This is Titan Strength, a free resource for athletes and coaches. It provides free reviews of strength and conditioning literature, websites, videos, dvds and equipment. The reviews are carried out by coaches from a variety of sports and are entirely objective.
BOOKS - Book Reviews
Periodisation Training for Sports by Tudor Bompa PhD and Michael Carrera
Bompa is one of the big names in periodisation and has had success with it at Olympic level. This book is interspersed with the findings of a massive amount of studies to back up it's claims and observations yet it is in fairly simple language that would be accessible to both coaches and athletes. The idea of periodisation is to build certain qualities pre-competition and then maintain them in during the season. This is done by altering training phases after a given time to avoid accommodation and to develop a foundation that will yield more significant gains in the next phase. An example of two phases would be turning new muscle into functional strength, a hypertrophy phase followed by a max strength phase. The book provides help to building a program for various individual and team sports. The program design advice depends on the needs of the sport, both in terms of the energy systems used and in terms of the competition requirements, i.e one extended competition period like in Rugby or many more smaller competition phases as in boxing. The book also discusses the different energy systems and strength qualities required in various sports and their order of importance. The order of importance is not necessarily a fixed thing, as it can depend on an individual athletes style of play in certain situations. However even if your sport isn't covered in the book it is possible to learn a lot just from reading about the interplay of different energy systems and how they work. Although Bompa provides a guideline for many different sports through the different phases he feels are necessary, this book does not spoon feed the reader with specific programs. An athlete reading this book would find out the different phases they would need to go through pre and in season but would have to come up with their own individual training sessions. There are examples in the book but unless an athlete wishes to go elsewhere they would have to do something like a hypertrophy phase like a football player, a strength session for a sailor and power work for volleyball. In this respect the book is more for the coaches. The author probably assumes this as well as he often remarks in an offhand manner about the time to start performing strength work that mirrors the functional tasks of the given sport by targeting the same prime movers. Bompa clearly assumes that the reader has this knowledge. Despite this athletes shouldn't be put off. The book also explains throughly the mechanisms involved in recovery, different kinds of strength and power training, sober thoughts on stability training, nutritional advice and lots of useful tables and charts. The tables make the book quite useful even after it's read, as the reader can quickly consult the glycemic index of a food, the percentage motor unit recruitment of a given exercise or loading guidelines for an athlete depending on their sport. This book would be useful to a variety of athletes and coaches with varied knowledges of sport science.
The Russian Kettlebell Challenge by Pavel Tsatsouline
Written in Tsatsouline's usual amusing and easy to follow style. Makes some claims about the kettlebell that the jury is still out on. At times this does seem like an extended kettlebell advertisement. However if you own or use kettlebells then this book would serve as a great companion. Not only are there numerous kettlebell exercises, broken down still by still, but there are numerous suggestions for kettlebell training protocols. Some of these are presented as Russian military regimes and there are also a couple of Steve Maxwell's, a Brazilian JuJitsu champion.
Power to the People! : Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American by Pavel Tsatsouline
This book is similar to The Naked Warrior in that it provides an exercise program that can provide results using just two exercises. Unlike The Naked Warrior, however an olympic barbell is required. The exercises in question and the program outlined would give adequate results for anyone wanting to be strong, look toned and be generally healthy. The leg exercise provided, the deadlift, is presented with numerous variations for targeting different areas of leg development. For the bodybuilder or athlete however the program would be ineffective. The bodybuilder would require far more isolation work, which is simply not supplied by two different exercises, and the athlete would need to train a greater variety of movement patterns and more sport specific exercises. However this book would still provide a great resource to both the bodybuilder and athlete. For the bodybuilder there is “the bear”, a program used by the soviet military showboaters of the Potemkin villages. This is a simple, highly punishing muscle building program. Some might find it is worth reading the book, just to hear the story about the Potemkin villages. For the athlete, numerous useful concepts are explained, including wave periodisation, tendon inhibition and muscle irradiation. Like most of Tsatsouline's books, if you're a professor in exercise physiology, you'll get by fine without it. On the other hand, most people would learn a lot from this book, even if they never bought a barbell and followed the exercise protocol that is outlines. It's just great principles from old school strongmen like Sandow, Aston and Saxon to modern greats like Siff, Zatsiorsky and Verkhoshansky, distilled into laymans terms. A worthy investment.
