Customer Reviews

Supertraining

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

THis is a great scientific book if you are doing a paper for your masters/doctorate degree or need some type of literature to quote. This book is a TEXT Book so if you are a coaching looking for something plain English that says do this to improve vertical jump or your squat then look somewhere else. This is the best of the best books when it comes to researching strength training.

This book is absolutely huge and I know Siff takes some criticism for not being able to give coaching info but he was not a coach. People need to understand there is a different between a PhD and a coach. PhD study how things work and coaches will actually take info and apply it to training. I had professors in college that could tell me how plyometrics work and how creatine phosphate system works step by step but couldn't write a strength training program or sprint program. I ready many other strength books and articles before I picked this on up because I was told it was basically a text book.

The best books that I have read that tell you how to actually use some of the info were written by Christian Thibaudea or Louie Simmons. Christians books are great and I'm really surprised more people have not read his books. The Black Book of Training Secrets and Theory and Application of Modern Strength Methods are two I'd pick up if you bought Super Training and are not sure how to use the info. Louie SImmons articles can be found at WestSide Barbell.


If you are looking for great DVD's check out Parisi Speed Videos or Defrancos SuperTraining video. They are the top of the line.

I have seen this book available online elsewhere, in a 2004 edition (!), so really, there is no excuse for you not having this.

Honestly, by the time I got to page 10, I'd already had many of my assumptions about health and strength challenged.
Dr. Siff seems to have a much greater appreciation for the contributions to health made by real strength training as opposed to cardiovascular fitness, which is basically heresay here in the USA. The man says:

"...the proliferation of weight training facilities and personal trainers still has much more to do with commercialsim than the impact of strength science, as is emphasized by the fact that the CARDIOVASCULAR DOCTRINE [emphasis added] still dominates the fitness conscious psyche..."

This book is a goldmine, loaded with a constant stream of science-based information that is essential.

Before you read this, make sure you are ready to expand your knowledge base and dive in-depth into specifics as opposed to generalizations.

This book is not 180$. You can find it on amazon or other sites for around $25.00.

Don't pay $180 for the best theory book on strength, conditioning and exercise science ever written. While it is worth several hundred dollars google will show you how to get it for the price the original author was selling it about $60 as well as his other landmark book - Facts and Fallacies of Fitness!

This book is excellent, it has it all in here I am not suprised that Louie Simmons talks about this book and recommends reading it. The only suggestion I have is to order it from elitefts because they sell brand new copies for $50 bucks or less I got mine on sale from them for $35.

Siff's Supertraining is an uncritical compendium of everything under the sun regarding strength training. In the section on Electrical Muscular Stimulation he cites nearly all of the literature that was available when he wrote the book but failed to reconcile the contradictory findings regarding the value of EMS for strength training. So the book is scholastic in surveying every possible finding but atheoretical in not providing an overall framework either for analysis of conflicting findings or for providing practical applications for strength athletes. By contrast Vladimir Zatsiorsky's "Science and Practice of Strength Training" is relatively succinct, but meaty, and oriented ultimately to providing coach and athlete with practical advice for training and competition.

I found that if you took any of his seminars (I attended two of them) and asked him up front for straight-forward practical advice on strength training he would stonewall me and go off on some tangent and never give me a straight answer - and "Supertraining" is more of the same and terribly overpriced to boot.

Anyone serious about strength training...this along with Dr. Vladimir Zatsiorsky's book "The Science and Practice of Strength Training" are two must-haves.

In my review of Zatsiorsky's book, I mentioned that it's very technical. Supertraining is much the same way. It's more of a piece of reference literature than something you'll sit on the toilet and read through...although I do that also.

This is again one of the books that has really revolutionized the way that we strength train these days.