Men's Health: The Book of Muscle--The World's Most Authoritative Guide to Building Your Body
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Author: Lou Schuler, Ian King
- Publisher: Rodale Books
- Release Date: October 2003
- ISBN-10: 1579547699
- ISBN-13: 9781579547691
- List Price: $35.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryYou might think that the subtitle, "The World's Most Authoritative Guide to Building Your Body," is hyperbole, but The Book of Muscle from Men's Health delivers as promised. Australian strength coach and former powerlifting champion Ian King and Men's Health fitness director Lou Schuler cover everything you want to know about your muscles and what makes them grow, complete with dietary recommendations, exercises for every muscle group, and exercise routines. Each muscle group is illustrated and discussed, with 149 pages of clearly described, well-photographed exercises using a variety of equipment. A section on workout routines helps you put together your own program, from beginner to advanced.
Schuler's guy-talk style makes the book enjoyable to read, even on days when you have no intention of going to the gym. The artistic drawings of muscle groups, full-color photographs of beginning and ending positions of every exercise, and stunning close-ups of buffed body parts make The Book of Muscle is as beautiful as it is practical and motivating, an exceptional gift for the fitness guy in your life, and well worth the price. Highly recommended for men wanting to get in shape or stay there. --Joan Price |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
PERFECT
Rating:
My take on this book is that it does everything that I wanted/expected it to do. I am by no means an expert and did browse a few other titles before settling on this one. I don't see what another book with similiar content could do for you that this one cannot. It has some background information on muscles and how they work, nutritional information, and VERY detailed explanations of every single workout that are included in 3 different plans...beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each plan has information on sets, tempo, and frequency.
I read some reviews here before purchasing and some of the complaints that I stumbled upon were as follows...
-the book offers too little information on fat loss, and concentrates meerly on muscle building. First off, read the title of the book, if you want a book on fat loss programs this is not your best choice...this book will guide you to put on muscle, although it does offer some information on fat loss strategies...this is not the focus here.
-the book doesnt tell you "why" your doing what you are, and doesnt allow for deviations within the program due to injury or other reasons. First of all, if you actually READ and not just look at the workout programs you will be reassured many, many times the "why" behind their strategy. Secondly, in many of the excersise descriptions (not in the workout plan itself) you will read what specific injurys will make certain workouts more difficult, and ways to get around them.
I really don't see how anyone concerned with building muscle, from beginner to moderatley advanced does not find this book helpful. Almost every single excersise in the book is given with multiple variations, common flaws, and execution strategies. Each excersie is also shown with extremely detailed step by step photos and instructions for correct execution.
If your just getting started, or are trying to add some structure and variation to your normal routine this book is excellent. Each workout is broken down into 4 phases, usually with 4-3 week sessions in each one. Example: your first 3 weeks in the intermediate program call for 3 different routines each once a week. It is so nice to have something to follow while never becoming mundane in the gym. I look forward to working out even more with this plan, because I never become bored and know what I am doing is most beneficial to me. BUY IT!
First half good, second half wanting
Rating: 
I recently purchased this text and now am in the process of returning it. Whether or not this is an appropriate book for you will depend on how much you like dictated to you, and how much you like to understand the "why" behind what you're doing. I'll summarize my review with a few bullet items:
- It's a large, slightly heavy, hardbound book with lots of beautiful images of male fitness models and shiny pages with very large font. In a nutshell, its graphic design falls into the coffee table category. I found it a bit annoying because I'm a guy and while I think it's great to have male role-models in fitness, a few pictures here in there is sufficient. This book pummels you with random artistic images that sometimes take up an entire page (or two!). This is just filler and makes the book larger than it need be. Its overall design doesn't lend itself to the "dig in and get it dirty" sort of book that you'd feel comfortable making notes in, for instance.
- The book's first half goes into the basic physiology of muscle building and nutrition. I felt this was pretty descent.
- The next section goes into various body parts and lists, for each body part, related exercises. This is annoying because, for instance, certain exercises are not in what common knowledge would dictate as the correct section (eg. barbell press being put in with the exercises that primarily target the shoulder instead of those that target the chest).
