Book Review: The New Rules of Conditioning for Abs

The New Rules of Lifting For Abs is the latest in the New Rules of Lifting series of books by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove.

Let's get the title out of the way - yeah, it's about the abs. For serious lifters, this makes the book sound very trendy and fluffy. Deadlifts? Getting strong in pullups? Overall health and fitness? Nah, screw that, I just want teh abz for my internet self-shot for my social media profile. But this is not true. It's more like training from the core out, with "core" being broadly defined as everything that contributes to stabilizing the torso. New Rule #5 is "The core includes all the muscles that attach to your hips, pelvis, and lower back." Now we are talking! Spinal muscles, abs, the lats - it's a very broad but useful definition of core. No fluff for appearance here. The goal is to get your stronger in the core and then, yeah, see the abs at the end, not see the abs at all costs. So don't let that line turn you off. If you wants teh abz, this will help you get there. If you couldn't care less about your abs, you'll still benefit from the core strength and stability built into every training session.

The book draws heavily on Dr. McGill's work, so you know it's fact-based and tested. Not surprisingly if you know Dr. McGill's work is that the book shies away from loaded spinal flexion, or high-rep spinal flexion. AKA weighted situps, crunches, and twists. But it does make a very important exception that is dear to my heart - MMA fighters. MMA fighters specifically need to train spinal flexion against a load. The book mentions clinching and takedowns from the clinch, but I'd also mention that many BJJ, catch wrestling, and general grappling movements require you to be able to flex very strongly against an opponent's resistance. The general population doesn't need this, and there is evidence MMA fighters are trading long-term risks against sports-specific needs. But it is very nice to see that caveat instead of the usual "everyone must do this" vs. "everyone, don't do this" approach of most books.

So it's just crunches. But what does the book include?

First, it includes a lot of core exercises. They are progressive, meaning you go from static stability (holding a good core position) to dynamic stability (holding a good core position while moving parts of the body) to integrated stability (holding a good core position while moving the whole body). In specific terms, think "plank," then "Pallof press," then "Turkish get-up."

The workouts are great. They are focused primarily on core strength and building strength, unlike the varied workouts of the earlier NROL books. Each individual workout has:

- a dynamic warmup element
- core exercises
- full-body exercises
- metabolic exercises (aka cardio, energy systems work, finishers, etc.)

The sets and reps undulate, meaning you don't just do 5 sets of 5 or 3 sets of 10 or something of that sort, but switch around between high, medium, and lower rep days to build strength in a variety of ways.
There is also a strength-focused option, for people who want to add even more heavy lifting to focus on getting stronger in the big lifts. The extra volume isn't excessive, and because they are centered on lifts like front squats, it's certain not fluff or a throw-away gift to folks who need more raw strength.

The diet section is also excellent. It focuses on whole foods, good eating habits, and minimizing the damage from convenience foods. Since seeing your abs is more the result of diet than of exercise, this section is pretty much required for a book on abs. The diet advice is broken up into four levels. Each level gets more and more exacting, from "get some basic stuff right" all the way to precise nutrition approaches. It's a nice progression, and it makes for diet advice that isn't either too much too soon for folks with a terrible diet nor too little for folks already weighing and measuring their food and cycling their calories and carbohydrates around their workout schedule.

The writing style of the book echoes the one you'll see in the other NROL books and books like the All-Pro Diet. Lou Schuler is the everyman, and Alwyn is the off-camera expert telling him what will work and what won't. It works pretty well, although after reading so many books written or co-written by him it's hard to picture Lou Schuler as the "everyman" - he obviously knows his stuff. But the approach is popular and probably is for a reason. It makes it easy to address common sense and urban legends and FAQs in-line with the explanation, without undermining the main message.

The organization of the book makes following the workouts tough. I tried to do one, and I find I was flipping back and forth, back and forth, over and over. This makes a joke of the prescribed rest periods - 60 seconds quickly stretches into 5 minutes as you try to see what's the next exercise and double-check how to do it.

