Product Description

This is a 512-page encyclopaedia on how to build a terrific physique. This encyclopaedia offers the key to your training success. By acknowledging your individuality, this book teaches you precisely how to train yourself. Become your own expert personal trainer! Whether you're male or female, a beginner or very advanced, young or not-so-young, want to train at home or in a public gym, this book is for you. Apply what you learn and success will follow! The 'how-to' guidance includes: why conventional training is fundamentally wrong and must be bypassed; how to overhaul your training philosophy so that you're destined for big gains; your ultimate size and strength potential, and the organisation to take you there; how to design and personalise your own training programs, step-by-step; how to conquer over training, maximise results, and never let age hold you back; how to eat in order to maximise your gains and improve your health; how to set up your own low-cost but super-productive home gym; and a real-life, step-by-step training cycle for you to learn from.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17602 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Customer Reviews

Undoubtedly the best book on weight training I have read.
To successfully build the body you want you need a lot of information. When I began weight training two years ago the only information I had was the excercise chart which came with some dumbells I bought. If I had continued to use that information I might have improved my muscle tone but would have grown very little. It didn't take me long to realise that the chart contained very little of the information I needed. Over the past two years I have read a number of books about weight training. These books contained large numbers of big pictures demonstrating excercises and showing the alleged results of the application of the books information. Dispite this multitude of pictures the excercises were not explained in sufficient detail and the other information tended to be rather brief. None of the books were really worth the money I spent on them. After the disappointment of the books I turned to the various magazines on weight training. Although the magazines gave a lot of useful information, there were so many different oppinions on the important issues and so many different routines being displayed, I became rather confused. Another disadvantage of the magazines were that they were all produced by companies selling supplements and full of adverts. This encouraged me to try various supplements like creatine, glutamine and a number of fat burners, none of which gave good results.

I received 'Beyond Brawn' as a birthday present earlier this year. Just by it's size and almost complete lack of photos I could tell that it was different to the other books I had read. For no more money than one of the books I had previously bought, I had a book five times as thick and far more densely packed with information. This book is unusual in the fact it is written for the genetically typical -or even disadvantaged- trainee (i.e. most people) and not the genetically blessed trainee who can gain muscle with comparatively little effort. An awful lot of weight training books are written by people who are naturally huge and totally out of touch with the methods needed to help 'Joe Average' to gain muscle. The book Beyond Brawn is in touch with those methods. Stuart McRobert's book is also for the drug free trainee, not someone pumped up with all sorts of illegal steriods. A lot of books and magazines are aimed ( some even admit it) at trainees who have 'chemical assistance' and so can gain on programs that would overtrain the drug free. This book is also free from all those routines which the professional bodybuilders use to shape what the already have in abundance rather than to build what the normal trainee has yet to gain. Just because you use a professionals routine you cannot hope to get as big as the professional, that takes muscle building routines like those that Stuart McRobert teaches you to create and tailor to your own needs in this book.

I have now read most of Beyond brawn more than once and I have to say that this book contains the best advice I have ever read on the subject of weight training. It cafefully explains the best methods to use and why the other methods from other books are not going to work for the average trainee. This book covers just about everything you need to know about weight training including diet, how to design your traing programs and how to get the best results from your training. The only thing it doesn't exhaustively deal with is correct excercise technique (dealt with in the companion book 'The insiders tell-all handbook on excercise technique'). This book also acknowledges your individuality, unlike most books in the field, and teaches you how to train yourself.

The bottom line is if you want to put on muscle, get a copy of this book and you'll make a lot more progress. If you do buy this book, I would recommend you also buy the equally brilliant companion book 'The insiders tell all handbook on weight-training technique', to teach you how to perform the right exercises, safely and effectively.

Best Book Yet on Weight Training
Here is a good book. "Beyond Brawn" is a book for those who work hard, for those who sweat buckets, and for whom every single fraction of an inch of muscle growth comes hard. "Beyond Brawn" is for those who will NOT give up, and who will accept nothing less than final victory. "Beyond Brawn" injects the much-needed and long absent "something missing" back into bodybuilding That something is nothing less than the original heart and soul of real bodybuilding--for strength, health, aesthetic appearance and, most important of all, for longevity, whether in training or in its literal sense.