- The last section is where the book really fell down for me, the section where they introduce the routines. There are two problems I have here:
A) The authors clearly wrote the book with the idea that the reader would be content to just blindly follow their routines without any understanding of why those routines are structured as they are. If you want to deviate from the routines at all, for medical reasons or for different training goals/background, etc. this book will give you ZERO info on how to build your own routine from the bottom up. I greatly prefer to know why I'm doing the things in a routine, rather than just blindly follow some guy's advice. There is literally ZERO explanation for how to build a routine, what considerations go into exercise selection, etc. etc. You're just expected to turn off your mind and do it. That may be fine for many, but if you like to know why you're doing things, you'll likely be very dissatisfied as I was.
B) Even if you're willing to take things without any understanding as to why you're doing them, you'll likely find the routines way too complicated. There are routines that require 16 (!!) different exercises. This is stupid.
I think this book is, in short, great looking and impressive at first sight, but when you dig deeper, only surface deep.
I'm now reading Stuart McRobert's "Build Muscle Lose Fat Look Great" in parallel with Tom Venuto's ebook "Feed the Muscle Burn the Fat" (T. Venuto recently published a similar book that's available on amazon). I haven't gotten far enough to review them yet, but already I'm much more satisfied in that each give you reasons for things....you don't have to just be a robot to be satisfied with it. To each his/her own.
UPDATE (10/4/9): Listen to the Fitcast podcast, Episode #150, at 19 minutes into the show. It's with Lou Schuler, one of this book's authors. He looks back on his earlier books, including this one (orig published in 2003), and comments that after writing this Book of Muscle he decided that "he never wanted to do another short term program. I never want to pretend to somebody that I've got some magic program that within a short period of time is going to give them everything they want and they'll never need anything else. Especially with "New Rules of Lifting", you can throw out (i.e. present) general ideas and principles that you can follow the rest of your life, as long as you're not pretending 'here's one workout you can do the rest of your life' ". Those are the author's words and while perhaps vague in some sense and admittedly open to some interpretation, they might be useful to some of you.
Terrible Kindle DX experience
Rating:
I bought this book because it was featured as being formatted for the Kindle DX. That was a terrible mistake on someone's part. The book is not really usable as a reference, which it's obviously supposed to be. Some of the issues:
1. In the print version, there are large pictures of the human body with little numbers pointing out various muscles. The text then names the muscles, with the numbers corresponding to the numbers in the picture. In the Kindle version, you can barely make out the spots on the pictures where the numbers should be, and the text does not show the numbers. So you can't learn the names of the muscles, which makes understanding the text a lot harder.
2. The table of contents is of limited use for getting around in the book. Since much of the point of this book is to learn the many exercises presented, you need to be able to get to them quickly, again and again (again, this is a reference book). The table of contents doesn't help.
3. The index also is of no help--it shows the various exercises, but the entries are not links. Instead they give pae numbers, which apply only to the print version.
4. Search is of no help to find an exercise (or most of them, anyway), since there will be many entries for, say chin ups, and the Kindle's ability to view search results and navigate among them is awkward and slow. With the print version, I imagine you can 1) look up an exercise and 2) get to the right page in under 20 seconds. It can a minute or two to find an exercise in the Kindle version.
5. Several times the text will refer to an image, but the image isn't anywhere nearby. You hit the Next button and still don't see the image. Frustrating.
6. Bookmarks are of little help. This may be a general Kindle issue, but it's still frustrating here, with this reference book. I tried creating bookmarks to help me get to specific exercises, but you can't name the bookmarks. Ridiculous. Also, you can't change the order that the bookmarks appear in the list.
I could probably go on, but I'm sure you get the idea. Amazon needs to work a lot harder to customize the layout of the Kindle versions of its books. At minimum they should provide indexes with working links and bookmarks you can name and reorder. The images should also be reworked.
I returned this book and will buy the print version.
Nice and Educational
Rating:
Book includes a lot of information about muscle, and a lot of technical language which is good because when I read it with my younger brother it pushes him to use a dictionary. Exercises are well explained and good time is made to ensuring no injuries occur.
Really a Complete book
Rating:
I like this book because it doens't only introduce the basic concept and science about muscle, it also includes 3 programs (beginner, intermediate, advanced) targetting for different stage in boby building. I actually look forward to have an iPhone app for the program so that I don't need to bring my notepad in the gym...
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