Body by Science: A Research Based Program for Strength Training, Body building, and Complete

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A quick rundown of this product’s key features:

Building muscle has never been faster oreasier than with this revolutionary once-a-weektraining program

In Body By Science, bodybuilding powerhouse John Little teams up with fitness medicine expert Dr. Doug McGuff to present a scientifically proven formula for maximizing muscle development in just 12 minutes a week. Backed by rigorous research, the authors prescribe a weekly high-intensity program for increasing strength, revving metabolism, and building muscle for a total fitness experience.

Our Top Reviews

Reviewer: Nestor A. Leal Perez
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great to understand what really happens in the muscles at cell level
Review: This books was recommended by a friend on who I have seen notable changes in the past two years. Since I am an engineer and I tend to look on the scientific explanation on why things work, I gave this a try. This is the first fitness book that I’ve read that really explains why your movements and your diet are working to create muscle and strength. Not only why but how to perform the movements and what NOT to eat to achieve the results. I was tired of reading books that tell you just how many reps and sets to perform without any scientific backup. I was always suspicious on how they came to those numbers and why it would work for everybody given each one is different. The chapter on biochemistry was fenomenal. Everything I learned on highschool’s biology class came to mind immediately and made so much sense.Since I don’t have access to the Nautilus machine and I hate paying gym fees, I follow the HIT Super Slow protocol on plain body weight. I use other books as reference, like Convict Conditioning and You Are Your Own Gym. This way I can perform the exercises increasing the difficulty depending on my results. Of course it would be easier just to add weight on the machine but I much rather use my own weight which seems more natural. The only pieces of equipment I use are a medicine ball, a pair of small dumbbells and a door bar, all easily available for less than 60 bucks.Using the protocol in this book I have seen much better results in a few weeks than what I was doing for the past two years. And best of all, it takes MUCH LESS time to exercise. Just make sure you don’t quit ahead of time, push it to the inroad as stated in the book. Now I learned that it is more efficient and economic to let your new muscle do the fat burning for you instead of the long chronic cardio hours.I have to be honest and tell you that this is not the only thing I am doing for my health. This books is a great companion to the other books I mentioned but also to Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint and Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. I am on a low carb diet, more like a Paleo diet and I am also doing HIIT once a week. I try to vary my HIIT as on sprints, elliptical and rowing. It takes another 12 minutes of HIIT once a week. 3 minutes warmup, then 8 intervals of 30 seconds intensity and 30 rest, and cool down.So my whole fitness regime is HIT Super Slow (as in Body by Science) bodyweight strength training, 12 minutes every 5 days and I insert a HIIT (sprint, elliptical or row) in between those 5 days, giving a rest day in between HIT and HIIT. Also following a Paleo diet, and it is working much better than the chronic cardio and my strength routines I used to do for over the past two years.Forget the grains, forget the sugar, forget the long training hours of chronic cardio. Do your HIT Super Slow, your HIIT sprints, and have more active fun the rest of your free time.

Reviewer: patricia roach
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great book!
Review: Extremely beneficial to all who want to gain strength and mobility. Very easy to read and the info is valuable.