One nice bonus? The book has a list of all of the "New Rules" from the whole series. Great!

Rating:
Content: 5 out of 5. Excellent information overall, especially with regards to exercise progressions.
Presenation: 4 out of 5. Very attractive, easy to read, excellent workout writeups and easy-to-understand pictures. Marred only by requiring a lot of flipping to actual try the workouts.

Overall: Apart from the need for flipping pages a lot to get going, and the need to show a lot of judgment selecting exercise variations, it's great. The emphasis on quality of movement and abdominal strength in all areas (not just ab appearance) also makes it a great way to start or re-start your workout. Even if you just want more ab exercises in the no-crunches vein, it's a great resource. Don't let the buzzword "abs" scare you off from this one. Highly recommended.

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Book Review: The New Rules of Lifting

The New Rules of Lifting: Six Basic Moves for Maximum Muscle
by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove
320 pages. Published 2006.

I read a lot of bad workout books, so you don't have to. But I try to read good ones...and this is one of those good ones. The New Rules of Lifting or NROL as it's commonly known on the web, is a very good workout book. I first heard of this book from a friend in Japan who'd been training with it...he'd seen my MMA club's gym and said "straight bar, cage, bench...yeah, all you really need for a workout. You can squat, deadlift, bench, chin..." I immediately asked him what he did, and he mentioned NROL. I didn't get to read it until months later, but I've read it twice since. There is a variation of this book aimed at women lifters, NROL4W, which I reviewed earlier.

Unlike the earlier book, this book doesn't try to sell you on getting stronger and lifting weights...it seems to take it as read that a male audience is buying this book to do that. It focuses mostly on What, When, and How rather than Why. Still, it sticks with the central conceit of there being a set of rules for training - about 20 of them, all together, ranging from "Do something" (Rule #1) to "The weight you lift is a tool to reach your goals, it is not a goal by itself" (Rule #6) to "If it's not fun, you're doing something wrong" (Rule #20).

The tone of the book is conversational, but it doesn't stint on technical information. It will simplify to make a point clear, but also goes back and gives you the proper details. Muscular hypertrophy, for example, is defined as increased muscle size - but then the difference between myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is explained, and why it matters to you.

The book spends a good 50 pages on the first section, explaining the Six Movements and the facts behind muscular development. The six movements are the central under pining of the workouts, and are as follows:

Squat
Deadlift
Lunge
Push
Pull
Twist

They credit this six-move framework to Richard A. Schmidt, but then they take it and run with it.

The exercises are all solid - almost all of them are multi-joint compound exercises, not single-joint isolation exercises. You won't find any machine exercises except for cable work, which as I've posted before aren't machines in the sense I mean. Because of the six movements, every workout will feature squatting, deadlifting, lunges or single-leg squatting, pushing, pulling, and twisting/ab exercises. The exercises range from fairly standard (full squats) to fairly unique (one-arm rows without a bench), but all of them are good. There isn't a "maybe not..." exercise in the bunch. Not a leg press, leg extension, or bosu ball squat in the bunch. No dangerous form in the pictures, either, and they're all good pictures. They make the proper form clear, and act as a clear aid to the exercise descriptions. Each exercise is also labeled with the workout it is used in, so it's very easy to flip from the exercise to the workouts to check the sets and reps you'll be using.

After the techniques, the book discusses Periodization. It's a big concept - basically, how do you vary your workouts so you get the best training effect (more strength, muscle size, fat loss, endurance, whatever)? Basically, as they say, everything works, but nothing works forever. Periodization is a way of organizing your workouts so you change when you need to change in order to keep progressing. Whole books have been written on this subject alone. But they make it simple enough to follow. You won't come out of this section understanding more than the basics, but it's a large subject and they don't dumb it down, just give you the parts you'll need to understand how to use the book. They also go over some possible ways to organize the various workouts, based on age/body type, training background, and goals.