The Naked Warrior by Pavel Tsatsouline
The Naked Warrior is about strength training with no equipment. It is minimal to say the least, not just because no equipment is required, but also because only two exercises are required. Many people might be put off by this approach, however the exercises involved are really quite challenging and instill functional strength, stability and should help to address imbalances. For those who don't find them challenging, various suggestions are made to make them more difficult by altering the leverage. For those who find the two main exercise too difficult, they are broken down in simpler components so that they can be worked up to. As well as the two exercises used, the pistol and one arm push up, there are several variations and a couple of other exercises requiring a door and a towel, as used by accomplished martial artists Steve Maxwell (Brazilian JuJitsu) and Bill “Superfoot” Wallace (KickBoxing). The Naked Warrior is ideal for anyone who spends a lot of time travelling or on the road in one way or another. However, if you'd rather train with weights, then the book is definitely still worth considering. The principles of power breathing and muscular irradiation, which are taught to help you perform the pistol and one arm pushup, can be applied to your barbell work as well. Additionally the sections on GTG, which help open up neural pathways and allow you to more effectively learn a skill, can also be applied to deadlifts, clean and jerks and any exercise you care to think of. The book also has a section on barbells, kettlebells and dumbbells and the individual strengths of each. Like most of Tsatsouline's work, it is easy to follow, in this case requires no equipment and is occasionally humourous.
Get Buffed by Ian King
This is a great book for bodybuilders or indeed anyone who wants to get bigger and stronger. If you are confused by mixed information or lack knowledge on exercise selection, rest periods, tempo, sets, reps, muscle groups, training frequency, training duration, training intensity, periodisation, training methods, exercise order, recovery, imbalances, belts, wraps and straps then this book is for you. It is an easy to follow, straight forward guide to all of the above and more. Chapter after chapter begins with a question, and then proceeds to answer the question in a jargon free comprehensive manner. The book is ideal for beginners, who after reading it, should have a significant grasp on various forms of training and the qualities that they will instill. The book includes a q&a session, which deals with a variety of subjects including nutrition and supplementation. Get Buffed also includes a 12 week training program towards the end of the book. Even if some of the equipment isn't available to the reader, they should have enough of an idea from what they have already read, of how to adapt the program with a different but suitable exercise. One thing King does very well in this booess the “more weight = better” philosophy. Some of his bodyweight calf exercises and single leg lunges, for instance, are extremely punishing. King also stresses the importance of stability and balance. He provides some excellent suggestions to build this, such as single leg good mornings. The Ian King way of training defies the bench orientated gym culture of today, by stressing the importance of a balance between vertical pushing, vertical pulling, horizontal pulling, horizontal pushing, hip dominant and quad dominant training. If you don't have a background in strength and conditioning this is a great place to start, and if you do, it might give you some great ideas for getting bigger and stronger in a healthy and balanced way.
The Science and Practice of Strength Training by Vladimir Zatsiorsky
This is one of the seminal works on strength and conditioning and is a set text at many universities. It is frequently quoted by a host of writers in the strength and conditioning field and not without good reason. It examines numerous aspects of strength training in an extremely thorough and precise manner. These varied concepts are discussed in fine detail and are presented at length with numerous charts, graphs and diagrams. The author, before he defected, was a consultant for the soviet olympic teams during seven cycles. The information in this book doesn't come solely from the findings of studies or email testimonials, but from the accumulation of data collected in monitoring thousands of top athletes. If you were to own one book on strength training, this might be the best choice. However, to understand and utilise the information effectively would require a fairly sophisticated understanding of sports science. Although Zatsiorsky explains various crucial aspects of strength training, such as accommodation, supercompensation, detraining, retraining, exercise selection, timing in strength training, task specific strength, athlete specific strength and many more, it would take a fairly competent coach or student of sports science to understand how to implement these principles into a training program. This book is a training philosophy and not an idiot proof training guide with month by month plans which can just be photocopied. Although the information in this book is valid, extensive and ratified by scientific findings it may just be too complicated for those with only a meagre understanding of exercise physiology, or some branch of maths and physics. For students of sports science, it is crucial to understand the concepts in this book. If you have such a grounding and are used to dealing with information that is displayed graphically or in jargon, rather than in plain English, then go for it. Otherwise, if you just have a first aid certificate and a personal training qualification, buy a different book.