Reviewer: J. Storey
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Probably the best book on the SuperSlow protocol
Review: There has been a lot of buzz over this exercise concept during the last fifteen years or so, with a gaggle of books out hyping the idea that slowing down rep speeds during resistance exercise is the “best” way to exercise, bar none. Readers have probably seen many titles promoting variations of this theme, such as “The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution”, “Power of 10”, and so on. Slowing down concentric and eccentric reps is not a new idea, it probably goes back over a century (heck, maybe even back to Cro-Magnon times, Fred Flintstone probably experimented with it), but the idea really started taking off due to the efforts of Ken Hutchins promoting his “SuperSlow” (TM) protocol in the 90s and beyond. Soon thereafter, SuperSlow “Zones” starting branching off from central Florida and appearing in various cities around the country, offering very short workouts twice a week for people “short on time”. Certainly there were lucrative business opportunities here…Mr/Ms. Average American never has any time, except 6 hours of TV a night, and certainly does not like to move more than required, so these promises of “20 minutes, twice a week”, or in the case of Body By Science, “12 minutes a week”, certainly appeal to folks who want to get in their 12-20 minutes and get out. The trouble is, slo-mo training is painful, which unfortunately tends to hurt long-term compliance. Bad for business.So what is so hot about slowing down rep speeds that encourages its proponents to hype it as the ultimate form of exercise? Indeed, many of the staunchest proponents say no other form of exercise is necessary, especially steady-state aerobics. Most slo-mo proponents actually poo-poo ANY type of cardiovascular training, even HIIT interval-training that has been shown to be very effective in numerous studies. Ken Hutchins is well-known for nixing cardio, especially. And in this book, Dr. Doug McGuff echoes the same theme, viewing any cardio as probably unnecessary or even worthless. Certainly it is fair to say this is a minority opinion among exercise physiologists and researchers in general, and the actual scientific literature usually points out a synergistic effect of combining strength training with some type of cardio. Indeed, these are two separate modalities of training that produce different physiological effects on muscle tissue, glucose transport, insulin sensitivity and so on; each form of exercise affects these parameters in different ways. It is difficult, therefore, to buy the SuperSlow arguments that only one form of exercise is necessary (i.e., muscle strengthening), or that slo-mo strength training should *replace* all cardiovascular work. Hutchins and Co., in fact, have received a huge amount of backlash from exercise experts on this idea of “all cardio is worthless”. The idea that the only form of exercise that is worthwhile is “strengthening muscle”, which all of the slow-mo proponents spout, is a creative re-visioning of the term “exercise”. And it is an idea, if taken to the extremes that McGuff does, that has zero support in the clinical literature. I have gone over some of the limitations of exercise done ONLY above the anaerobic threshold in another review (interested readers can read my comments in a review of Craig Ballantyne’s “Turbulence Training” system; his book is entitled “Just Say No To Cardio”). I submit a different working definition of “worthwhile exercise”, which is more in tune with the goals everyone should be looking for: “that which in general decreases low-grade systemic inflammation and oxidative stress, and improves one’s endothelial health, insulin sensitivity, and lean muscle tissue.”Yes, weights are important, especially for that last component. But weights aren’t necessarily superior in promoting some of the other parameters, alas. Saying weights produces superior results, say, in insulin sensitivity to traditional steady-state aerobics, is selectively ignoring a lot of clinical research. And that should be a problem for an MD like McGuff, who only sees the anaerobic side of the picture. Defining your goal (narrowly) to only “muscle exertion” completely ignores the role of type-I oxidative muscle fibers -not to mention the role of fatty-acid metabolism- in fitness and health, and McGuff’s biased presentation on this point should be pointed out. Readers-ask yourselves here- do you know anybody who certainly has some serious muscle mass, yet gets out of breath doing simple routine tasks? I certainly do. In fact, in my observation, the situation is common among muscle-heads. Fact is, some of these folks are NOT training in a balanced manner, regardless of what “experts” like McGuff are telling you about the superiority of intense muscle exertion. Quite clearly, this should be a warning flag that there is something wrong with this scenario. We can’t really make the excuse that we are only talking about “specificity of training” here when someone can’t even perform simple sustained tasks without being breathless, can we? Obviously, the problem is more general: a complete lack of conditioning of the cardiovascular sytem.I also have a problem with the slo-mo proponents trying to use studies done on HIIT (i.e., interval or sprint-type exercise) to justify the methodology of slo-mo weight training. True enough, both these forms of exercise utilize “muscle exertion” and very high intensity, but, for example, is one prolonged set of the leg press really the same as a series of bicycle sprints? For McGuff and Co., since their premise is that muscle exertion is the key here, and both these examples utilize the leg muscles in high-intensity exertion, we could substitute one for the other and get equal results. Well, this premise is something folks should be questioning; are we really looking at an apples-to-apples comparison? If you just read what McGuff and his slo-mo buddies are saying, one should be able to freely extrapolate the results of studies on HIIT to a slo-mo session on weights. McGuff and his slo-mo friends love those studies on interval training, such as the famous Tabata protocol, or the recent one where subjects sprinted all-out 30 seconds, 4-6 times per session, three times a week. Is that exactly the same as doing McGuff’s routine in his book? In his paradigm, these are all similar examples of “high-intensity muscle exertion” and should produce the same results….I say, reader, beware of invalid comparisons. Certainly the burden is on McGuff and Co. to produce the evidence; there isn’t anything in the exercise literature, to my knowledge, that compares HIIT “sprints” with McGuff’s slo-mo routine and gets equal results. And that is the problem here- McGuff has his theory and is making some questionable comparisons with no real published data. (And I won’t belabor the point that most of these HIIT benefits were typically a result of sprint-type-training 3 times a week, which McGuff says isn’t necessary). Slo-mo fans, if you know of such studies, please provide us readers with the data. Otherwise, we need to take this borrowing of HIIT “sprint” results with a large grain of salt.But enough on the anti-cardio sentiments seen in these books. Let’s comment briefly on the results claimed by slo-mo proponents. This book, Body by Science, certainly offers many arguments supporting the idea that slo-mo training (in this case, intense 10-second concentric with 10-second eccentric reps) is valuable in a variety of health areas. I won’t argue with these claims, they are supported by numerous studies involving resistance exercise in general, and there is no reason to believe the particular protocol offered by McGuff and Co. would be any different. Where things start to go wrong here, however, is when slo-mo proponents claim their methods are *superior* to any other type of resistance training for producing these results. Proponents are usually fond citing a couple studies by Wayne Westcott that seemingly “showed” superior results for slo-mo training, but these studies have been reviewed by skeptics and have received criticisms, which would make them interesting studies but of questionable worth. Other studies have compared slo-mo with more traditional training protocols and found the slo-mo methods inferior. I guess it boils down to which studies you want to select to “prove” your point.And what is with this “10-second concentric, 10-second eccentric” hype? Is there anything magical about “10 seconds”, as if we’ve suddenly discovered the gospel of resistance training now? The claim, of course, is that by demanding long periods of what exercise geeks call “time-under-tension”, muscles receive a maximal amount of microtrauma, and therefore, long extended-reps produce the best muscle gains. While there is some truth to the idea that extended periods on reps produce greater microtrauma, especially on the *eccentric* portion, there isn’t any documented literature supporting the protocol of 10 seconds being anything magical. Why not 8 or 6 seconds? Heck, if 10 is good, why not 50 seconds each direction, using a weight so light a parakeet could lift it?As a case in point on the folly of drawing premature conclusions on rep-speeds, which is hardly an exact science, a recent 2009 study compared a typical 2-3 second concentric plus 2-3 second eccentric cadence, vs. the same eccentric period but only a 1-second (explosive) concentric. What did they find? The latter actually produced better results mass-wise.Well, this is getting long so let us sum up. Is slo-mo training actually worthwhile? I think it is. The observation that most weight lifters use too much momentum certainly strikes home- just observe the guys in your local gym bouncing heavy weights up off their chest, etc.. So using slo-mo reps certainly teaches one to pay more attention to the quality of one’s reps. Slowing down the eccentric portion, specifically, is valuable in producing optimal microtrauma, which means more lean muscle during the rebuilding process. Which leads us to another good observation. The argument from slo-mo proponents that most folks lift too much per session, and much too often, is certainly valid. Better recovery is a strong argument, considering how much the typical weight enthusiast trains… Plus, all of the health benefits of weight training in general, as laid out so well in this book, argue that weights, particularly a HIT (high-intensity) protocol, should be an essential part of anyone’s exercise program.Negatives? The hype over very long reps being somehow “superior” to traditional forms of weight training is certainly questionable. Just because slo-mo training CAN produce good results, as HIT guru Drew Baye has observed, it doesn’t follow that the results are necessarily superior to other rep speeds… Also, we don’t have space here to discuss slo-mo claims to improve sports/athletic performance, which is an area where often explosive movement needs to be trained specifically as part of the skill-set. Specificity-of-training is an important physiological concept, and slo-mo doesn’t really address these sports concerns well, as critics have pointed out.So, is the book worth buying? Yes. But go light on all the hype.

