Outstanding Life Changer | Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life

Solid advice from experience | Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life | Shawn Phillips

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	• Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life Shawn Phillips Ballantine Books, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Not my cup of tea

I didn't get much from book. Sort of philosophical and not much meat. Someone else may find it great. Just my personal opinion.

Outstanding Life Changer

I've enjoyed reading this book as well as I've started my first day today and it was a great workout. Only took 30 minutes and worked up a good sweat. Can wait to get further along and see the results....I know they'll be there.

Solid advice from experience

This is just good! It was easy enough to just get started with the base camp training but as you progress both in your training and the book it really gets better and better. The tone does not feel textbook but you can certainly feel the knowledge the author has in fitness and nutrition. I have had a hard time sticking with anything healthy until now. I'm on week 7 and going strong. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

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A thoughtful approach to fitness and strength -- has worked wonders for me

Strength for Life is a sophisticated program for developing strength that lasts a lifetime. If you follow the program outlined in the book you will get stronger -- I can vouch for that, as I've been working the program for about 10 weeks now. I've lost over 20 lbs, gone from a waist size of 44 to 40 (I am 6'9" -- so that is not as big as it may sound, relative to my frame -- I was a 38 in high school and was a skinny beanpole at the time) and feel more energy than I have in about 6 years. I had been starting to feel the pains and aches of a sedentary middle age -- and when I had a hard time bending over to tie my shoes I decided it was time to do something about it. 10 weeks later I am running with my kids, kayaking on the ocean, going out for walks instead of sitting down at the TV. I am just getting started, really, but I can't say enough how much better I feel.

Of course, there may be other programs that would work to achieve similar results. The most important thing is to find a program and stick to it. For me, at least, the best way to get results is to follow a program as if it were scripture -- to follow the advice without deviation until it becomes firmly entrenched into my routine. But I've tried other programs over the last several years (such as the "Abs Diet") that didn't bring me nearly as much success and were not as well thought out as this one. More importantly, what is needed is a program that you can really follow for life -- with adaptations to fit your own experience and growing knowledge of your own body -- and this one fits the bill.

I was drawn to Strength for Life because it was written by Shawn Phillips, the brother of Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength author Bill Phillips. About 7 years ago while teaching in London I picked up Body for Life and decided to follow it. I lost a lot of weight and got a lot stronger -- and it lasted until I came home and got back into my old routine. Then I found myself spending all my time working and hardly any time exercising -- part of the problem was that I'd gotten bored with a program that put looking good as its top priority.

Shawn Phillips' book offers a similar program to the one in "Body For Life" -- but it is aimed in part at people like me who can't see the value of following a tough weight training program indefinitely for the rest of their lives. He modifies the program in a few ways -- but above all adds a "mindfulness" dimension to the exclusive body focus of "Body for Life." Strength, for Shawn Phillips, combines mental focus and body discipline. Each workout becomes both about building strength and practicing mindfulness.

In addition, while he makes clear that the quickest way to lose weight is through a smart combination of strength training and aerobics exercise, he also knows that a good routine is one that offers variety. Following a 12 week intensive body transformation program over and over for the rest of your life is just not something that most people are able to do -- and in the long run such a plan would be destructive since the body needs to rest.

What Phillips suggests is that you follow his 12 week transformation program once a year -- and consider that like the on-season of a sports program, or like the build-up to a yearly marathon. Use the other three quarters of the year to focus on another dimension of strength, such as flexibility or endurance, or as a time to build expertise in a sport of choice. This is a plan that I could live with. Even now, during the intensive 12 week program, it only takes about 45 minutes a day to do my workouts -- and the food I eat tastes much better and leaves me with a lot more energy than before -- and the results have been astonishing.

The nutritional guidelines are easy to follow and merely simplify and clarify nutritional advice that the best experts and research provide: don't eat junk food, eat small meals 5-6 times a week instead of 3 large meals, eat a healthy balance of lean proteins and good carbs and the right kind of fats. There is a lot of very useful advice packed into this book on how to think about eating and exercising and other matters, written by someone who has obviously been living this for a long time and reflected carefully on what works and what doesn't. For example, he suggests that you think about eating in a whole new way: not as a way to fill a hunger, but as a way to provide your body with the energy it needs to accomplish what you need to in the next few hours. That simple advice has been like a paradigm shift for me -- eating better no longer feels like a restriction, rather it feels like liberation, because I see it as enabling myself to accomplish what I want to.

My only qualm about the book -- and a point that I think could be improved in an otherwise excellent program -- is that it doesn't seem to give enough attention to stretching. The program includes a stretching routine one day a week -- but everything I know about exercise and fitness says that stretching, after a warm up, should be included as part of every aerobic and strength training session. An excellent complement to this book, for anyone who really plans to take it seriously, would be Nicholas DiNubile and William Patrick's "Framework."

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Shawn Phillips is an internationally respected strength and fitness expert who has helped athletes, celebrities, and tens of thousands of others over the past twenty years. Now he?s sharing his fresh approach to fitness with everyone. Strength for Life is an easy-to-implement program to help you get in fantastic shape, enjoy abundant energy, and maintain a lean, strong physique?not just for 12 weeks but for the rest of your life.

Let?s face it, with the demands of family, work, and life, many of us simply don?t have the time to stick to a rigorous workout schedule. Through his own life experience, Shawn Phillips has recognized this challenge and risen to it, literally reinventing fitness with a results-oriented program that you can embrace even with your hectic schedule and do either at home or at the gym. Homing in on the idea of building mental and physical strength rather than just sculpting your body, Shawn has pioneered a technique called Focus Intensity Training ? (FIT), which uses the mind-body connection to yield incredible results. The program features

? a workout plan that can take as little as 35 minutes a day, 3 times a week
? illustrated exercises with clear step-by-step instructions
? 3 workout phases?a 12-day Base Camp pre-training period, a 12-week Transformation Camp, and a year-round continuation plan geared to keep you going strong and vibrant for the rest of your life
? a simple eating plan to fuel your body for optimum energy and performance?one that will free you from dieting forever
? goal-setting exercises to help you achieve lasting motivation and reach your loftiest visions

It?s never too late to get in shape. If you?re in your twenties or thirties, Strength for Life will show you how to achieve peak levels of fitness year after year. For those forty and beyond, you can look forward to recapturing the energy and vitality you thought you had lost. By following Strength for Life, you will make yourself stronger, leaner, sharper, and more confident. As Shawn writes: ?Strength is about being more, doing more, giving more. It?s not just surviving; it?s thriving. And most important, strength is about having a reserve, a deeper, fuller capacity of body, mind, heart, and soul.?

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