Enter the Kettlebell by Pavel Tsatsouline
More on the kettlebell by Tsatsouline. More drills, more suggestions, strategies for combining kettlebell work with routines from other Tsatsouline programs and further kettlebell programs. Much like The Russian Kettlebell Challenge, the book comes across as a collection of testimonials for the kettlebell. However if you are serious about kettlebells, don't let that put you off. Not only does it breakdown some of the kettlebell lifts more thouroughly than the previous book, but it also teaches simple drills to build up to the full cleans and snatches. Some of these are flexibility drills, some movement patterns and some to build joint stability. It presents a safe and effective way to build yourself up to full on kettlebell training. It also has some new regimes, such as the Secret Service Snatch test. If you don't own kettlebells there probably isn't much point. If you do, then this book will help you to lift them more safely, more effectively, challenge you more and with a q&a section it might just clear up something that's had you scratching your head since you became a girevik.
Periodisation Breakthrough by Fleck and Kraemer
A good book for budding coaches. It serves as an introduction to the terminology and ideas behind modern strength and conditioning. It lays out the principles behind periodistation, the different phases, the different ways to periodise and how to design a program from a single session to a season leading up to an event. The exercise selection is simplistic. If you were hoping to learn secrets for your sport, think again. Wending it's way through the book are sample generic basketball/strength power programs which are more there to show how volume, intensity, type of exercise (i.e. multi joint or single joint) and other variables are altered than to serve as the ultimate guide to basketball or strength and power activities. If the idea of periodisation is new or confusing to you, then this book would help you learn to avoid accommodation to training and help maintain gains without over training in season. Most experienced coaches, however, will find there isn't much here that they didn't already know.
Beyond Bodybuilding by Pavel Tsatsouline
This isn't a book about bodybuilding. As the title implies it aims to be something more. If you're an aspiring bodybuilder, not someone wanting to gain weight for sport but a bodybuilder, give it a miss. You'd be better off with Ian King's Get Buffed or Fred Hatfield's Bodybuilding: a Scientific Approach. Having said that it is an excellent book. The idea of the book is to present numerous ways to a “strong as you look” physique. The book is strewn with anecdotal information from military, powerlifting, martial arts and strongman circles. It is also an excellent source of complex sports science findings, broken down into plain English in a way that is readily understandable and easy to implement into your training. Numerous alternatives are provided throughout the book for those with injuries which preclude certain exercises, as well as thorough explanations of the right way to do some of the classic lifts. The book is full of decent equipment suggestions and suggestions for what to do when you have no equipment. The book also contains a plethora of web resources and suggestions for further reading as well as a myriad of suggestions for busting your plateaus. If you can read Zatsiorsky, Siff and Verkovhansky, understand it intuitively and be ready to implement their principles into your training, fine. If not, this guy does it for you. This book does repeat a lot from The Naked Warrior and Power to the People, by the same author, but there is enough new material here to make it worth the while. It's ideal for people who prioritise strength or their physique but don't want to look like a bodybuilder. This book would also be useful to military personnel and athletes as it encourages functional strength.
Renegade Training for Extreme Sports by Coach Davies
This book would be great, as the title suggests, for those participating in extreme sports and x games. However, with it's emphasis on static and dynamic range of motion, balance and agility, it would equally serve the stunt man, tumbler, acrobat and be of use from a conditioning perspective if your martial art is capoeira. A special balance board is endorsed but a lot can be got from the book if you have a swiss ball, freeweights and a jump rope. There are also a great deal of drills that require no equipment, so plenty of it can be performed on the road. Some heavy concepts in here for the complete beginner but an entire week by week, day by day program is laid out at the back, making it very user friendly. Some extremely challenging stuff in here, like cleans and snatches on a swiss ball. Not for the faint of heart.
