The Home Workout Bible - Hardcover

Lou Schuler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405041269 ISBN 13: 9781405041263

Publisher: Rodale, 2003

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Get bigger biceps, broad shoulders, a bigger bench press, powerful legs, cut abs . . .
without ever leaving your home!

The body you want, in the space you have.
The strength you want, with the equipment you have.
The muscles you want, in the time you have.

You don't need to join a gym to get in shape. In fact, for a lot of guys, the gym is an impediment to getting in shape. The crowds, the inconvenience, the intimidation, the time, the commute-- by the time you add it all up, you could end up investing 2 hours to get 45 minutes of exercise.

No matter how little space you have, no matter how little equipment you have, no matter how little time you have, you can get the results you want without stepping inside a gym.

The Men's Health Home Workout Bible by Lou Schuler and Michael Mejia, M.S., C.S.C.S. gives you...

* Four full-body muscle plans:
The Body Weight Plan
The Dumbbell Plan
The Barbell Plan
The Multistation-Machine Plan

* Custom training plans for strength, fat loss, aerobic fitness, and sports performance

* Buying advice for weights, benches, machines, cardio equipment, and exercise videos

* Complete guidelines for turning your home into a state-of-the-art fitness center

With beginner, intermediate, and advanced full-body workouts for each type of equipment, The Men's Health Home Workout Bible gives you more than 400 exercises altogether, photographed and fully described. From pushups to power cleans, from crunches to jump squats, we show you how to get more muscle and strength at home, whether you're a complete beginner or a competitive athlete.

The Men's Health Home Workout Bible is a personal trainer, on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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About the Author:

Lou Schuler and Michael Mejia, M.S., C.S.C.S., are coauthors of the book The Testosterone Advantage Plan(TM). Lou is also fitness director for Men's Health, the world's largest men's magazine.

Introduction

Welcome home.

We're glad you're ready to turn a piece of your humble abode into your personal war room. You're primed to use home exercise equipment to get your body into the shape it deserves to be in. You're not asking for much--just an awesome physique, better health, increased self-confidence, greater strength, and a longer life.

In the pages ahead, you're going to get all of that--and then some.

We assume you're not in the habit of doing things half-assed. Good. Rest assured that the information we're going to give you will be fully assed. In fact, the reason this book is more than 400 pages long is because a top-quality, beginner-friendly, long-haul home-workout program takes some time and space to explain. We're giving it 100,000 words and several hundred pictures. That doesn't cover everything, but it sure gets to most of it.

Exercise is as simple or complicated as you want to make it. It's easy (in theory) to walk for a few minutes or do some pushups or jog or stretch. When you attach performance goals to those exercises, things start getting tricky. Adding muscle, shedding fat, building strength, or improving your

ability to run or jump or play a specific sport--those goals require the right exercises, the right techniques, and the right mix of hard work and recovery.

We've got all that, and more.

How to Use This Book

We hope everyone who buys this book will eventually read every chapter. But we know many of you will go straight to the exercise sections and dive in. We anticipated this, because we're the same way. Our houses and garages are filled with appliances, tools, and vehicles for which we still haven't read the owner's manuals.

That's why we made the book as modular as possible. The exercise chapters are arranged according to the equipment a guy is likely to have in his home. We start with the no-equipment chapter (chapter 6, which strongly encourages you to add a chinning bar and Swiss ball to your minimalist setup), then progress to chapters on dumbbells, barbells, cable machines, and, finally, multistation home gyms. Chapter 11 shows you several routines you can do if you have all the equipment mentioned in chapters 6 through 10.

Each chapter is itself divided by muscle groups, so all the dumbbell arm exercises are in one place, all the barbell chest exercises are together, and so on. We recommend how many exercises to choose from each group, and how many sets and repetitions to do.

For the most knowledgeable and self-motivated among you, that's probably enough. But in case you don't have much experience putting together workout routines, we've taken the extra step and put some together for you.

Starting on page 357, you'll find sample routines for three skill levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), with six equipment options (no equipment except a chinning bar and something that can be used as a bench; dumbbells; barbell; cable; multistation; and all equipment). If you have more than one type of equipment, we've made it easy to mix and match.This book's authors, as well as other experienced trainers and knowledgeable readers, will be happy to help you find the answer.

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