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The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises: Four Weeks to a Leaner, Stronger, More Muscular YOU! [Paperback]

Adam Campbell
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (225 customer reviews)

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Book Description

December 22, 2009
The Men’s Health Big Book of Exercises is the essential workout guide for anyone who wants a better body. As the most comprehensive collection of exercises ever created, this book is a body-shaping power tool for both beginners and longtime lifters alike. From start to finish, this 480-page muscle manual bulges with hundreds of useful tips, the latest findings in exercise science, and cutting-edge workouts from the world's top trainers.
 
Inside The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises you'll find 619 exercises expertly demonstrated with color photographs, with dozens of movements for every muscle in your body, including:

* More than 100 core exercises! You'll never run out of ways to sculpt your six-pack.
* 74 biceps, triceps, and forearm exercises: Build your arms faster than ever before.
* 64 chest exercises, and featuring dozens of variations of the pushup and bench press.
* 103 back exercises, so you can carve a v-shaped torso.
* 40 shoulder exercises, for a tank-top worthy torso.
* 99 quadriceps and calves exercises, to help you jump higher and run faster.
* 62 glutes and hamstrings exercises, for a more powerful, athletic body.

From cover to cover, you'll quickly see that there's a training plan for every fitness goal—whether you want to shrink your hip, find your abs, or shape your arms. Highlights include:

* The World's Greatest 4-Week Diet and Exercise Plan
Lose 10 pounds of pure fat in 30 days! This scientifically proven plan, based on research from the University of Connecticut, shows what's truly possible when you combine the right kind of diet with the right kind of exercise. You'll build muscle and lose fat faster than ever.
* 64 Ways to Add Inches to Your Arms
You'll learn how to mix-and-match the 12 best biceps exercises to create scores of sleeve-busting routines. The upshot: You'll never get stuck in a muscle-building rut again!
* The Get Back In Shape (Fast!) Guide
If you've never even picked up a weight, you'll want to try this plan from Joe Dowdell, C.S.C.S. Joe makes his living training celebrities, cover models, and professional athletes, such as NBA stars Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy. And the strategies he uses when designing workouts for his high-profile clientele are the same ones he employs to help you burn fat, build muscle, and get back in shape.
* The Ultimate Fat Loss Plan

You might call this the six-pack workout. That's because it's designed to help you finally finish off the flab that's hiding your abs. Created by Bill Hartman, P.T., C.S.C.S., a top fitness advisor to Men's Health, it's based entirely on the new science of fat loss. From the sets to the reps to the rest, every part of this workout is designed to optimize your body's ability to burn away belly-fat.

And:
* Boost Your Bench Press by 50 Pounds in 8 Weeks
World-class powerlifter Dave Tate shares the strategies that helped him lift a personal best of 610 pounds
* Triple Your Chinups in 6 Weeks
Use this simple routine that to master one of the world's greatest muscle-building exercises
* Add 4 to 10 inches to Your Vertical Leap
This high-flying plan from strength coach Kelly Baggett will have you jumping out of the gym in no time
* The Beach Ready Body Workout
Get-strong to get-big—this 8-week plan shows you how
* The Wedding Workout
Look great—just in time for the big day (and your honeymoon!)
* The Best Sports Workout
Train like an athlete, look like an athlete
* The Scrawny to Brawny Workout
Pack on muscle fast: your 4-week plan
* The Best Workouts for a Crowded Gym
Sculpt a lean, fit body—no waiting!
* The Best Bodyweight Workouts
Take your workout anywhere with these no-weight routines
* The 10 Best 15-Minute Workouts
Bust stress, blast fat, and build muscle in almost no time
* The 7-Minute Back-Saving Workout
End low-back pain for good!
 