Reviewer: Amit Gupta
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Not for strength but for diabetes and cv issues

Reviewer: AlexG
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I used to be an elite athlete and I spent my youth being heavily overtrained. I have been following the science on exercise and health for 67 years. I am 78 now, and I have tried every system from jogging to HIIT to yoga to isometrics. The only system that has been producing consistent gains in strength, cardio endurance and general energy level has been the one presented in this book.There is a lot of science showing that the best way to build muscles is to do 9-10 sets for each muscle group a week, but all of it is based on studies of competitive bodybuilders and powerlifters. These are people uniquely designed to build large powerful muscles. By contrast, all the research quoted in “Body by Science” was based on people who were not serious athletes. It applies to the majority of people who do not have genetic predisposition to bulking up.Every other system I know is either too easy to produce any positive results for one’s health, or it leads to excessive wear and tear. I highly recommend this book to everyone who wants to work out for the sake of health rather than pushing his or her body to the limit, which is what sports are all about.

Reviewer: Reader
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Details the science behind gaining muscle and losing weight in a very readable fashion. Helps you understand why a lot of commonly recommended ideas don’t work and how to tweak them so they do. Also explains why your body reacts the way it does from an evolutionary standpoint. If you care about your long term health, you need to read this book.

Reviewer: Cliente Amazon
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Un approccio nuovo, intelligente e sensato alla pratica dell’ esercizio fisico.Il Dott. McGuff unisce valide conoscenze ad un’ ottima intuizione.Per la prima volta nel mondo occidentale del “fitness” qualcuno esplora la via del percorrere più strada possibile col minimo sforzo, come quando si nuota nel senso della corrente del fiume.Like smimming in accord to the flow of the river, this method represent a intelligent approach to training where gains comes with minimum effort.This practise don’t asks you to waste immense vitality, but to do few thinghs well focused, standing present.The inside tresure is that this approach stimulates the state of presence, trught the concentrate effort your energetic body will be expanded… try and just feel the sensation after.

Reviewer: Niklas Andersson
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: …you get the impression that it’s quite biased to support the claims in the book. However I’m currently following the Big-5 program and plan on doing so for some 3 months. Things are going well. After that period I will update my comments.

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