"Beyond Brawn" is entertaining. It is a good read. Though written to inform, motivate and persuade, the flavour is of author Stuart McRobert's personal mission to promote honest and frill-free training, and he is not above some shin kicking and bare-knuckling to get the message across. McRobert--a well published author of many years in the major niche magazines--is no friend of the "sell them another supplement" miracle vendors. And his stark and realistic standards to which those who want to be strong, and sweat blood to become so, continue to spur "ordinary, just like you and me" weight trainers on farther than they ever thought possible.

So what commends "Beyond Brawn" over and above the rest of the genre?

There is a chapter on the philosophy of the "hard gainer," and on expectations for just how big and strong a hard gainer (someone not genetically gifted with big bones and easy muscle growth) can become. There are chapters on training cycles that actually work and deliver, and on how to equip a home gym. The book deals with exercise selection--the suggestions are guaranteed to annoy some of the conventional "wise" men of exercise. There is a particularly interesting chapter on correcting training injuries through trigger point therapy.

The finest summary--the précis of the entire work--is told in story form in Chapter 3, in which McRobert in his clear style describes how a "wise and uncompromising mentor" would have guided a dedicated, devoted and thoroughly misinformed young man safely and most importantly successfully through years of training--years, that in McRobert's words, were largely wasted and actually damaging to the body. By following the mentor's lead, the young man might have achieved in a few quick and hard training years a body of impressive size, filled with power and ready and able to train for a lifetime, rather than having taken more than a decade to actually make mistake after mistake and paying the price in injury and pain.

"Beyond Brawn" captures the moment; it expresses and guides the growing thousands of hard gainers who want the power and the muscle--but never knew just how straightforward it was to get there. Every gym has its hundreds who have real desire and true motivation, but they have never achieved their goals because they have bought into the over used, over sold and overly hyped systems and methods that work only for the genetically gifted or chemically enhanced.

Most of are not in the "gifted gene" pool, and most hard gainers will not go the chemical route because it is neither natural nor "right."

If you like hard work, "Beyond Brawn" is for you. If you have a deep desire to gain, this book is for you. If you wish to finally get to where you thought was never really going to happen, then read, apply and persist with this book, and you will achieve. I did.

Dr. Gregory M Steiner

excellent
An excellent book for beginners or pros alike. It quashes what has become conventional body building training (the 3 or 4 day "split" routine) in favour of 'abbreviated training' which is done no more than twice a week (moving to 3 after a firm foundation has been set) and uses minimal excersies. This is how they used to do it before all the bull, endorsements and marketing crap took over. I took a course in gym instruction a few months ago and brought up some of the 'forgotten ways' outlined in the book and it seemed to fall on deaf ears! Very stupid and very frustrating because it seems every beginner out there is being taught completely the wrong thing. McRobert points out than unless one is genetically gifted and/or on steroids most people will never achieve the type of 'muscle and might' sold to us on a daily basis by most glossy mags, books and fitness centres. I worked with a semi pro bodybuilder for about 2 and a half years and over that time did a conventional 3 or 4 day split and ate 6 times a day. I did get bigger in that time but it was a very long process and I always wondered why I wasn't any bigger after all that time. Last year I bought this book after skimming it in a shop and I quickly noticed that it was telling me that everything I knew was wrong. Sticking to the basic compound movements and conentrating on getting stonger little by little is the name of the game here - none of this pulldown, kickbacks or dumbell flyes nonsense - it's bench presses, squats, deadlifts, dips, pullups and chins if you can bear it! I excitedly hit the gym after a year of no training and stuck to the rules outlined in the book. It bloody well works! I put 2 inches in my chest in 6 months and a year later my arms are feeling very tight in my shirts! If you've continously hit walls with trying to build muscle, ignore what others may try to tell you, get this book, eat properly and grow. This will work for everyone. I always classified myself as a classic "hard gainer" - 6'2 and naturally slim - no brawn anywhere and genetics nothing special. This way of training has made me feel like an easy gainer so I presume if you put on muscle easily it'll work even better for you - you swines!. There you go, can't sell it anymore than that can I? McRobert has a new book out so check that out too and I'd recommend his guide to weight training technique also.
Happy growing!