Plus:
Every page of The Men’s Health Big Book of Exercises is filled with the fitness and nutrition tips and tricks you need to sculpt the body you want.
Throughout the book, you'll discover:
* The secret to burning 40 percent more fat.
* The 18 muscle mistakes you should never make
* The best stretch for every muscle
* The fastest cardio workout of all-time (just 4 minutes!)
* The best exercises you've never done
* The 8 healthiest foods you aren't eating
* The 4 surprising foods that build muscle
* The 25 super snacks that keep you lean
* The 5 biggest nutrition myths, busted
* The truth about saturated fat
* The perfect foods to fuel your workouts
* The complete guide to protein powders
* The 20 ways lifting weights helps you look great, stay healthy, and live longer

Frequently Bought Together

The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises: Four Weeks to a Leaner, Stronger, More Muscular YOU! + The Men's Health Big Book of Food & Nutrition: Your completely delicious guide to eating well, looking great, and staying lean for life!
Price for both: $27.78

Buy the selected items together


Editorial Reviews

About the Author

ADAM CAMPBELL, is the fitness director for Men's Health and a National Magazine Award-winning writer. He holds a master's degree in exercise physiology and is a NSCA-certified strength and conditioning coach. Campbell has appeared on Good Morning America, The Early Show, and VH-1.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 480 pages
  • Publisher: Rodale Books; 1 edition (December 22, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1605295507
  • ISBN-13: 978-1605295503
  • Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 8 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (225 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,611 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ADAM CAMPBELL, is the fitness director for Men's Health and a National Magazine Award-winning writer. He holds a master's degree in exercise physiology and is a NSCA-certified strength and conditioning coach. Campbell has appeared on Good Morning America, The Early Show, and VH-1.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
134 of 156 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Big Book is Big Disappointment February 26, 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The concept of Men's Health Big Book of Exercises is great: collect hundreds of exercises, group them by muscle group and add some background information and nutritional advice. There you go: the workout manual to make all others obsolete. But despite the lyrical reviews posted here, I found this book disappointing. In short: the collection of exercises is great, but the way they are presented is not optimal. A serious framework to construct your own training plan is absent and the nutritional information is downright silly.

EXERCISES

What I liked about this book is the sheer number of exercises; they are the reason I continue to use this book every now and then. Each exercise comes with at least one clear picture and has some handy little performance tips scattered around. However, this being the main event of the book, there are a number of omissions that I would consider flaws.

First, there is no connection between the discussion of the anatomy in the beginning of each section and the exercises. It's great that you are shown the different muscles that make up the back, but in the 60 or so exercises that follow, there is no way of finding out which muscle or part thereof is targeted by which exercise. Also, if you give 15 variations of one particular exercise, it would have been logical to mark the variations in terms of level of difficulty. No such luck.

Basically, the book first gives some fairly detailed information on an entire muscle group (albeit with some less than great illustrations), but then simply dumps a long list of exercises on you. Though the number of exercises provided is much smaller, the book com/Strength-Training-Anatomy-3rd-Frederic-Delavier/dp/0736092269">Strength Training Anatomy by Frederic Delavier is infinitely better. It tells you not just how to perform an exercise but also how an individual exercise targets each specific muscle. I sincerely hope Men's Health takes some cues from Delavier for their next edition of the Big Book.

TRAINING PLANS

The 'exercise plans' in the Big Book are alright, but if you are looking for a good, consistent framework to get maximal results (as opposed to just "doing something in the gym"), I feel the The Body Sculpting Bible for Men is way better. It may not have the same number of exercises, nor nice color photos like the Big Book, but I feel the overall framework of training is much more solid and consistent than the somewhat hap hazardous and confusing approach in Men's Healh Big Book.

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION

Now, if it were for the exercises and plans alone, I would still have given the book three stars, maybe even four; the sheer number of exercises makes it quite unique. Five stars would be out of the question, because the difference in content quality is too far off from some of the other books available. Still, I decided to lower the rating by one more star, because of the nutritional sections which are silly at best.

First let me say that from a magazine (such as Men's Health) I fully accept a somewhat eclectic approach. A new study comes out one month that says coffee is bad for you and the next month another says it's good - all fine. A book, however, I expect to be a bit more authoritative. This book is not.