Bullet-Proof Abs : 2nd Edition of Beyond Crunches by Pavel Tsatsouline
Tsatsouline's ab and stretching writings come with the reccommendation of Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell fame. A good book that would benefit most. Works equally for those who worry about how hard they look and those who worry about how hard they play. Lots of exercises to choose from with clear explanations of what the exercises are for. Includes the gruelling janda situp. An excellent exercise from an aesthetic point of view but maybe not such a great idea to turn off the hip flexors when trying to mirror athletic function. Although, it's fine if deliberately performed as an isolation exercise. The book heavily endorses a piece of equipment to perform the janda, but there are other options in the book and the said piece of equipment can be made if you know a welder. Unlike a lot of ab publications, the author doesn't forget to remind the reader to stabilise from all sides and exercises are provided with this goal in mind. The author also goes further in discussing breathing work to increase abdominal pressurisation for greater force generation. There are some great suggestions for lateral and twisting work and a great functional exercise for force exertion from a twist. It's followed up by a decent Q&A session and interspersed with wisdom that will keep you healthy.
Scientific Training for Olympic Taekwondo by Willy Pieter
This book would be of most use to a coach or student of a stand up fighting martial art (Taekwando, Karate, Kung fu, Savate, Muay Thai, Boxing etc) who wasn't the most adept sport scientist. The book shows how to plan Taekwando training cycles around bread and butter classic periodisation principles. It's well tailored to Taekwando, specifically illustrating how to tailor things like heavy bag work to aerobic and anerobic phases. However, most of these principles are readily known to students of western sports science. For this reason, the book might not offer much to an experienced strength and conditioning coach, but be highly effective for an instructor who's spent more time in the dojo than in the lecture hall. It has a weights program, which would be of benefit if adhered to, but it leans a little too heavily to isolation exercises and fails to build into a more compound exercise orientated regime. Such isolation exercises work well for hypertrophy and foundation work, but ideally the martial artist needs to generate strength and power as a unit or single structure and the weights program would not effectively instill this. Once again, if you know your macro cycle from your meso cycle this might not be for you, but for all you dyed in the wool old school martial artists it could be the missing link in your training.
Solo Training by Loren W Christensen
Loren W Christensen is not to my knowledge an authority on weight training and there are much better people to go for when it comes to that. He is however an accomplished tournament fighter and experienced police officer, who has a keen insight to what works on the mat and what works on the street. Check for the legality of some of the techniques before you decide you are going to train them, the eye rakes spring to mind, but this is a very good book. There is so much here in terms of solo training sessions requiring absolutely no equipment whatsoever. If you are willing to get creative, and adopt some of the equipment suggested, then there is a vast array of possibilities. Some of the suggestions are obvious, like practice punches and kicks on a heavy bag, and others are really quite intuitive, such as doing isometric training in chambering positions to improve flexibility and endurance. There are things you can do at work, at home, in the gym etc. You really no longer need to let how many training sessions you can afford or how long the dojo closes over Christmas to limit your progress. Some of these training sessions might even keep you alive a little longer, such as trying to do techniques in cramped conditions or from a chair to see which ones work. Practically no stone is left unturned with this book as it deals with flexibility, footwork, all manner of strikes, taking strikes, psychological preparation and much more. One caveat with this book though: anything you practice, without the supervision of a sensei or sifu etc, has to be with proper technique. Practice makes permanent, so if you teach yourself bad form or mechanics, you will learn bad form or mechanics. Stay conservative with what you work on and this book is an excellent resource.
Speed Training by Loren W Christensen
Loren W Christensen is not, to my knowledge, a nutritionist. To understand your nutritional requirements there are much better places to go. The brief weight training section is just that. For nutrition or strength and conditioning for the martial arts this book is inadequate and cursory at best. However, I'd recommend this book to any student of a stand up fighting martial art. It has some excellent drills for improving the speed of your strikes and ability to cope when they're coming at you. Improving speed is looked at from all sorts of directions, including movement and reaction speed. Speed generated by mechanical efficiency and proximity to a target is also dealt with. Christensen also deals with bridging the gap to deliver speedy strikes. This, of course, is also a crucial aspect in administering grappling techniques, which is also briefly dealt with. It abounds with plenty of drills that can be used by instructors and students alike. Finally, and probably most importantly, the picture on page 158 is probably one of the funniest things you'll ever see in a book.
