Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Right up front, please do not take my mediocre rating of this book as a similar pan of John Berardi himself. Based on what I know of him from his articles on "testosterone.net" and elsewhere, I am sure that he knows and understands a hell of a lot more than he can pack into a book aimed at the diet-and-weight-loss demographic. This book is obviously his attempt to branch out from the hardcore muscle and fitness crowd and reach a broader audience.
Pros: The book has a lot of good basic info on the roles of nutrition, diet and exercise in achieving personal fat loss and figure shaping goals. If I had a friend who had no clue where to begin, this is one book I wouldn't hesitate to recommend. And Berardi's writing style is encouraging and entertaining - he knows how to write for his audience without being dull, pedantic or overly self-important (always a plus).
Also a "pro" is the book's emphasis on interval training for cardio health and fat loss. Berardi makes a very good case for this relatively new protocol which may help many people stuck on treadmills for the last 20 years understand why they are still pudgy, and what to do about it. I couldn't write a better, more convincing and usuable cardio/aerobic routine if I'd had a month to write it.
Cons: The book's format and content has Rodale Press all over it. Rodale Press publishes "Men's Health" and "Prevention", 2 magazines that have been recycling a set of 30 articles each - supplemented with various "factoids","breaking news", and "helpful hints" boxouts - over and over for the last 25 years. And with the exception for the advice on interval training, "The Metabolism Advantage" is really just a repackaging of the diet and exercise advice from a prior book, "The Abs Diet", as well as every "Men's Health" diet and exercise article from the past 5 years. If you've read that book, you don't need this one. In fact, if you've read ANY other recent exercise and diet book (including the ones by Oprah's trainer Bob Greene), you don't need this one. I suspect that Berardi, left to his own devices and not forced to shoehorn his book into the Rodale Press "house style" could have written a much more helpful and innovative book than what we have here. But Rodale Press isn't about innovation - it's about the same mainstream fitness and health thinking that have dominated self=help and fitness magazines since the dawn of Pritikin and Ornish.
This last caveat especially applies to the actual weight training routines in the back of the book: they are a total rehash of the same articles that "Men's Health" (and "Men's Fitness" and "Exercise for Men Only" and all the other non hardcore fitness mags) have been churning out for at least 25 years. While the emphasis on free weights over machines is good, these routines are boring, linear, one-dimensional and self-limiting; any average trainee will plateau (or burn out) on these exercise and routines very quickly and will need to look else where for more sophisticated advice. Some of the exercises are worthless, but they are included because they are always included in material like this. Some (like the Overhead Squat) are difficult-to-impossible for the average beginning trainee to perform safely and properly without proper personal coaching, yet they are presented here as if they are no more complicated or productive as the worthless ones. As I said about, Berardi obviously knows a lot more about resistance training than he tries (or is allowed) to include here, and so the book in that sense is something of a disservice to the reader.
Still there is more good than bad about the book; I plan to purchase it when it comes out in trade paperbook to share with my friends who have been stuck on the treadmill for the past 20 years.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Metabolism Advantage: An 8-Week Program to Rev Up Your Body's Fat-Burning Machine---At Any Age
With this powerful body transformation program, men and women discover how to kick their metabolism into high gear--and replace flab with lean, fat-burning muscle . . . in just 8 weeksRevving up the body so that it optimizes nutrition and turns flab into lean body mass can be accomplished easily and quickly--and at any age, even after the body's metabolism has supposedly slowed down. That's what sought-after fitness trainer and nutrition expert John Berardi demonstrates in this new book. Drawing on the best scientific research, including his own ongoing studies, Berardi has developed a supremely effective plan that enables his clients--who include athletes, models, and ordinary men and women of different fitness levels--to stoke their metabolic fires, burn more calories, build lean muscle, and improve their health, too! This unique three-pronged program includes: ' the Nutrition Plan, which provides recipes and meal plans that offer readers the foods that will teach their bodies to burn fat for fuel' the Exercise Plan, which combines interval exercise and strength training to enable readers to burn more calories not only while they are working out but also after exercise' the Supplement Plan, which identifies the essential compounds that kick the metabolism into high gear and improve general well-being
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