The Men’s Health Big Book of Exercises: Four Weeks to a Leaner, Stronger, More Muscular You!

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Lot’s of great exercise variants, diet and workout plans lacking
I purchased this book along with Dumbbell Training for Strength And Fitness, based upon Amazon reader recommendations. While Dumbbell Training was mostly a dud, MH Big Book of Exercises was mostly a hit.In the past, I’ve designed my home workouts with the help of Men’s Health Home Workout Bible: and Men’s Health The Body You Want in the Time You Have: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Leaner and Building Muscle with Workouts that Fit Any Schedule. The former helps you translate exercises done in gyms and on machines into what you can do at home with bodyweight, dumbbells, or barbells. The latter gives you a variety of plans for losing weight, gaining muscle, or total-body workouts.However, over time – I’ve wanted to add more variety into my strength training, and that’s where MH Big Book of Exercises comes in. I found a decent variety of shoulder and chest exercises, but the book really gave me a lot of new moves within core and legs. There are a ton of variations presented, although for my tastes – they have too many cable machine variants thrown in (who has a cable machine at home?!). Still – the sheer number of exercises fit exactly what I was looking for in this title. There are some really interesting ideas that I’m excited to try, like straps that descend from your pull-up bar so you can do hanging pushups/rows.As others have mentioned, the nutrition guide is simply a low-carb affair without much imagination. This diet works for a lot of people, so I understand why they went with an easy out in this regard. Some of you who’ve done P90x will find it very familiar to the “Fat Shredder” phase diet, which you do for the first 30 days of the program. My problem is that the diet is billed as a “one size fits all” approach – even though there are risks that you’ll actually lose muscle weight along with fat via this approach. Personally, I think they should have presented a few diet options: low-carb, slow-carb, and perhaps an athletic-oriented diet with less restrictions on the carbs. But – this is ‘Mens Health’ we are talking about, so it’s all about a diet that will net you a six-pack.The one other area that I found lacking was the supplied workout plans. I guess after using “The Body You Want, In the Time You Have” – I expected more. The first few are decent, albeit a bit repetitive. However, some workout guides seem thrown in and add little value… E.G. “The Spartacus Workout”, which takes up a whopping one page.Still – it’s called the Big Book of EXERCISES for a reason, so despite those two minor quibbles I rate it four stars. If you need a lot more exercises that you can do at home, this is a great resource.

This is definitely the best exercise book I have ever read. While the numbers of exercises may at first seem overwhelming, the book is very approachable because is so well organized. It has clear, concise and easy to follow instructions, together with illustrations of how to perform each exercise.I like the method of showing main moves for each set of exercises, together with variations. As an example, the first main move in the chest section is the push up, followed by 24 variations of this exercise. Other chest main moves, followed by variations, include the dip, bench press, etc. At the end of each anatomical chapter a core set of exercises is given to build the “perfect” chest, back, arms, etc.The chapters on nutrition, how to design your own program, etc., are very well written and understandable by anyone, whether experienced bodybuilder, or newcomer to resistance training. Anyone wanting to understand and perform exercises in the most effective way will benefit.There are also very helpful chapters devoted to core, total body, warm up exercises, best cardio exercises.In summary, this book is a complete guide to exercise, whether one wishes to use only body weight exercises, or use weights and/or machines. I strongly recommend it to every one. Although women could benefit from this book, they would no doubt obtain more benefit from the companion volume, “The Big Book of Exercises for Women”.

A must have for gym enthusiast.