Relax into Stretch : Instant Flexibility Through Mastering Muscle Tension by Pavel Tsatsouline
Most of these stretches are performed with little to no equipment. The equipment mostly being chairs, broomsticks, doors, dumbbells and, in one case, a pull up bar. The stretching program is thorough and caters to both the inflexible and those with a decent range of motion. This is not to be confused with a warm up routine, but is rather a comprehensive regime for flexibility improvement. Different tactics are provided to achieve results, including contrast breathing, waiting out the tension, pnf, forced relaxation and more. Most of the stretches do not require a training partner. The book is written in a humourous, easy to follow style and is perfect for beginners in the strength and conditioning field. It dispels many mainstream myths about flexibility and even the experienced coach may learn something about the physiology of stretching.
Power: a Scientific Approach by Fred Hatfield Ph.d.
A lot of this is dated as it comes out of the late 80's and a lot of it is also found in Bodybuilding: a Scientific Approach by the same author. This is slightly naughty as it was probably before the days of cut and paste and wouldn't have been as much of an effort saver. A lot of the stuff in this book is pretty good and, credit where credit's due, the guy wasn't called Dr. Squat for no reason. Firstly I'll deal with what's good about this book. It begins with a throrough look into what strength really is in an attempt to define it. Many may think this sounds unnecessary but it goes through a list of 23 factors, varying from the physiological, psychoneural and environmental. It might even give experienced trainers and athletes pause for thought and may even help the way they approach training. It also includes a great chapter on why machine weights are inferior to free weights, a chapter on the squat by a guy who did over 1000lbs, a section on soviet style periodisation and a mature, realistic and informative section on anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances. Much of the book is however made up of things that are available in a hundred other books. So unless you are lacking any of the following things, you'll probably just be replicating stuff you already have. These include sections on fibre arrangment, fibre types, contraction types, diagrams of muscle spindles, myosin and actin filaments, generic plyometric, barbell, dumbbell and stretching exercises, diagrams of first, second and third class levers, anatomical diagrams listing target muscles in certain exercises, suggestions for macro nutrient and micro nutrient requirements and one of those calorie expenditure tables. If however these are things you don't already have and would like to know more about, you would probably benefit from this book and be able to get hold of it relatively cheaply.
The Science of Martial Arts Training by Charles I. Staley MSS
This is actually quite an unusual book. It's by an exercise scientist who actually knows something about the martial arts. Most of these books are either by know all exercise scientists or know all black belts. In fact Staley seems to be aware of this, in his chapter on injury management he tries to remind martial arts instructors that they are not doctors and paramedics. This book is a sober exception and would be well worth a read for both instructors and students. Staley lays out, fairly thouroughly, the principles that need to be adhered to in implementing a modern, effective strength and conditioning program for the martial artist. It is not an unrealistic, one size fits all effort, but instead lays out the kind of strategies required to write up a Tudor Bompa style periodisation program for your martial art. Instead of an exercise program there is a comprehensive list of exercises and advice on the muscles trained and the martial arts applications of those particular muscles. There's also good advice on who would benefit from hypertrophy and who wouldn't, rather than taking a dogmatic position on it one way or another. Competition requirements, energy system requirements, weight category requirements, nutritional requirements and much more are all dealt with. In fact, with Staley explaining the neurological nature of skill acquisition, this book would even be of use to those martial artists who refuse to hit the weights. After reading this book, and Staley's simple explanation about a rocket hopefully highlighting how absolute strength is the foundation of speed, there might be a few more weight room converts. Good chapters on nutrition, restoration and flexibility. The supplement chapter is a bit dated now but still sensible on reflection. Some of the stuff on psychological preparation for a competion would be well worth a look if you're one of those who gets the jitters. Good for martial arts instructors and of course martial artists who also hit the weights. Intermediate and student sports scientists would get a lot out of this book as it explains some important concepts very simply compared with some of the standard university texts. It would also benefit judokas who need an excuse to spend so much time working on their biceps.
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