biceps. The warning in this rule is that most of the time, the people with those muscles built those muscles doing something else. Take it with a grain of salt.

A workout is only as good as the adaptations it produces.

The idea behind lifting weights is to force your body to adapt to new stimuli by creating greater strength through muscle growth. Older and more experienced lifters are going to adapt to a workout faster than younger or less experienced lifters, because our bodies become adept at adapting to new stresses the more we expose it to them.

There really is not much to disagree with on this rule. Basically, you want to get the maximum adaptation in as short a time as you can, and then move on to new workouts.

Don’t “do the machines”

The authors again speak out against isolating your muscles when working out. Their main problem with workout routines that follow a circuit around the machines is that nothing mimics a squat, and there is only one or two exercises that mimic a deadlift. Nothing mimics a lunge, and the pushing machines are unnatural. They do like pulling machines, however. Their two general problems with most of the machines are that they can force your joints into unnatural ranges of motion and make it easy to injure yourself, and that most of them prevent your body from doing the most important and useful muscle-building movements.

There are times when I have a lot of time that I can spend in the gym and that I “do the machines.” In general, I only “do the machines” when I am resuming weight training after time off, and I want to spend a few weeks getting my muscles used to the motions of lifting again. Otherwise, I do tend to stick to using free weights or cable machines.

If you are going to use machines, then be sure to always adjust them properly. If you are unsure how to do so, there are usually directions on each machine, and most gyms have trainers available who can help you.

The weight you lift is a tool to reach your goals. It is not a goal by itself.

The general idea behind this rule is that you should not go into a workout in order to bench press a certain weight; you should go into a workout to look better or to be healthier or to get stronger. The indivdual exercises that you do is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself. The key is to know what your real goals are for each workout, and to lift the weight that will achieve that goal. Too much or too little and you will fail to achieve the actual goal.

This is hard to disagree with. I am not a weight lifter who runs, but a runner who lifts weights. I am always structuring my weight lifting around my running. What season I am in, what races I am running, what kind of mileage I am hoofing through, and even what specific running workouts I am going to do on what days have a huge impact on what I try to accomplish in the weight room. I try to never lift at the expense of my running, but I still want to lift enough to get the greatest gains. Those gains are not just in regards to my running but also for my overall health and strength. My appearance in the mirror is also slightly important.

The real key is to just know what you want to accomplish and why. Once you have that figured out, you can decide on what you need to do in an individual workout and on individual exercises.

The goal of each workout is to set a record.

I do not really agree with this rule. They are not saying that you need to set a personal record every time you workout, but that you should never do the exact same workout twice in a row. You should always strive to lift heavier weights with the same number of reps, or more reps at the same weight, or the same reps at the same weight if you did something else in the workout that left you tired. The authors want you to improve in something every workout.

Most weeks, especially with my lifting, this is the case for me. But sometimes, you just need to gut out with the same as what you did the week before. When I am running, I will often go out for easy 4 or 5 miler, sometimes more than one day in a row if I am still beat. I do not feel that I should run faster every time I go out there; that would be counterproductive as it would leave me tired and other workouts or races would suffer as a result.

I also believe that every once in a while you should intentionally cut back on your workouts. My general plan is to increase my workload from week to week for 3 or 4 weeks, and then to take a week where I cut back on my mileage or on my weight before resuming an increase in the 4^th or 5^th week. This gives my muscles a little extra recovery time and can lead me to even greater gains than just trying to get better all the time.

To build size and strength, you must train hard but less frequently, with plenty of recovery time between workouts.

I agree with this to a certain extent. After a hard workout, you should definately give your body enough time to recover. However, you can work a different muscle group the next day or even the same day without ill effect, as long as you have at least one day a week where you actually rest. I have found that cross training works wonders for me. A heavy day of lifting followed by a speed workout on the track followed by a day of easy cycling can leave me ready for another day of heavy lifting while still getting good cardiovascular workouts in and allowing me to improve in my sport of choice.

To build size, you must build strength.

The authors talk about how metabolically expensive it is to have large muscles, and how your body will resist building them without a good reason. They state that muscle growth through increased strength is always a weight lifter’s goal in the gym. They also talk about the advantages of having stronger muscles such as weight control, injury prevention, and rolling back the biological clock.

I agree with the statement, but not with all of their reasoning. They deride folk who are there just to “tone” their muscles, but they don’t talk about any other reason that somebody might want to lift weights. My goals are a little bit different than average, at least for half the year. When I am getting ready for a marathon, I still want stronger muscles and do what I need to to build strength. My other goal, however, is not to increase my muscle size. Heavier muscles mean I need to work harder during my marathons. When I am recovering from a marathon, then that is when I try to increase my muscle size.

Weight control and injury prevention are good reasons to concentrate on strong muscles; by their example, however, I have no interest in having the body of somebody 20 years younger. In 20 years, I have no doubt I will say something different. In the meantime, I’d prefer to have my body than a 6 year old’s body. Ha ha.

Exercises that use lots of muscles in coordinated action are better than those that force muscles to work in isolation.

This is also good advice, and one of the things that I like most about it is that you can really streamline your workouts and finish working the same number of muscles in half the time. Depending upon what program I am currently working, and how much time I have, I will sometimes set up my workouts to isolate the muscles. However, harking back to Rule #1, your muscles are not meant to work in isolation.

After I finish running a marathon, I usually have more time to lift since I am less inclined to run for a few weeks to a few months (depending upon whether is a spring or fall marathon), and that is when I prefer to do longer gym workouts and use more exercises that isolate my muscles. When I am already outside running 40-60 miles per week, I tend to not have as much time to spend in the gym and before reading this book had already been doing workouts that used a plethora of muscles with each exercise. Now I am just more conscious of the fact.

The best muscle-building exercises are the ones that use your muscles the way they’re designed to work.

It is hard to disagree with that statement at all. Our bodies are designed to work a certain way, and in general they tend to work in that certain way very well. Exercising in such a way will make it easier to do every day tasks, which in my opinion is the whole point of weight lifting. Isolating your muscles and performing exercises that we haven’t necessarily evolved to do may get you large muscles (if done properly), but you can have big muscles and performance by using things in unison and in a natural way.

1. Use your muscles as they were designed
2. Use more than one muscle at a time
3. Strength before Size
4. Take Time to Rest
5. Set a new record
6. The weight you lift is not a goal
7. Don’t “do the machines”
8. Workouts produce adaptations
9. There is no magic system
10. Don’t judge a system by it’s promoter
11. The work is more important than the program
12. Fast Lifting is not more dangerous than slow lifting
13. A good warm-up may not make you warm
14. Stretching is not a warm-up
15. You don’t need to warm up to stretch
16. Lifting can make you flexible
17. Aerobic fitness is not a matter of life and death
18. You don’t need endurance exercise to burn fat
19. Strength + Endurance = Endurance
20. If it’s not fun, you’re doing something wrong