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Strong: Nine Workout Programs for Women to Burn Fat, Boost Metabolism, and Build Strength for Life Hardcover – Illustrated, November 10, 2015

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Forget the elliptical machine and the candy-colored Barbie weights. Female athletes are hungry for real fitness. They want to be Strong.
By now, it’s common knowledge that women can and should train the way men do. Today’s women want to be strong, with lean and athletic physiques. Fitness author Lou Schuler and renowned strength coach Alwyn Cosgrove present a comprehensive strength and conditioning plan to help women burn fat and build muscle by getting them off the machines and revolutionizing how they work out. Offering direct guidance and proven tools to help readers enhance their strength and get truly fit, Strong provides:
• A three-phase training program, including nine unique total-body workouts
• More than 100 exercises, with detailed instructions and step-by-step photographs
• Simple nutrition guidelines to cut through the barrage of trendy diets in magazines
• Inspiring success stories from women who have used this training program
Schuler and Cosgrove’s The New Rules of Lifting for Women has empowered tens of thousands of women inside and outside the weight room. Filled with the latest research distilled in Lou and Alwyn’s signature direct style, Strong will help women remake their physiques and reimagine their lives.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAvery
- Publication dateNovember 10, 2015
- Dimensions7.63 x 1 x 9.56 inches
- ISBN-101583335757
- ISBN-13978-1583335758
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Cosgrove and Schuler’s groundbreaking program is based on the concept that a healthy, sculpted body is the result of your muscles working the way they were intended.”
—Women's Health
“Lou Schuler has finally written a training book for me, and for all women. His expert advice, no-nonsense plans, and sense of humor are reassuring, motivating, and entertaining. I’m starting the program tomorrow!”
– Susan Kleiner, Ph.D., author of Power Eating and The Good Mood Diet
“The workouts in this book are unique, challenging, and extremely effective…be prepared to get into the best shape of your life!”
—Valerie Waters, celebrity trainer
About the Author
Alwyn Cosgrove is co-owner, with his wife, Rachel, of Results Fitness in Newhall, California. He is a professional member of the National Academy of Sports Medicine and the American College of Sports Medicine, among other organizations, and is a frequent contributor to a variety of magazines, including Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dana Smith remembers the first time. It was late summer 2009. “The arthritis in my knees was getting so bad my doctor was ready to put me on constant pain meds,” she told me recently. “I told him I’d think about it and get back to him.” Thinking about it meant research. Research convinced her that it was time to take action. Specifically, to strengthen her muscles with a serious training program. That led her to The New Rules of Lifting for Women, a book my coauthors and I had published the year before. We wrote it for a simple reason: Readers asked us for it. They asked because the guidance women received from the media, from their peers, and even from fitness professionals in health clubs was the opposite of what we provided for men.
This was despite the fact there was no reason to give different advice to men and women. Exercise science had concluded long before that the muscles of men and women are exactly the same. Your muscles and my muscles perform the same actions and produce the same movements. Pound for pound, they generate the same amount of force. When trained, they respond equally well. But here’s the worst part: This wasn’t secret information. Everyone who wrote about strength training or trained female athletes or worked with female clients either knew or should have known.
The exercises in NROL for Women weren’t the ones readers like Dana were used to seeing in books and magazines. She’d never done a push-up before, or a deadlift, or a squat with a barbell on her back. And the advice to focus on strength and muscle development, rather than “toning” and “shaping,” was a paradigm shift for women who’d developed an irrational fear of “bulking up” if they lifted anything bigger than their forearms or heavier than a purse.
So on September 9, 2009, Dana tried it. Arthritic joints and all. She could barely bend her knees on the squat and had to do her push-ups against a kitchen counter. But by the end of the program, she could do eight push-ups. Traditional push-ups, with her hands and toes on the floor. She could lift a 135-pound barbell off the ground and squat with 100 pounds on her back. And those pain meds her doctor was about to prescribe? Turns out, she didn’t need them. She just needed to get strong.
“Anyone who actually finishes the program comes out a changed person,” she told me. “Most of us never knew how strong we could be. It opened doors we didn’t even know were there.”
OUR GREATEST MISTAKE
Here’s the irony of Dana’s transformation: We never thought readers like her would pick up the book. The original title, Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess, signaled our goal of reaching women who were already working out but not getting the results they wanted. I saw countless women like that in the gym. They were healthy and appeared able and willing to work hard toward their goals, but did so with workouts that were unlikely to help them accomplish anything useful. Those are the readers who contacted Alwyn and me when we published The New Rules of Lifting, our first book together, in 2006.