The Big Book opts for the "high protein, medium fat, low carbs" approach. I think Susan Kleiner in her book Power Eating clearly demonstrated why a high carb, medium protein approach is far superior for building muscle and losing fat. Other than the Big Book, Kleiner backs up her story with sound scientific references. Where the Big Book settles for "A study in Denmark found...", Kleiner takes a truly scientific approach. Her conclusions are very different but much more logical and actionable for anyone who can think beyond the simplistic adage "muscle is built by protein, so the more protein I eat the more muscle I get".

Perhaps for people living in the US the nutritional advice in Men's Health Big Book makes some sense. Unspoken assumptions in the book seem to be a consequence of its orientation on the mainstream US audience. First and foremost, you are assumed to be too fat, or at least struggling with overweight. You also really like to eat a lot of fat and most certainly eat lots of animals. Also, you are not willing or able to change any of these habits.

Even within that context, the advice that comes out is sometimes downright puzzling:

- Beans, peas and corn should be avoided as they contain a lot of starch (p. 442)
- However, whole milk is fine (it's not all that much extra fat anyway), source cream is almost pure fat but hey, serving size is generally small, so go ahead! Other "healthiest" or at least "guilt free" foods: butter, pork chops, full-fat cheese, chicken thighs, coconut (p. 444 - 447). This one I found a particularly funny health advice: vinegar is good for you, so sprinkle some on your caramelized onions (!) or in your mayonnaise (!) before you spread it on your sandwich. Now, maybe I have been gone from the US for too long, but I don't think that I ever saw anyone health conscious eat mayonnaise sandwiches. But according to the Big Book, it's apparently great for your workout diet as long as you add some vinegar to it and stay clear of beans and potatoes. Yeah, right!

If you insist of eating a lot of fat, I can imagine the advice in this book to then at least cut back on carbs makes some sense. But it's obvious that this is no optimal diet advice for anyone serious about exercising. Again, Susan's Kleiner approach (high carb, medium protein and low fat) is far more sensible and much better researched. Sure, if you live in an area where KFC is considered lunch and a white sub sandwich is considered your healthy option, any truly sensible exercise diet may be out of reach. But of course, your results will never be the same as when you opt for a truly effective exercise diet.

In summary:
- Great book if you are a strength trainer and are simply looking to find some more exercise variations. The selection of exercises is unparalleled. Major flaw: the book doesn't tell you why and when you should choose one exercise over another, or which muscles each exercise targets specifically. For more detailed information on anatomy, how to exactly perform exercises and how these exercises relate to your muscles and objectives, a much better option is the classic but recently updated Strength Training Anatomy-3rd Edition (Sports Anatomy)
- If you need some guidance in setting up an exercise plan, opt for The Body Sculpting Bible for Men, Revised Edition: The Way to Physical Perfection instead. While Men's Health Big Book contains lot and lots of information, it gives you little guidance to make sense of it all. The little snippets of information basically have the same value as reading a couple of magazines. If you thought this book tied all the somewhat useful snippets of information from Men's Health archives together in a more consistent framework, you're out of luck.
- If you struggle with overweight and you are absolutely sure you cannot stray too far from the mainstream American diet or let go of eating lots of animals and fatty foods daily, then the nutritional advice in this book may be the best you can achieve. But if you are serious about your body and health and are willing to change to an optimal, goal-oriented diet (i.e. eat like an athlete), make sure to ignore all nutritional sections in this book completely. They are confusing at best, and if you follow a mainstream European or Asian diet, they will actually lead you in the WRONG direction. Instead, order a copy of the very dry, scarcely illustrated but content wise very solid Power Eating, Third Edition by Susan Kleiner.
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73 of 84 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A decent book with misleading marketing March 29, 2012
Format:Kindle Edition
While this book is marketed as the end-all of training books that gives every exercise you need along with sensible workout and nutrition plans, it falls a bit short of that promise.

It does have a TON of exercises with pictures and tips on how to do them correctly, and thus, it's a good reference book. The organization of the exercises, however, is poorly executed. While they appear in their proper categories, such as "back," there are no further details about the many exercises that follow as to which particular parts of the back that the exercises target.

It also doesn't indicate which exercises are compound, mass-builders, which are isolation exercises, and which are in the middle. Unless you really know what you're doing, you won't know what exercises to do and why.

