The exercises that didn't make it and other minutia.
Lou, Alwyn, I have some questions about the design of the workouts. Nothing critical, just picking your brain, especially yours Alwyn since you designed the workouts and are fond of the motto "Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless."
1. You have strength days for the bench press, squat, deadlift, shoulder press and row. How come you didn't make one for lunges?
2. There are some exercise you didn't use: sumo squat, sumo deadlift, elevated lunges, etc, etc, etc...It seems to me these have some value, but you left them out for reasons I'd like to know. So...why?
Cynic, we also didn't have a day dedicated to max-resistance twists. The reasons seem pretty straightforward to me:
1. It's not important to develop maximum strength in those movements.
2. Your body isn't really designed to perform those movements against heavy resistance.
I can think of exceptions to #2 -- Oly lifters stagger their legs on the clean and jerk, and a tug of war might be considered a twisting movement against max resistance, although it's still more of a pull than a twist -- but I can't think of any advantage to training lunges and twists with the type of loads that would be equivalent in intensity to the ones you'd use for squats, deadlifts, pushes and pulls.
I don't mean to dismiss your question. I just can't think of any context in which we'd include what you're suggesting. (A program for a discus thrower would include heavy twists, I guess ...)
As for all the exercise variations we didn't include, I can't really think of any answer beyond "there's only so much you can include in a single book."
Looking specifically at sumo deads and squats, one of our goals was for readers to become really good at deadlifts and squats. Sure, we could've made sumo variations part of the mix, but in doing so we might've slowed down the readers' progress on the classic lifts.
As for the decline bench press, I don't know why we would have considered that one. There isn't any real-life application for that movement at that angle, and we know from EMG studies that the lower pectorals are activated just fine by the flat bench press. We also have dips in the program, and I honestly can't think of any reason to add decline bench presses to a program that already includes flat BPs and dips.
I hope that's a helpful answer and doesn't sound defensive. We never set out to create a catalogue of all possible exercise variations. I know Alwyn would've liked to include more variations than we used, but that's where the practical considerations of mainstream book publishing come into play -- each photo you use comes with a cost, as does the amount of paper.
Every book I've written had ended up with more pages than we originally budgeted, which I consider a triumph of sorts. But I've never written a book that included all the information that I wanted to put in. You have to draw the line somewhere.
There were some things I wasn't really in control of, like the photos. The book was originally going to be published by Rodale, whose photographer took the pictures, and who owned them. I could've re-shot them, at my own expense, but it seemed simpler and more economical to license the existing photos from Rodale.
I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now, I absolutely would've re-shot the photos and had a female model doing half of them, and then edited the book a bit to make it clear it was for both genders.
But at the time, two years ago, nobody suggested it. It never occurred to any of us -- the authors, our agent, our editor -- that we should market this as a book for women as well as men. It was only after it came out that I realized what a mistake it was to do this as a book for men.
The only chapter we cut for space was one on alternative strength-training systems, like Super Slow, HIT, and some interpretations of "functional" training. But my editor argued -- and I agreed -- that it didn't make much sense to go after things that our readers probably weren't considering in the first place.
That's about it. I got to say everything I wanted to say about strength training, aerobics, energy flux, clean eating, etc.
You guys know I try pretty damned hard to make each of my books different from the others, and those were my goals in this one -- to talk about the things that weren't being talked about (especially the importance of energy flux, and the non-importance of steady-state endurance exercise), but not to repeat what I'd already said.
So I didn't spend much time talking about hormones (as my coauthors and I did in TAP), or how to do the workouts with limited equipment (Home Workout Bible), or how specific exercises affect specific muscles and parts of muscles (BOM).
And the next book, the one for women, likewise won't have chapters explaining the basic human movements (Alwyn's workouts will be built around the same principles, but we won't get into those nuances in the text), or talking about energy flux (all the research I've seen has been done on men anyway).
One important focus will be on getting enough calories, and the consequences of not eating enough -- with women, it's scary how many things start going wrong when they're exercising seriously while in negative energy balance.
But speaking of that book, I'd better get back to writing it ...
Lou, I'm seriously psyched for the new book ... I do love NROL but was bothered by how much the language in it "speaks" to men ... and there are differences in women's metabolism and such that will be interesting to see addressed. Plus I think women tend to have such a different relationship with food than men do ... anyways I ramble :p When is the book expected to be out for sale?
As for all the exercise variations we didn't include, I can't really think of any answer beyond "there's only so much you can include in a single book."
Looking specifically at sumo deads and squats, one of our goals was for readers to become really good at deadlifts and squats. Sure, we could've made sumo variations part of the mix, but in doing so we might've slowed down the readers' progress on the classic lifts.
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No, it's all fine. I figure, even though you two didn't include it, there's nothing against anyone from using Schmidt's basic six, Alwyn's periodization design as a template and making a program that incorporates these moves, if for nothing else than just for a change.
The exercises that didn't make it and other minutia.
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