To our delight, NROL for Women (the title we very wisely switched to after the book was already written and photographed) reached that target audience. We heard from readers who’d lost fat, improved their physiques in noticeable ways, and found they enjoyed doing the type of workouts we provided for guys in the original NROL.
But we also heard from readers like Dana, who was so excited by her progress that she started a Facebook group for her fellow lifters. Beyond their gender and the fact that they love lifting heavy things, they have little in common. In fact, these days I rarely hear from anyone who fits my original concept. Our universe of lifters includes women from their twenties to their seventies. From competitive athletes to complete beginners. From underweight to severely obese. From healthy to anything but.
Product details
- Publisher : Avery; Illustrated edition (November 10, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1583335757
- ISBN-13 : 978-1583335758
- Item Weight : 0.035 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.63 x 1 x 9.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #922,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #569 in Stretching Exercise & Fitness
- #1,100 in Weight Training (Books)
- #2,889 in General Women's Health
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Co-owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California—twice named one of the top ten gyms in America by Men’s Health and Women’s Health magazines. In addition to their gym, he and his wife, Rachel, are also owners of a fitness professional consulting company, Results Fitness University.
Lou Schuler is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, a contributing editor to Men's Health magazine, and the author of many popular books about fitness and nutrition, including five in the New Rules of Lifting series with coauthor Alwyn Cosgrove. He recently published his first novel, Saints Alive.
He lives in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley with his wife and three children.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2017
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The good news is that the contents of Strong are every bit as good as the cover.
The idea of a badass woman is commonplace to my kids. Girls are top athletes and they are more than capable of looking feminine and still be super strong and fast and mobile. Title IX along with books like the authors' original "New Rules of Lifting for Women" and the rise of mud runs, obstacle course racing, and Crossfit are a big reason for this.
Strong is the (new) template for how to get there.
With three phases and 9 full body workout programs there is enough here to keep the newbie and advanced person busy. The workouts will make you stronger and more "fit" -- more able to do things in life and in play like run faster, jump higher, pick and carry things, and bend and move without hearing the hinges creak. If you find an exercise you can't do that's fine -- the book covers progressions and substitutions. All the workouts are based on fundamental human movements (to coin a Dan John phrase) -- pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging at the hips, carrying things, etc. -- and can be scaled.
And if you're like me and like to read fitness books for the text as well as the workouts you'll get even more out of the book. Like the author's New Rules of Lifting books, the text is well researched and cited in a dedicated Notes chapter. Opinions are based on real world experience at one of the premier gyms in the US and on the latest exercise science research. There's a dedicated section on lifting weights for beginners, on the importance of protein in the diet, why weight control tops weight loss most any day of the week, and a host of other topics. The writing style is light but authoritative. It's really a good "read" especially compared to the usual fad diet and workout books that top the best seller lists.
p.s. Truth be told you don't have to be a woman to get a lot out of the workouts and programs here. They are just as applicable for a youth baseball player or a guy playing in the local pickup basketball league.
My other big problem with the book is that the workout charts are not very well formatted. I would think the editor would be able to come up with something more creative that would take up fewer pages. The month-long section I am in requires 6 pages of workout charts to complete. Basically you alternate between two workouts and the only thing that changes is the number of reps and sets. The workout charts also don't have any page numbers to indicate where you can find directions for the exercise they are referring to. I have taken to locating the exercise and writing it directly on the chart myself to save myself time. Sometimes I want to refer to the directions again to ensure I am doing the lift correctly. It seems like another little editorial detail that would have been helpful.
Overall, I enjoy the book and I'm glad I bought it. I'm not sure it will be a long-term lifting companion, though.
This program is about the same length as NROLFW's (the better part of a year) but the first stages are far less confusing and more of an on-ramp; no barbell back squats or deadlifts right off the bat. Yet, the early stages are still challenging for seasoned lifters. I've been lifting for over 20 years, and after completing Stage 1, my core is stronger and I lost an inch around my waist. The workouts are designed to be around an hour long and include finisher intervals. You do need gym equipment such as a heavy barbell, rack, cable machine (bands can be subbed) and something for pull-ups.
Don't skip straight to the workouts, because the "reading" part of the book is gold, especially the weight-loss chapter. The authors bust numerous myths including some ones that were in NROLFW. You don't have to eat a bunch of small meals, or chug shakes that taste like butt, if it's not working for you! The appendixes include a beginner's guide to lifting and all the jargon. Even if you don't do the workouts, Strong is like the "missing manual" to the gym, and hopefully will convince female readers how strong isn't "the new" anything, it's the old, new and forever awesome.
Top reviews from other countries





Great programs
Easy to follow and good advice