The workout programs given in the book seem to be thrown together kind of haphazardly, and while they'll keep you "busy" in the gym and are better than being completely random, they're not the most effective in terms of building muscle and getting stronger. If you get bored of routines easily, you might like the fact that there are many variations that you can do for each muscle group.

The nutritional section calls for a diet high in protein, moderate in fats, and low in carbs. This is fine for losing weight if done correctly, but definitely is not optimal for building muscle. Scientific studies have clearly shown the connection between high carb intake and building muscle. In fact, if you don't eat enough carbs, you'll not only be short on the glycogen necessary for muscle synthesis, you'll have a VERY hard time eating enough overall calories to build any appreciable amount of muscle.
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26 of 34 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Effective Guide for the Self-Guided Weight Lifter January 30, 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have bought a lot of exercise books over the years. The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises is one of the best. This useful book has a fair amount of general information on diet, fitness, and training for specific sports, but what makes it stand out are its descriptions of individual exercises, photos, and versatility. The main part of the book is broken down by muscle group (chest, quads, hamstrings and glutes, upper and lower back, biceps and triceps, core). Each section has several exercises that use barbells, dumbbells, cables, or body weight, with good descriptions of how to do the exercise and good color photos. I don't always trust myself to do a lift without instruction from an expert, but every new exercise I have picked up from this book has felt right and targeted the right muscles. I have used the book to fine-tune an existing workout, adding or swapping out individual exercise, but the Big Book is also packed with suggested workouts, including a series of 15-minute workouts for people who are new to lifting or have no time for elaborate workouts. There is also a section devoted to exercises that work several muscle groups at once. I have liked every workout I have tried, and am impressed that the book targets both the gym (with a section on the best way to get a good workout in when the gym is crowded) and the home. I have a bunch of dumbbells, and have focused on the dumbbell and body-weight exercises, but if you have a barbell set or cable machine at home you should find the book helpful, too. I am a runner and cyclist and drift toward the low-weight, quicker workouts, but there seems to be plenty here for the more serious lifter too.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars good book for men in house
I have two sons and both of them likes and uses book as I bought it for them to use. Good pictures for exerxises routines.
Published 3 days ago by Hemant Bhatt
5.0 out of 5 stars Great reference for making your own workout plan
I was very pleased with this. I have a gym at work and I can use my lunch hour to exercise. The gym has most of the equipment mentioned in this book, so it was very useful to... Read more
Published 12 days ago by SGHunter
4.0 out of 5 stars An Essential
This book has everything I need to put together a workout plan. I can't remember a time I didn't use this book to create a fitness routine. Read more
Published 13 days ago by Emilio Giron
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome 1 stop guide to exercises.
This book is written very well. The introduction and first three chapters help you determine what you want to accomplish, and allow you to attain the desired results..... Read more
Published 16 days ago by J.T.
3.0 out of 5 stars SHORT ON EXPECTATIONS, WITH LACK OF UP TO DATE INRORMATION.
It's as if they forgot half the book because it had all the obvious exercises which is part of what I was looking for, but what about the exercises you don't see every day that are... Read more
Published 19 days ago by artodyg
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
It has a large number of exercises for every muscle group. Color pictures featuring subtext with small tips to perfect each set. Read more
Published 28 days ago by Jared Ecker
5.0 out of 5 stars The best strength training reference for any level of skill &...
Brilliantly written & photographed by respected industry professionals, “The Big Book“ is a font of concise & accurate information presented in an easy to understand format. Read more
Published 1 month ago by 9082us
4.0 out of 5 stars Great workout book
Great workout book. Gave me ideas on how to get things done quickly. Has caused some significant changes in the way I think.

I got the Kindle edition.
Published 1 month ago by John S. Kret
5.0 out of 5 stars complete
There are very much exercise, you can choose for any part of the body. I suggest this book to people that like fitness.
Published 1 month ago by Mauro Tacchella
5.0 out of 5 stars The best Workout Book
I have never read a more complete and informative book on this topic. The pictures and descriptions are explained thoroughly and clearly. Read more
Published 1 month ago by David Saldivar
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