The workouts are broken out into four frameworks.

Break In
Fat Loss I, II, III
Hypertrophy I, II, III
Strength I, II, III

Break In consists of a short series of workouts, split into A and B, aimed at priming you for later exercise. It is centered on 2 sets of 15 reps per exercise, and it introduces the frameworks of the six moves. They recommend beginners train on this program longer than advanced lifters. This gives the beginners more time to adapt and make gains, while advanced lifters will need to cut it short because they're already working hard enough (even in Break In) to need to change up their stimulus sooner than beginners.

Fat Loss I-III are a series of workouts you use for exactly what it says - burning body fat. The workouts are geared towards circuits and limited rest times, trying to create as much metabolic disruption in your system as possible. Your body will burn fat in the process of recovering from the workouts. Exercises are often combination lifts (like a combined Romanian Deadlift and a bent-over row) or short circuits, pairing or grouping completely unrelated exercises to force your body to work in an inefficient (and therefore calorie-burning) way. Workouts II and III are meant to follow in order after I, although they have advice for cutting them short as well. You aren't locked into doing I, then II, then III. You could do Fat Loss I then move on to Hypertrophy or Strength workouts, for example, and one example workout schedule goes from Break In right to Fat Loss II, skipping I entirely.

Hypertrophy I-III are aimed at increasing muscle size. They discuss the many theories of why muscles grow, and different methods of doing so - muscular fatigue, specific rep ranges, time under tension, heavy weights, etc. - and then apply them all in a shotgun approach. Whatever the scientific reason behind the growth, it doesn't matter, it's covered. This features mostly undulating periodization, where you'll change from doing 5 x 5 to 3 x 15 to 4 x 10 and back over the course of the cycle. Other workouts feature 6 x 2, 2 x 25, and other ranges. Rest times vary, weights vary, reps vary. All of these are high volume, meant to elicit more size gains.

Strength I-III are aimed at getting you much, much stronger. These feature lots of "wave loading", where you do a set at one weight, then do a set at a higher weight, then drop back down to a lower weight again, but higher than the first. For example, one workout does 6, 1, 6, 1, 10-12. So you'll squat 6 reps fairly heavy, then 1 very heavy rep, then go back to 6 reps at a slightly heavier weight than the first six reps, back to another heavier single, and then finish lighter. Or 3,2,1,3,2,1 - the second "3,2,1" is heavier than the first "3,2,1", allowing you to build up to heavier weights. The volume is lower than fat loss or hypertrophy, but the rest times are longer, and you'll mix in explosive lifting as well.

Each of the workouts has a template listing the reps, sets, and even lifting tempo (how long up, held at the top, and down). I'm not a big fan of tempo, it's too much to concentrate on for most lifts when you're doing them. But some people swear by them, and for a beginner it's a good guideline. All of the templates also include page references to the exercises, and more than enough guidance to make them clear.

One thing that especially recommends this approach is that the workouts are set up equally well for 2 x week and 3 x week workouts. They aren't built into a 4-day a week interlocking series of workouts. I train MMA, and so do many of my friends. It's nice to have a book that contains workouts they can fit in around their MMA schedule - 2 x week lifting plus 2-3 x week training is more than enough, and it takes exactly zero tweaks to NROL to make it work for this. Excellent!

The book also includes good diet advice. It suggests calorie levels by weight and activity level and goals. It covers breakdowns of macronutrients and rates food from the A list to the C list, and then garbage. So you know when you're eating the good stuff and when you're eating crap. It's relatively simple stuff - no recipes, no food plans. But it's good, solid information on what to eat.

The book is crammed full of good information on eating, lifting, and exercise technique. Even when it gets something a little wrong (for example, EPOC) it's the "why does this work?" that's a little off, but the methods will work.

Rating:
Content: 5 out of 5. It has all you need to get started and keep going for a long time.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Well illustrated, good flow to the text, good index, and easy to follow.

Overall: Great workout book, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a friend looking for a program.